5 Essential Books For Better Understanding African Folklore

The birthplace of the human race. The oldest inhabited landmass on the planet. Ancient. Seeded with ancestral memory. One could say mythology and folklore from the African continent are some of the oldest stories in the world. I was born and raised in Cameroon, a West/Central African country. Growing up, I was exposed to a fair amount of folktales.

However, product of the post-colonial experiment that I am, I barely speak my people’s language and so I am cut off from the full measure of the richness encoded in orally transmitted traditional mythology and folklore. In the last four years, I have immersed myself in lore which speak to my roots through curating Mythological Africans, an online platform with which I explore mythology and folklore from the African continent.

However, much of what is documented or recorded of the African continent’s myths and folklore was done by individuals who and institutions which facilitated or outrightly participated in the immensely destructive colonial enterprise. What can they offer present day Africans and humans in general?

My debut book The Watkins Book of African Folklore is a partial culmination of a quest to answer this question. The following five books, which I discovered through conversations, reading recommendations and the endlessly delightful rabbit hole that is the reference section of research papers and Wikipedia articles, have been most helpful in providing necessary context and perspective for my curatorial work in general and my book in particular.

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Isidore Okpewho, Myth in Africa : A Study of Its Aesthetic and Cultural Relevance

If I was to recommend one book and one book only, it would be Isidore Okpewho’s Myth in Africa. I was incredibly fortunate to have found this book early in my exploration of mythology and folklore from the continent. This is especially so because none of my readings of renowned mythologist Jospeh Campbell’s work, which in many circles is required for mythology or folklore research, offered any in-depth analyses of the mythology or folklore of African peoples.

Isidore Okpewho was an Urhobo/Igbo (Nigeria), classical scholar who used his deep understanding of western literary traditions to highlight the latent dynamism of African mythology and folklore. The book is many wonderful things: it is a primer in anthropology, ethnography and folklore studies, a survey of traditional African mythmaking, and an expert literary and cultural analyses of some of the main texts of and accounts from African mythology and folklore.

What I love and find most helpful about Myth in Africa is how it skillfully establishes the myths and folklore of African people as more than the “dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo” as Campbell blithely put it. To my knowledge, no other book in circulation offers what this book does.

The analyses and ideas presented in the book have become the proverbial center around which my understanding and appreciation for African mythology and folklore have coalesced and this center, so far, is holding.

Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa

Irish linguistic anthropologist Ruth Finnegan’s six-hundred-page text Oral Literature in Africa is perhaps the most comprehensive reference available for scholars of African orature. The book starts with fifty pages of contextualizing commentary, tracing the roots of and inherent conflicts in the modern study of oral lore from the continent.

It then presents an in depth excavation of the continent’s various poetic forms, prose, riddles, proverbs, and special forms like drumming and drama (masquerades, plays and puppet shows).

What I loved the most about Oral Literature in Africa is the  sheer fact of its range. It is a thoroughly researched book  with examples from Cape to Cairo, Dakar to Dar es Salaam. The book offers historical and cultural context, images, and a detailed bibliography for the insatiably curious.

Ibrahim Al-Koni, Al Majus

In the hands of a skilled wordsmith, intimate knowledge of a subject—be it a person or a people, a place, a time or an idea—results in prose and poetry which evolves sentences, paragraphs and stanzas from lines and blocks of words to vessels of wonder, stimulating, delighting and even awing in the way certain paintings, photographs, sculptures or musical compositions do. This is the sense you get from reading Libyan author Ibrahim al Koni’s Al Majus or The Animists.

Ibrahim al Koni is of the Tuareg people who claim nationality mainly from Libya, Algeria, Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso. But one could say the Tuareg are citizens of the Sahara desert for they have claimed the desert as wholeheartedly as it has claimed them.

The Tuareg lifestyle is a vivid demonstration of how humans, with a clear understanding of their environment, can survive even the harshest of conditions. Traditionally, they build no permanent settlements. Instead, they travel with their camels across the desert, using water from ancient wells and stopping just long enough to rest and graze their camels and other livestock.

