Cunnie Rabbit, Mr. Spider and the Other Beef: West African Folk Tales

Nature is very human in many of her moods. She has her periods of feverish energy and impetuous application, then her periods of gentle outpouring and watchful tenderness, and a...

Sobah was a born trader, in this respect exemplifying one of the strongest propensities of his tribe. He had frequently made trading trips "up country," and had sometimes taken...

When one morning, not long after the story of Mr. Spider's successful courting, Sobah felt the hunter instinct strong upon him, he left the work of the little rice farm to Mammy...

One evening, about a week after the burning of the farm, a little company of women and children, in varying degrees of undress, was gathered in the larger room of Mamenah's hut....

[56] A barreh is a public meeting-place. A town has one or more, according to the population. It consists of a mud floor surrounded by a wall two or three feet high, and covered...

Sobah had gone with his boat on a trading trip to Freetown, but he was a thoughtful husband and father, and had left a generous supply of rice and dried fish.

The rice is now ripe for the harvest. Sobah has engaged the services of a half dozen sturdy men to aid in gathering the crop. Neighbors and friends, many of them women, have ass...

A short time after Sobah's return from his trading trip, occurred the initiatory mysteries of the Purro secret society. Nearly all the male population of the village had gone to...

A few weeks later, near the close of the rainy season, Konah and her mother were at the farm, guarding the ripening rice from the ravages of birds and other marauders. Two look-...

The day "fo' bu'n fa'm" had come. The thick underbrush of three or four years' growth had been laboriously chopped down by men and boys some weeks before and left in a tangled m...

The next time there was story-telling in Konah's presence, she unwittingly became the chief actor. It came about in this wise. A pack of children, tired of romping, had collecte...

One forenoon, two weeks after the rice harvest, the little village was thrown into a state of intense excitement by the news which a messenger had just brought. "White ooman duh...

The African day was lingering for a brief moment in a tropical twilight, as if reluctant to give over a world of natural beauty to the impenetrable darkness of a moonless, fores...