AFRICAN FOLK TALES

AFRICAN GENESIS. By LEO FROBENIUS

and DOUGLAS C. Fox. Faber and Faber. ]2s. 6d.

Professor Frobenius is an authority on the rock-paintings of the Stone Age culture and his researches into this subject have taken him into many remote parts of Africa. " African Genesis " is the ,csuit of his interest in the folk-lore of the various races encountered during his travels, tribes as far apart as the Soninke of the Upper Niger, representatives of what Mr. Fox describes as the proud Hamitic hunting cultures, and the Bantu Wahungwe of Southern Rhodesia.

Being written for the entertainment of the general reader rather than for the enlightenment of the anthropologist, the book does not pretend to be an exhaustive study, but in dealing with such varied material perhaps it would have been as well to provide a little more information on the origin and background of the stories. A short introductory sketch bv Mr. Fox does no more than sharpen our curiosity. It would have been interesting, for instance, to be given more details about the folk-lore of the Kabyls, a Berber tribe living in the Djurdjura mountains of Algeria. The peculiar selection of Kabyl stories given by Professor Frobenius contains elements which suggest a connexion with ancient Egypt side by side with animal fables current among all the Bantu peoples, one of these fables being a version of. " Little Red Riding Hood," a theme found again among the far away Zulus.

For literary interest the best of the stories are the heroic legends of the Soninke, but we are not told whether the very spirited versions here given are translations from some manuscript source or whether thev are free renderings of traditional tales handed on by word of mouth from generation to generation. This lack of precise information inevitably detracts from the interest of the book, but, read for their narrative value alone, many of these stories, in particular " Gassire's Flute," " The Old Women," and " Samba Gana," can rank among the great folk tales of the world.