African Folktales at Internet Archive: Chinyanja and Kimbundu

I just realized that I promised earlier this week, when writing about Zimani's Drum, that I would share Rattray's classic collection of Chinyanja stories this week, but I forgot to do that... so, since this is the last post for this week, I want to make sure to do that: Some Folklore Stories and Songs in Chinyanja by R. S. Rattray. 

Chinyanja (also Chewa or Nyanja) is a Bantu language that is spoken in Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe; you can find out more at Wikipedia. The book has the Chinyanja stories in the front, and then literal English translations in the back. There are trickster animal stories about both the rabbit, whose name is Kalulu in this language, and also about the tortoise, who is Kamba. In addition to the 24 stories, there is also a section of riddles and proverbs, and don't miss the detailed notes in the back.

You probably recognize Rattray's name by now; this is one of his first linguistic projects, published in 1907. I've written about some of Rattray's later projects here at the blog: his book of Hausa Folklore, plus his book of both Ashanti Proverbs and his Akan-Ashanti Folktales. You can find out more about Rattray's life and career at Wikipedia.

I also want to include in today's post another classic collection of African stories from this same time period: Folktales of Angola collected by Heli Chatelain and published way back in 1894. 

This amazing book contains 50 folktales in the original Kimbundu text (like Nyanja , this is also a Bantu language; more about Kimbundu) with English translations and also detailed explanatory and comparative notes in the back of the book, including information about the storytellers.

Because these books are in the public domain, that means they are available not just for digital check-out at the Internet Archive; you can access the books at any time and download them in a variety of formats. So, an abundance of traditional stories await you in these books, with the original language texts so that you can look up specific words if you are curious; I'm always curious to learn the names of the animals in different languages, and you can also see the patterns of words in the lyrics to the songs too. There are not beautiful illustrations in these books like in other books I've featured this week, but there are some beautiful stories!

Some Folklore Stories and Songs in Chinyanja

by R. S. Rattray

Folktales of Angola

by Heli Chatelain 

African Folktales at Internet Archive: Hausa Folklore, Customs, Proverbs

Following up on Skinner's Hausa translations from yesterday, today I want to feature Hausa Folklore, Customs, Proverbs, etc. by Malam Shaihu, and translated by R. S. Rattray; both Volume 1 and Volume 2 are just a click away at the Internet Archive.

As Rattray explains in his note at the start of Volume 1, the scribes, or malamai, played a crucial role in Hausa culture, so to prepare this book he worked with a malam named Shaihu who wrote out these Hausa stories (sometimes translating into Hausa from Arabic manuscripts), while Rattray then provided the English translation along with a transliteration into the Roman alphabet. Malam Shaihu himself spoke no English. The book itself contains the Hausa text in beautiful Arabic script:

Then Rattray added the Roman transliteration with the English translation below:

In Volume 1, you will find a short history of the Hausa nation, followed by 21 stories that feature human beings as the main characters. Then, in Volume 2, you will find 9 animal stories, plus some accounts of cultural traditions and practices, and finally a section of proverbs, with the Arabic script, transliteration, and translation, just as for the stories:

I've written about Rattray at this blog before, as he is the author of Ashanti Proverbs and Akan-Ashanti Folktales, among other works. You can find out more about his life and career at Wikipedia: Robert Sutherland Rattray. There is even an amusement park named after him, located in Kumasi in Ghana: Rattray Park. Here's a little video about the park:

You cannot just hop over to Rattray Park, but you can find his books just a click away at the Internet Archive:

Hausa Folklore, Customs, Proverbs, etc.
by Malam Shaihu and R. S. Rattray

African Folktales at Internet Archive: Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales

Yesterday I featured two important works of contemporary scholarship from the World Oral Literature Project, and today I want to feature an older, very important collection: Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales by R. S. Rattray, which contains 75 stories:

This book was published in 1930, so it will be entering the public domain soon, and for now, it's just a click away at the Internet Archive. Some of Rattray's earlier work is in the public domain, such as his collection of Ashanti Proverbs, which I've written about earlier at this blog. You can find out more about Rattray at Wikipedia.

In the introduction to this collection of tales, Rattray is highly critical of earlier tale collections for their amateurish approach: "The most that can be said for such methods is that the results are perhaps better than nothing at all." With this book, Rattray aspires to a close, literal translation of the stories that he heard from old storytellers in remote villages. 

The book has illustrations by members of the Ashanti, Fanti, and Ewe tribes with whom Rattray lived and worked but, sad to say, Rattray did not record the names of the artists. Some of the illustrations are really marvelous, like this one of Half-a-Ball-of-Kenki:

This illustration shows a woman on her way to her village:

Rattray's book has been important source for later book authors: Verna Aardema's books The Sky-God Stories, Anansi Finds a Fool, and Half-a-Ball-of-Kenki  rely on Rattray's book as a source, as does Ashley Bryan's The Adventures of Aku.

The Sky-God Stories

by Verna Aardema

Anansi Finds a Fool

by Verna Aardema

Half-a-Ball-of-Kenki

by Verna Aardema

The Adventures of Aku

by Ashley Bryan

So, you can enjoy Rattray's abundant collection of stories, or look at the books which those stories inspired; they are all available at the Internet Archive.

Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales

by R. S. Rattray

African Proverbs at Internet Archive: Ashanti Proverbs

Following up on the Liberian proverbs post from yesterday, I wanted to share a book of proverbs available at Internet Archive: Ashanti Proverbs translated by R. S. Rattray. There are 800 proverbs in the book, grouped by subject, with the original Twi language version, plus Rattray's translation along with some commentary about the language and also the cultural context. 

Here's the photograph that appears on the right, showing Owusu Sekyere (Kuma), the chief of Mampon in Ghana:

So, on the one hand, this is an incredibly valuable book, both for English speakers and even more so for students of Twi (more about Twi). The proverbs in the book were originally collected decades earlier in 1879 and published at that time without any translation or commentary, so Rattray's efforts to provide translation and commentary are very welcome. 

At the same time, the book was published in 1916, and it is permeated with the racism and white supremacy of the British colonial project in Africa. The subtitle gives you a hint right from the start; the book's full title is: Ashanti Proverbs: The Primitive Ethics of a Savage People. Think about that enormous historical irony — Europeans calling the Ashanti people "savages" as they were engaged in their own cataclysmic world war that would leave twenty million dead and even more wounded.

As I see it, an important task for us now is to take these books from colonial times and see what we can salvage from them. The study of African languages was a major part of the colonial project, and collecting proverbs and folktales was usually part of that linguistic research. As a result, there are hundreds of books and articles about African folktales and/or proverbs that were published in English, French, and German. Sometimes the framing of the contents is repugnant (even really repugnant), but I believe we can still hear the African voices in those folktales and proverbs, even when the books in which we find them are part of a deeply racist colonial project.

In the case of this project, Rattray worked closely with Mr. Samuel Kwafo of Mampon (see photo of the chief of Mampon above) in preparing the translation and commentary. Rattray does not tell us anything about Mr. Kwafo beyond his name (in sharp contrast to the tribute Herskovits paid to Mr. Sie Tagbwe for commentary on the Liberian proverbs), but I suspect this must be the Samuel Kwafo shown in this picture: Ordination of the first native pastor, Samuel Kwafo, in Kumase 15th August 1909.

And I suspect this might also be the same Mr. Samuel Kwafo mentioned in Richard Emmanuel Obeng's autobiography, which prefaces his novel Eighteenpence: "In the year 1888, my maternal uncle, Kwadwo Yeboah, arrived to take me back to Kwahu. I was delighted. A few days after our arrival, I visited the school. The Rev. Samuel Kwafo, then a Catechist, was in charge of the school."

Those are the only traces that I found of Mr. Kwafo through Google-searching, and I wanted to share at least that much since, of course, Rattray's name appears as the author of this book, with no trace of Mr. Kwafo except for the mention of thanks in the introduction.

Meanwhile, the name of Hugh Clifford does appear on the title page of the book: "With a preface by SIR HUGH CLIFFORD" (name in all-caps on the title page). More specifically: "His Excellency Sir Hugh Clifford, K. C. M. G., Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the Gold Coast Colony." You can read more about his colonial exploits at Wikipedia. Clifford's contempt for Africans and African cultures comes through loud and clear in the preface to this book: white people are superior to all; he admits some grudging respect for "Orientals," and nothing but contempt for Africans — such was Clifford's colonial hierarchy. "Much has been said and written concerning the difficulty which the European mind usually experiences in comprehending the mentality of Orientals, but it is probably that the difficulties which beset a student of West African thought are far greater than any which are experienced in Asia. [...] To anyone who is acquainted with the proverbial wisdom of the East, the present collection will appear to lack the epigrammatic crispness of thought by which the former is characterized. This perhaps indicates that the mind of the people whose sayings Mr. Rattray is interpreting for us differs from our own more fundamentally than do the minds of the peoples of Asia."

As Rattray explains, Clifford provided the financial support in the form of a subvention that made it possible to publish the book. Clifford had no love for the proverbs (he expresses nothing but scorn for the proverbs in the preface); instead, Clifford's goal was to provide British colonial administrators with the linguistic and cultural knowledge they could use to dominate the African people over whom they ruled. Rattray was himself one of those civil servants (part of the Gold Coast Customs Service; more about Rattray at Wikipedia), but at the same time he was an anthropologist with a deep and abiding interest in both the proverbs and the folktales of the Ashanti people, and he also published a book of Hausa folktales; I'll have more to say about Rattray's other publications in later posts. Unlike Clifford, Rattray has a real admiration for these proverbs. As he explains, "These sayings would seem to be, to the writer, the very soul of this people, as of a truth all such sayings really are. They contain some thought which, when one, more eloquent in the tribe than another, has expressed in words, all who are of that people recognize at once as something which they knew full well already, which all the instinct of their lives and thoughts and traditions tells them to be true to their own nature."

As I explained in yesterday's post, I'm focusing on the animal proverbs, so I'm transcribing the animal proverbs from Rattray's book in a Google Doc, and I'm also making slides of the ones I think would be of general interest. I was especially excited to this a proverb about the tiny royal antelope, a.k.a. chevrotain, a.k.a. mouse-deer who is a trickster character in West African folktales; see this earlier post about cunnie rabbit. Here's the proverb: The elephant is big and bulky, but the tiny mouse-deer has the most experience and sense.

I also really liked this proverb about the baboon's red butt: The monkey struts about just like a conceited man, but its bottom is still red.

As I keep adding new animal proverbs to the collection, they'll appear in the slideshow (bottom sidebar of this blog) and also in the Padlet.