The Best Of African Folklore

Africa has a wonderfully rich store of folk tales that have been passed down from one generation to the next. There are stories about how the world came into being, stories that tell of the relationships between human beings and between man and his environment, and of the lessons to be learned from everyday experience. The tales are like the fairy talkes told all over the world, but they have a strong African flavour that is as real as the smell of rain on hot earth. The Best of African Folklore takes the reader into an enchanted world where animals can talk and humans are often changed into different forms, where magic is commonplace and reality is turned delightfully on its head. Despite numerous setbacks, things usually turn out all right in the end. Wicked and greedy people (and animals) come off worst and the good receive their just rewards. The gods are stern but fair, and every story has a moral for those who are wise enough to see it.

Collection of traditional folk tales introduces a host of interesting people and unusual animals — among them "The Cricket and the Toad," "The Tortoise and His Broken Shell," and "The Boy in the Drum."

Winner • NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work (Fiction) Winner • Anne Izard Storytellers’ Choice Award Holiday Gift Guide Selection • Indiewire, San Francisco Chronicle, and Minneapolis Star-Tribune These nearly 150 African American folktales animate our past and reclaim a lost cultural legacy to redefine American literature. Drawing from the great folklorists of the past while expanding African American lore with dozens of tales rarely seen before, The Annotated African American Folktales revolutionizes the canon like no other volume. Following in the tradition of such classics as Arthur Huff Fauset’s “Negro Folk Tales from the South” (1927), Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935), and Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly (1985), acclaimed scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar assemble a groundbreaking collection of folktales, myths, and legends that revitalizes a vibrant African American past to produce the most comprehensive and ambitious collection of African American folktales ever published in American literary history. Arguing for the value of these deceptively simple stories as part of a sophisticated, complex, and heterogeneous cultural heritage, Gates and Tatar show how these remarkable stories deserve a place alongside the classic works of African American literature, and American literature more broadly. Opening with two introductory essays and twenty seminal African tales as historical background, Gates and Tatar present nearly 150 African American stories, among them familiar Brer Rabbit classics, but also stories like “The Talking Skull” and “Witches Who Ride,” as well as out-of-print tales from the 1890s’ Southern Workman. Beginning with the figure of Anansi, the African trickster, master of improvisation—a spider who plots and weaves in scandalous ways—The Annotated African American Folktales then goes on to draw Caribbean and Creole tales into the orbit of the folkloric canon. It retrieves stories not seen since the Harlem Renaissance and brings back archival tales of “Negro folklore” that Booker T. Washington proclaimed had emanated from a “grapevine” that existed even before the American Revolution, stories brought over by slaves who had survived the Middle Passage. Furthermore, Gates and Tatar’s volume not only defines a new canon but reveals how these folktales were hijacked and misappropriated in previous incarnations, egregiously by Joel Chandler Harris, a Southern newspaperman, as well as by Walt Disney, who cannibalized and capitalized on Harris’s volumes by creating cartoon characters drawn from this African American lore. Presenting these tales with illuminating annotations and hundreds of revelatory illustrations, The Annotated African American Folktales reminds us that stories not only move, entertain, and instruct but, more fundamentally, inspire and keep hope alive. The Annotated African American Folktales includes: Introductory essays, nearly 150 African American stories, and 20 seminal African tales as historical background The familiar Brer Rabbit classics, as well as news-making vernacular tales from the 1890s’ Southern Workman An entire section of Caribbean and Latin American folktales that finally become incorporated into the canon Approximately 200 full-color, museum-quality images

Pieternella, Daughter of Eva opens in the early days of the first white settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, beneath the shadow of Table Mountain, with the Dutch East India Company clinging precariously to a little piece of land - Robben Island - in Table Bay. Eva was one of the first interpreters and intermediaries between her Goringhaicona tribe and the Dutch, and Pieternella's father was Pieter van Meerhoff, the Company surgeon who was murdered by slave dealers in Madagascar. Pieternella and her siblings were among the first mixed-race children born at the Cape and their lives are a manifestation of a sentiment often expressed by Matthee in this novel - that life can consist of heaven and hell rolled up together in one bundle. After her mother's sudden and untimely death, the orphaned Pieternella and her brother Salomon are sent to the hurricane- and drought-afflicted Mauritius, a penal colony at the time, to work as 'slaves' to foster parents. Pieternella barely survives the exhausting sea voyage and a premature marriage becomes her salvation. Pieternella remains attached to the memory of her mother and is full of turbulent emotions about how she is both brown and white in the same body. What will her children look like? Is she really only half-human, as she has so scornfully been told? Will she ever come to terms with who she is and find the peace and comfort she yearns for? Through this remarkable true story, which took three years of intensive research into old journals, diaries and historical records, Matthee has resurrected and breathed new life into the early history of the Cape, and Robben Island and Mauritius - the isles of banishment. She skilfully balances the elements of Pieternella's life: love and shame for her mother, the impersonal might of the Company versus one individual, and a slave who is freer than a free woman. She allows the historically misunderstood Eva finally to come into her own through the eyes of her clever, sensitive daughter.

Sun and Moon must leave their earthly home after Sun invites the Sea to visit.

A wide and varied selection of myths from various African tribes south of the Sahara.

From the rift valley come stories of gods, tricksters, cattle and ogres from the many peoples of East Africa. Traditional stories bring a deeper understanding of the movement of peoples across East Africa. Common roots and differences between ancient peoples create a lively portrait with their fragile, powerful gods. The modern nations of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and more inherit the folk and mythic tales of the rift valley region. Here you'll find stories of ogres and tricksters, riddles and poems, figures such as the first man (Gikuyu) and woman (Mumbi), and great heroes of history such as Liongo. This new collection is created for the modern reader. FLAME TREE 451: From myth to mystery, the supernatural to horror, fantasy and science fiction, Flame Tree 451 offers a healthy diet of werewolves and mechanical men, blood-lusty vampires, dastardly villains, mad scientists, secret worlds, lost civilizations and escapist fantasies. Discover a storehouse of tales gathered specifically for the reader of the fantastic.

Tricksters and animals play an important role in West African folklore with stories that entertain but serve a moral purpose. Traditions and local tales revel in the antics of these characters: from Nigeria to Benin, from the cunning spider god Anansi to Agemo, the chameleon spirit deity of the Yoruba people, animals teach humans to farm, to love, to survive and thrive, and offer inspiration for moral purpose. This new collection is created for the modern reader. FLAME TREE 451: From mystery to crime, supernatural to horror and myth, fantasy and science fiction, Flame Tree 451 offers a healthy diet of werewolves and robots, mad scientists, secret worlds, lost civilizations and escapist fantasies. Discover a storehouse of tales, ancient and modern gathered specifically for the reader of the fantastic.