The systematic collection of African folktales began in the nineteenth century, as Christian missionaries, and later colonial administrators and travelers, began to penetrate African societies, to learn the languages, and to record their observations of the cultures they encountered.
Traders, whose contacts go much further back, rarely wrote of what they experienced; an exception would be the eighteenth-century Danish trader Ludewig Rømer, who offered the first Anansi stories on record in 1760). To this period, until roughly 1940, we owe a number of influential collections from which tales have been widely anthologized. Many of these collections offer the original language versions of their stories, but few provide reliable information on the informant or the circumstances of collection; in a number of cases they clearly demonstrate the beliefs of the collector (an example being Ruth Fisher's Twilight Tales of the Black Baganda, 1911). But time and widespread reproduction have made some individual tales from these collections into something like classics. In southern Africa, Wilhelm Bleek's work with San-speaking informants (often convicts assigned to serve with him) led to his collections, first Reynard the Fox in South Africa (1864), and later, in collaboration with Lucy Lloyd, Specimens of Bushman Folklore (1911), a bilingual collection of texts, in which the English is an unreadable literal translation of the original. Stories from this collection, rewritten, were later popularized by Bleek's daughter Dorothea in Mantis and his Friends (1923). Around the same time, the Reverend Henry Callaway published his Nursery Tales, Traditions, and Histories of the Zulus (1868), which is also a bilingual edition.
In West Africa, R. S. Rattray published Akan-Ashanti Folktales (1930), collected in the British Gold Coast Colony (later the Republic of Ghana). This introduced the popular spider-trickster Ananse (that is, Anansi). His collection is supplemented for neighboring groups by A. S. Cardinall's Tales Told in Togoland (1931). Togoland at the time was a former German colony placed under British mandate following World War I, and at independence in 1958, the enclave chose to remain with Ghana.
For French West Africa, Laurent Jean Baptiste B_erenger-Feraud published an anthology, Recueil de contes populaires de la S_en_egambie (Collection of Popular Tales from Senegambia, 1885), followed later by the administrator Fran_cois-Victor Equilbecq, who in 1913 published an extensive three-volume collection of tales from different regions, preceding them with an extensive descriptive essay (Essai sur la litt_erature merveilleuse des noirs, suivi de contes indig_enes de l'Ouest africain fran_cais [Essay on the Marvelous Literature of the Blacks, Followed by Native Tales of French West Africa]). One should also mention the influential anthology of Blaise Cendrars, Anthologie n_egre (1927), which contributed to the Paris-based N_egritude movement. For North Africa, Ren_e Basset published large collections of Berber and Arabic folktales, including Contes populaires berb_eres (Popular Berber Tales,1887), Nouveaux contes berb_eres (New Berber Tales, 1897), and Mille et un contes,legendes et r_ecits arabes (A Thousand and One Arabic Tales, Legends, and Stories, 1925-27). From central Africa (the Congo basin) there are a number of collections in French from missionaries: H. Trilles, Contes et l_egendes pygm_ees (Pygmy Tales and Legends, 1931); Joseph van Wing and Cl_ement Scholler, L_egendes des Bakongo-Orientaux (Legends of the Eastern Bakongo, 1940); and A. de Rop, Versions et fragments de l'_epop_ee m_ongo (Versions and Fragments of the Mongo Epic, 1978). Some of the scholarship, however, is in Flemish, reflecting the Belgian origins of the collectors.
German story-collecting activity in their colonies of East and West Africa more or less ceased following World War I, when their territories were handed over to other powers.
Before the war, however, the Germans had been very active in linguistic and ethnographic research, and the Zeitschrift f€ur Kolonialsprachen (Journal of Colonial Languages), later renamed Afrika und € Ubersee (Africa and Overseas), and other similar journals contain numerous collections of tales from southern and eastern Africa, in the original language with a German translation. Karl Meinhof made a good anthology of stories entitled African Tales, 1921, but it is eclipsed by the monumental, twelve-volume collection of Leo Frobenius: Atlantis: Volksm€archen und Volksdichtungen Afrikas (Atlantis: Folktales and Folk Literature of Africa, 1921-28). Each volume represented a different region of the continent, the stories having been collected during a series of expeditions Frobenius made in the early years of the century. The collection offers volumes 1-3: Tales of the Kabyles (Algeria/North Africa); volume 4: Tales from Kordofan (Ethiopia-Sudan); volume 5: Traditions of the western Sudan (a descriptive essay, and stories of the Nupe, Mossi, and Mande peoples); volume 6: Epic traditions of the western Sudan (Soninke, Fulani, Baman, and Dogon); volume 7: Spirits of the western Sudan (Mande, Bozo/Sorko, Jukun, and Hausa); volume 8: Tales of the western Sudan (Malinke, Mossi and others); volume 9: Central Sudan (Nupe, Hausa, and others); volume 10: the Yoruba; volume 11: Upper Guinea (Togo: Bassari, Tim, Munchi); volume 12: Kasai (modern Congo) (n.b. in these titles, Sudan means not the modern republic along the Nile, but the old Arabic Bilad es-Sudan, the land of the Blacks, or Africa south of the Sahara and especially the Sahel). Another book, Erythr€ aia (1931), offers description and stories from the region of modern Zimbabwe. Americans working in Africa have contributed to the effort. Heli Chatelain, working as a missionary in Angola, published Folktales of Angola in 1894. Melville and Frances Herskovits, visiting the French colony of Dahomey in the 1930s, collected materials published in 1958 as Dahomean Narrative, which was at the time an exemplary work; their interest in Dahomey was guided by Melville Herskovits's curiosity about the trans-Atlantic continuities of African cultures. It should be stressed that the titles mentioned above are only some of the many publications from this period that offer African tales to a wider audience outside the continent.
