Africa at the Internet Archive: Spreadsheet (6)

Because I'll be away for Christmas Day, I'm posting the spreadsheet update on Thursday this week instead of Friday (previous updates). There are now over 8000 stories listed (wow!) from 261 different books and articles. You can access the spreadsheet here: African Tales Spreadsheet, plus I've added a new link in the tab navigation to the weekly round-ups also.

You'll find links for each story to the Internet Archive page, plus links to versions of the stories that I've written (536 of those so far; you can find out more here: Africa.LauraGibbs.net).

You can do searches and create data filters, and you can also copy the spreadsheet for your own use. Even better: you can create your own spreadsheet of your Internet Archive resources, and if you think it will be useful to others, perhaps you will share that publicly also!

I'll be back tomorrow with the round-up of books from this week, and I hope everybody is having a good holiday week, and staying safe if you must travel.

Here are book covers of some of the sources that I added to the spreadsheet this week; the links below go to earlier blog posts about the books:

Bascom. African Dilemma Tales

Courlander. A Treasury of African Folklore

Fairman. Bury My Bones but Keep My Words

Scheub. Dictionary of African Mythology

Scheub. The World and the Word

by Nongenile Masithathu Zenani

Africa at the Internet Archive: Dahomean Narrative

Following up on yesterday's post with folktales from western African in Baba Wagué Diakité's books, I wanted to share this monumental work by anthropologists Melville and Frances Herskovits: Dahomean Narrative: A Crosscultural Analysis.

This book, published in 1958, collects over 150 stories which Melville and Frances Herskovits collected in Benin (French Dahomey at that time) from Fon storytellers in the 1930s and then translated into English. 

The detailed notes in the book make it a work of great scholarship (almost 600 pages long), but it is also very readable for a general audience. 

Before publishing this collection of stories, in 1938 Melville Herskovits published an ethnography of the people of Dahomey which can put those stories in context: Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom.

For more about Melville and Frances Herskovits, see Wikipedia. I will have more to say about them at this blog when I move on from writing about African folklore in Africa to books about African folklore in the Americas and the Caribbean like Herskovits's astounding book documenting the folklore of the Saramaka Maroons in Suriname on the northeastern Atlantic coast of South America: Suriname Folklore (and that book likewise has an ethnographic companion: Rebel Destiny: Among the Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana).

Herskovits was one of the strongest advocates for the importance of African cultural heritage in the Americas, as he explains in The Myth of the Negro Past published in 1941.

The work of Melville and Frances Herskovits is a big part of how I came to undertake my own African reading project documented here at this blog, and I am so glad to see so many of their books available at Internet Archive, just a click away!

Dahomean Narrative: A Crosscultural Analysis

by Melville and Frances Herskovits

Africa at the Internet Archive: The Hunterman and the Crocodile

I'm excited to have three books for today's post that show the beautiful artwork and also the artful storytelling of Baba Wagué Diakité, who was born in Mali and who is now based in Oregon. First up is: The Hunterman and the Crocodile.

The version at the Internet Archive comes from the International Children's Digital Library, and the navigation is a bit awkward, so you might find it easier to use the actual ICDL version that was captured by the Wayback Machine. 

The artwork is delightful, and this book won a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor in 1998.

There is also beautiful artwork to be found in The Hatseller and the Monkeys published in 1999:

And I think his best artwork of all three is in Mee-An and the Magic Serpent, published in 2007:

You can learn more about Diakité from a children's book that he wrote as a memoir about growing up in Mali: A Gift from Childhood.

You might also remember Diakité from a book I had blogged about earlier for which he did the illustrations, the stories are by Adwoa Badoe: The Pot of Wisdom: Ananse Stories.

For more, visit his website: Baba Wagué Diakité. You can also find his work at the U.S. State Department's "Art in Embassies" project, which includes this gorgeous piece: Hold Onto My Back.

Meanwhile, his books await you at the Internet Archive, just a click away!

The Hunterman and the Crocodile

The Hatseller and the Monkeys 

 Mee-An and the Magic Serpent

Africa at the Internet Archive: African Women's Network in Dublin

I'm not sure how this lovely book from Dublin ended up at the Internet Archive, but I sure am glad that it did... who can resist a title like this after all: Horses and Tortoises and Rabbits and Elephants and Birds and Hippos and Lions and Sisters and Frogs and Dogs and Hares and Jackals and Murder: Stories From Africa.

This is a beautiful community-based project from the African Women's Network in Dublin, Ireland, with ten stories written and illustrated by members of the collective. The book is intended for use in elementary schools so that Irish children could learn about African and also for African children living in Ireland to celebrate their heritage, thus furthering the goal of this organization: "a just society where there is equal opportunity and equal access to resources in all aspects of society: social, cultural, economic, civic, and political." Most, but not all, of the stories are animal stories, and each story has its country of provenance along with the name of the storyteller for that particular story.

So, for example, here is a story about a trickster rabbit who rides on the back of a cheetah to win the race; it's a story from Kenya:  

And those hippos on the book's cover are from this story in which a man turn into a hippo:

This screenshot of the thumbnail view gives you a sense of how colorful and fun and different each story is! 

So, give yourself a treat and plunge into the colorful story-ful world of this book. It's delightful, and just a click away at the Internet Archive.

Horses and Tortoises and Rabbits and Elephants and Birds and Hippos and Lions and Sisters and Frogs and Dogs and Hares and Jackals and Murder: Stories From Africa

Africa at the Internet Archive: Mother Crocodile

Since I started off last week with the great African writer Chinua Achebe, I thought I would start off this week with another great African writer: Birago Diop, a francophone writer from Senegal and one of the most famous members of the Pan-African literary movement known as Négritude, or "Blackness." The book is Mother Crocodile: An Uncle Amadou Tale from Senegal translated and adapted by Rosa Guy, just a click away at the Internet Archive:

The story featured in this book, "Maman-Caïman," is one that Diop learned from Amadou Koumba, his family's Wolof griot (storyteller), and it is one of the stories included in Diop's book, Les Contes d'Amadou Koumba. This book has been translated into English, but it is hard to find (I'm on the lookout for a copy!). You can find out more about Diop's remarkable life and career at Wikipedia. 

Rosa Guy was a Trinidadian American author, and she met Diop while traveling in Senegal; you can find more of Rosa Guy's books for young readers at the Archive.

The beautiful illustrations are by the artist John Steptoe:

Steptoe is best known for a book that he both wrote and illustrated, Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters: An African Tale, which is also available at the Internet Archive: 

Both Mother Crocodile and Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters were recipients of the Coretta Scott King award, and John Steptoe is one of the featured biographies in this very useful book: Coretta Scott King Award Books: Using Great Literature With Children and Young Adults by Claire Gatrell Stephens.

So, enjoy: Diop! Guy! Steptoe! So much goodness awaits you at the Internet Archive.

Mother Crocodile:

An Uncle Amadou Tale from Senegal 

by Birago Diop

Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters

by John Steptoe