African Folktales at Internet Archive: Tales from Southern Africa

Reading through Samantha Naidu's Transcribing Tales, Creating Cultural Identities: An Analysis Of Selected Written English Texts Of Xhosa Folktales (see yesterday's post about Phyllis Savory), I learned some more about the remarkable life and career of Archibald Campbell Jordan (A. C. Jordan), a Xhosa writer and scholar who was a pioneer in South African cultural and literary studies; you can find out more at Wikipedia. 

So, I knew that was this was the book at Internet Archive that I wanted to share today: A. C. Jordan's Tales from Southern Africa. Thanks to digital lending, this important book is just a click away:

There is a foreword by Z. Pallo Jordan, Jordan's son (more about Jordan's life and career as an ANC politician at Wikipedia), along with an introduction by Harold Scheub, a scholar of South African folklore (I'll be sharing some of Scheub's books in future posts), with beautiful illustrations by Dumile Feni, a South African artist and activist (read more at Wikipedia). Look at this extraordinary illustration of a fight scene, for example: wow!

Jordan was born in Cape Colony (South Africa) in 1906. In 1961 when he was in the United States doing academic research, the South African government revoked his passport, and he spent the rest of his life in exile in the United States until his death in 1968; this book of South African folktales was published after his death in 1973. 

Unlike other African story collections which emphasize animal tales, Jordan's emphasis here is on stories about people, including several stories that feature strong female protagonists. Jordan also includes a few animal stories at the end of the book, but that is not the emphasis of the book; just the opposite. There is nothing escapist here, nothing infantalizing; Jordan's project is very different from Savory's project in that sense. As Annie Gagiano says in her review of the book, "Jordan's Tales have no ring of nostalgia. If they commemorate and celebrate a proud and complex African civilization to dispel the blind condescension of European racists, they do also point forward to what a combination of peoples in this land must rediscover and regain in their own rites of passages towards mutual recognition. These Tales from Southern Africa exhibit the hard-won achievements of communities beset by threats from outside as well as from within, constantly driven to redefine humanness."

So, Jordan's Tales await you now, just a click away thanks to digital lending from the Internet Archive. I am also very glad that this exemplary book is the one that closes out Week 3 of these African folklore book recommendations; I'll be back tomorrow with a round-up of all the books from Week 3. :-)

Tales from Southern Africa

by A. C. Jordan

African Folktales at Internet Archive: Lion Outwitted by Hare

After yesterday's book of stories by South African storyteller Gcina Mhlophe — Stories of Africa — I wanted to do another book with stories from southern Africa today; this is one of Phyllis Savory's many African story books, and it is just a click away thanks to the Internet Archive: Lion Outwitted by Hare and Other African Tales.

The illustrations are by Franz Altschuler; here's one of his rabbits:

This book contains Bantu stories from South Africa (Matabele, Xhosa, Zulu), and also from Malawi and Kenya; the book contains a helpful preface about the different Bantu-speaking peoples whose stories are represented in this book — and of course there are stories about trickster hare all over Africa. As a result, many of hare's antics have become famous in the United States (Brer Rabbit) and the Caribbean (like B'Rabby in the Bahamas), and in South and Central America also (Tio Conejo) thanks to the power and persistence of the stories that African storytellers brought with them. Slave-owners tried to strip away all traces of African culture, but they could not stop the storytellers and their stories.

Phyllis Savory was born in 1901 in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), and here is what she says about her early encounters with these stories in the introduction to her book The Little Wise One: African Tales of the Hare: "As a child, with no companions apart from the workers on my parents' farm in the early days of the then Rhodesia of about 1907, I listened with avidity to the folktales told around the evening fires. The doings of Kalulu the Hare, called by many the Little Wise One, intrigued me to such an extent that I have followed the rascal throughout the years that followed, jotting down stories about him whenever I heard them... collected from attendants and carriers when I accompanied my father throughout the countryside as his typist and cartographer." 

Unfortunately, like so many collectors of stories back in the day, Phyllis Savory did not hot down the names of those storytellers amongst the "attendants and carriers" who worked for her father, which means they are not credited by name in her books. Yes, these are folktales: Savory no doubt heard many different versions of the "same" story from many different storytellers, but that is still no reason not to credit the storytellers, helping us to remember who the actual bearers of the tradition were and how they made her books possible. (In contrast, consider the approach taken in Grainger's Stories Gogo Told Me where the author credits each storyteller she worked with.) 