By doing this, they preserve the fragile ecological balance of their unforgiving desert home, taking just as much as they need, and moving on quickly to give the land a chance to recover. The image of vivid blue robed and veiled Tuareg men sitting on white camels with the stark desert landscape as a backdrop is one of many striking African images.

Ibrahim al-Koni was born in the Fezzan region of southwestern Libya. He spent his formative years in the desert, first learning the language and ways of his people before eventually learning Arabic and traveling to Russia to study literature and journalism.

He maintained a strong attachment to his Tuareg roots, however, and states in an essay that it was after a return to his homeland and a period of communion with the desert that this book, which is often hailed as “The Tuareg Epic” emerged.

Al Majus is a massive book—over five hundred pages broken down into two volumes, and four parts. But only a book of this size could possibly contain everything al-Koni put into it in the way he does. The book oozes the mythology and folklore of the Tuareg people which is dominated by the dramas of their encounters with their desert home and the relationships through which they survive the demands of their chosen lifestyle.

Reading Al Majus felt like a long conversation with the Sahara desert and not just any conversation, one of those wide ranging, depth scouring conversations at the end of which you see the person you are in conversation with, and yourself with eyes refreshed by the sheer complexity and beauty of what one has experienced.

Egyptian writer and culture critic Ismail Fayed summarizes it beautifully when he says one reads al-Koni’s text, as if one is seeing the Sahara unfold before his mind’s eye, with its harshness, strangeness but also ineffable beauty, and this comes from his intimate knowledge, his deep ecological awareness, the depth of his understanding of the topography, climate, flora and fauna of the Sahara.

Sylvia Ardyn Boone, Radiance from the Waters: Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art

Radiance from the Waters: Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art is another book I read early in my exploration of African mythology and folklore. Much has been written about African women in the traditional or modern context. However, few books have focused on what the women themselves believe about their place in the world and how these beliefs translate to practices in the way American art historian Sylvia Ardyn Boone’s book documents the beliefs and associated practices of the Mende of Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Traditional (and to a large extent modern) Mende women’s self-concept is deeply influenced by their induction and participation in Sande, the powerful centuries old women’s secret society. Sande is one of the African continent’s many women’s societies through which, traditionally, girls were guided into womanhood and educated about what is expected from them both as women and as members of their community.

Boone’s complimentary writing about Sande’s rules, lore, activities and artefacts highlights the many ways in which the organization elevates and empowers Mende women. It is a glittering account of sororal camaraderie on a quest for personal and communal excellence.

As an African woman who attended girl’s only boarding schools founded by Christian missionaries, Radiance from the Waters presented me with an alternate and critically important vision of what was possible for my self-concept. It also provided much needed context for my understanding of perceptions about women in Mende and to an extent African folklore as a whole.

Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek, Lucy Lloyd, Specimens of Bushman Folklore

They were the people,
those who broke the string for me
and so this place was a grief to me
for what they did.

 Since it was that bowstring which broke for me
and its sound no more in the sky, ringing,
hereabouts it feels to me no longer
like it once felt to me just for that thing.

 For everything feels as if it stood open before me
empty, and I hear no sound
for they have broken the bow’s string for me
and the old places are not sweet any more
for what they did.

This poem, titled “The Broken String,” comes from German and Welsh linguists Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek and Lucy Lloyd’s Specimens of Bushman Folklore published in 1911. It is a lament by a San (South Africa) man named Xaa-ttin for his friend Nuin-kui-ten, a magician and rain maker, who was shot and killed while prowling the night in his lion form.

Xaa-ttin might as well have been singing for his people. The San, one the African continent’s longest surviving indigenes, have steadily been dispossessed of their land, lifestyle and language, first by incursions of Bantu populations moving southwards, then by the European colonial machine and its aftermath. |Xam, a language spoken by the San and in which the poem and the other eighty-odd folk narratives in the book were recorded, is now extinct.

Bleek and Llyod, however, are immortalized as two of  the best known scholars of African languages of their time. They have been criticized for sanitizing the indigenous narratives they collected, but their work resulted in the Bleek and Lloyd Archive which is the most extensive archive of the oral lore of southern Africa’s indigenous hunter-gatherer peoples.

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The Watkins Book of African Folklore edited by Helen Nde is available via Watkins Publishing.