On
Sunday and
Monday this week I focused on books newly added to the Internet Archive, and that's what I am going to do again today, with a fabulous and even mysterious book... I've shared what I know about the book in this blog post, but I will be grateful for any additional information people can provide! Here's the book:
Amadu's Bundle: Fulani Tales of Love and Djinns by Malum Amadu, edited by Gulla Kell, and translated by Ronald Moody... all three of them fascinating characters! Details below.
The book contains 28 stories supplied by Malum Amadu. There is a tantalizing description of Amadu in the opening pages of the book by Gulla Kell; be sure to read her editor's note.
Of course I wanted to find out more, and this led me to an article at JSTOR, which is free to access if you sign up for a JSTOR account:
Prose and Poetry of the Ful'be by G. Pfeffer. This is a very thought-provoking article about folklore and literature, focused on the materials that Malam Amadu shared with Gulla Kell, who published this article as G. Feffer (Kell is a later married name).
The introduction to Malam Amadu and his work begins on p. 289:
This article was published in 1939! Gulla Pfeffer Kell was a German anthropologist born in 1887; she died in 1967. She published under the names G. Pfeffer, Gulla Pfeffer, and Gulla Kell. The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art holds an archive of over 1500 of her photographs, from her work with the Fulbe people in Cameroon and Nigeria, dating back to 1928. There's also a biographical note here:
Gulla Pfeffer photographs. Alas, the photographs apparently have not been digitized. Maybe they will be someday!
She was also a filmmaker; you can read more about her film
Menschen im Busch here:
Film Forum: "Ethnologist Gulla Pfeffer and cameraman Friedrich Dalsheim found the village of the Ewe people in the interior of Togo, which was a German colony until 1914. Work in the fields, hunting, preparing meals, weaving, pottery, dancing, and religious rites govern the life of a community whose most modern convenience is a telephone of tin cans and a string. Original speech recordings, everyday sounds, and orchestra music are concentrated into an ethnographic, documentary study, with drums, songs, and ecstatic dances." Here's a still from the film:
Then, somehow (???), the Heinemann
African Writers Series (incredibly important literary series; it has its own
Wikipedia article) commissioned the Jamaican-born sculptor Ronald Moody to translate Gulla Kell's book of Malam Amadu's stories into English (from German? that must be the case I suppose); the resulting book was published in 1972, which is several years after Gulla Kell's death.
Given that Ronald Moody is the most famous person involved in this project, perhaps someone knows more about just how he came to be involved! Was it even perhaps his idea that this book be included in the series? It's a bit of an oddity there, since the series is focused on literature rather than traditional storytelling. Here is the
Wikipedia article about Moody; he was born in 1900 and died in 1984. His life story is worthy of being a film or TV series: wow!
I'm also 99% sure that this is Ronald Moody's artwork on the cover of the book.
You can find out more about the remarkable life of Ronald Moody here:
So, I'm hoping that people might be able to tell me more about this book, and how after almost 50 years of his meeting with Gulla Pfeffer Kell, Malam Amadu's stories came to be published in English! I am glad that they did, and very glad also that Internet Archive is making this book available to the whole world 50 years after the book's publication. I wish Malam Amadu was alive to see it!