For a detailed analysis of the question of authenticity in books by writers like Phyllis Savory, Marguerite Poland, and others, see Samantha Naidu's Transcribing Tales, Creating Cultural Identities: An Analysis Of Selected Written English Texts Of Xhosa Folktales which you can read online (thank you, Sam Naidu! more of her work here). I share Naidu's optimism that asks us to confront the colonial past and neo-colonial structures today, listening for the diverse voices that we can hear if we try: "In post-apartheid South Africa, there is even greater opportunity to reshape stories, to recreate selves, and to redefine intercultural relations. This thesis has outlined how some of those stories, which use folktale texts as their central trope, are constructed and commodified. Not only do these reinvented folktale texts embody the heterogeneous cultural influences of South Africa, they also have the potential to promote, first, the understanding of cultural differences, and second, the acceptance of the notion of cultural hybridity in our society."

So, please read and enjoy the stories you can find in Savory's book, and take a look at Naidu's thesis too; it is full of important questions to keep asking.

As for hare and lion,

they are just a click away at Internet Archive:

Lion Outwitted by Hare and Other African Tales

African Folktales at Internet Archive: Stories of Africa

After yesterday's lovely book of stories from Ghana by Peggy Appiah — Tales of an Ashanti Father— I wanted to write today about a contemporary African storyteller: Gcina Mhlophe from South Africa. You can read about her remarkable life and career at Wikipedia. Born in 1958 in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, Gcina Mhlophe is an activist and actress, a storyteller and writer, and her wonderful book, Stories of Africa, published in 2003, is just a click away at Internet Archive, thanks to their digital lending program.

Some of these stories you will find in this book are famous not just all over Africa but all over the world, like the story of Jabulani and the Lion (an African version of the Indian folktale about the brahmin, the tiger, and the jackal), and also the story of The Crocodile and the Monkey's Heart (a Buddhist jataka tale from India that has been told for centuries in Africa too). One of my personal favorites in this book is the very first story, Mazanendaba, which is a story about the world-before-stories and how a woman named Mazanendaba, with the help of Eagle and Dolphin, brought stories in the world. I also really like Khethiwe, Queen of Imbira — with imbira/mbira being another name for the musical instrument also known as the kalimba; more at Wikipedia. If you play the kalimba, you will want to read that story for sure. Here is the illustration by Jeannie Kinsler (the stories are illustrated by various artists); look closely and you'll see Khethiwe is holding an mbira:

So, if you are looking for an exciting and beautiful little book of South African folktales to read, Gcina Mhlophe's Stories of Africa is a great one to choose, and it is just a click away, thanks to the Internet Archive.

Also, as Gcina Mhlope explains in the introduction to this book, she loves to write, but she loves telling stories to live audiences even more. YouTube is not the same as being right there in the audience, but it's still a way to see the wonderful Gcina Mhlope at work; here's just one of many videos of her performances: at YouTube:

Telling African Stories

Passing the Heritage

Gcina Mhlophe

African Folktales at Internet Archive: Tales of an Ashanti Father

After yesterday's Ashanti Proverbs book, I knew I wanted to feature Peggy Appiah's Tales of an Ashanti Father which is just a click away with Internet Archive digital borrowing:

This book was first published in 1967, and it is one of several books of West African folklore by Peggy Appiah. And yes, she is the mother of Kwame Anthony Appiah, and some of his books are also available for checkout at the Internet Archive.

Peggy Appiah was born Enid Margaret Cripps in England in 1921, daughter of Sir Stafford Cripps (a leader in the Labor Party), and she married Joseph Emmanuel Appiah in 1953; they met when he was a law student in London. They moved to Ghana, and his home became her home; she died in Ghana in 2006. You can read her obituary in the New York Times: Peggy Appiah, 84, Author Who Bridged Two Cultures, Dies. There is also a Wikipedia article about her.

This book, Tales of an Ashanti Father, focuses on Ananse (Anansi) tales, Ananse being the Akan word for "Spider," who is a key character in West African folklore and mythology. Here is how Peggy Appiah describes him in the opening words of this book: "Shrewd and cunning, greedy and clever, his actions are those of a man, and he only returns to the cobwebs on the ciling when he is in trouble and escaping punishment. So well-known is he that he has given his name to the whole rich tradition of tales on which so many Ghanaian children are brought up  —anansesem — or spider tales."

Anansi does appear as a character in many of these stories but all the stories are "Anansi stories" ... and if you have not read any African Ananse stories before, this book is a beautiful way to begin. The illustrations are by Mora Dickson:

Thanks to the Internet Archive, the book is just a click away!

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.

African Folktales at Internet Archive: Tales from the Story Hat

Verna Aardema had a long career as a writer of children's books inspired by African folktales. Earlier I had profiled what is probably her most famous book, the Caledecott-award-winning Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears: A West African Tale, which was published in 1975. 

The book I will look at today is a much earlier book, Tales from the Story Hat, published in 1960 with illustrations by Elton Fax; it's available for digital lending (two copies) from the Internet Archive. 

Aardema was born in 1911, and she worked as a elementary school teacher from 1934 until 1973, and she also worked as a journalist and writer during those years and beyond. Tales from the Story Hat was her first published book, and it was both a critical and commercial success. The book is no longer in print, but used copies are abundantly available, as is also the case with the sequel: More Tales from the Story Hat.

There are nine tales in the book, and Aardema provides detailed bibliography for each: three come from Henry M. Stanley's collection of stories from the Congo and Uganda first published in 1873 (a remarkable book that I'll write about in a separate post); since Stanley's book is in the public domain and available online, you can compare Aardema's adaptation of her sources. Another story is adapted from a legend reported in Mary Kingsley's Travels in West Africa, also available online, and in this case Aardema has taken a very sparsely told Igbo story and turned it into a really exciting story ("Wiki the Weaver"). Aardema also took a Fang story reported in a novel, Stinetorf's Beyond the Hungry Country, published in 1984 which you can read online at the Internet Archive if you want to compare Aardema's story to her source material. Two more of Aardema's stories comes from booklets published in Liberia which are hard to find anywhere, so that makes her stories here especially valuable, giving us (indirect) evidence for some Liberian folktales that are hard to track down otherwise. I'll have more to say about one of those Liberian stories below; it is a really exquisite fairy tale that seems to me ideal material for prompting students to write their own fairy tales using the same formula.

Meanwhile, in addition to those African sources, Aardema includes two stories from "LoBagola" (Joseph Howard Lee), one of the most fascinating literary tricksters of the 20th century. I'm not going to try to provide an account of LoBagola's life and career here, but he has a Wikipedia article. One of my future projects is to try to do a motif analysis of LoBagola's published stories to get a sense of just what Joseph Howard Lee took from African folktale traditions (that might have been known to him directly or indirectly) as well as elements of his own imagining. I have a long way to go in developing my motif catalogs, but I definitely think LoBagola merits our attention as an African American storyteller as well as being a trickster in real life. In any case, at the time Aardema wrote this book, she did not question LoBagola's self-proclaimed identity as a West African "savage," including his stories side by side with the stories she retold from African sources.

I'll close with some comments about the really exquisite fairy tale that Aardema tells from a Liberian source: Koi and the Kola Nuts. The story has many distinctive African features, like the kola nuts of the story's title, which might be of special interest to students who are fans of cola; more about that at the BBC: The little-known nut that gave Coca-Cola its name.

kola nuts in a West African market

Here's how the fairy tale takes shape:

1. Village chief dies, and his sons inherit his property. The youngest son, who is a little guy and underrated by all, is away hunting and comes back to find nothing is left to give to him... except for a scraggly kola-nut tree. The boy, Koi, picks all the nuts, puts them in a bag and sets off to find a village where he will be respected as the son of a chief.

2. Along the way, Koi meets a snake who needs some kola nuts as medicine; he shares his nuts with the snake.

3. Next, Koi meets some ants who stole the devil's kola nuts and need to pay them back; he shares nuts with the ants.

4. Next, Koi meets an alligator who killed a dog and ate it, and now he has to make restitution in the form of kola nuts; he gives the last of the nuts to the alligator.

5. Koi arrives at a village where they mock him for his small size and poor appearance, even though he insists he is the son of a chief. The chief of that village sets Koi some impossible tasks.

6. I'm not going to spoil the whole story but suffice to say the snake helps him complete the first task.

7. The ants help him complete the second task.

8. The alligator helps him complete the third task.

9. The village chief decides to give Koi half the kingdom, recognizing that he is truly a great man after all.

10. The village chief also gives Koi his daughter in marriage, so Koi becomes not just a co-chief but also son-in-law.

I really like the fact that children who might only be familiar with European fairy tales will grasp the ways in which this West African story from Liberia shares the same overall "story form" as fairy tales they might already know.

Then, once students see that fairy tales have a "form" (formula), they can create their own, with their own heroines and heroes, their own magical helpers, their own quests and tasks, their own rewards, etc.

Of all the stories in this book, this one seemed the most likely to use a kind of writing prompt for students. There's also a single-story book edition of Koi and the Kola Nuts by Verna Aardema which is not available at Internet Archive but, interestingly, a version by Brian Gleeson with illustrations by Reynold Ruffins which is available for digital lending: here's the link. I'm surprised, and disappointed, to see that Gleeson does not credit Aardema, or any other source, for the story. The details which he shares with Aardema's story make it pretty clear (?) that she must have been his source. Wikpedia identifies the story as an Igbo story from Nigeria, but provides no citation for the source at all. If I find more information about the source of this story (I do have some Liberian folktale books yet to explore), I'll update this post.

Aardema's book:

Gleeson's book: