The Black Hand Gang is a neighbourhood group of young Kenyans, which meets in the eastern part of Nairobi. The gang members, Onyango, Waithaka, his sister Jane, V.J. Patel and Hassan make a lot of friends trying to help other people. The story is intended as a supplementary text for children fluent in reading, to encourage reading for pleasure.

First published in Dholuo in 1983, this is the first English-language edition of this story for children. One morning Ogilo and his two friends discover a pregnant hippo stuck in a muddly hole. The story centres around the boys secrecy, to protect the hippo being killed by grown-ups for meat, and their efforts to save the hippo. The fate of the poacher contains a moral tale.

Kandu lives with his parents in a fishing village near a big lake. Kandu's father is a fisherman, and sometimes allows Kandu to accompany him to the shore. Kandu sits and watches the men, and women, and donkeys going about their daily business, or he plays with the other boys. One day, he starts helping a woman at the store to wrap fried fish, for which he was paid enough to buy sweets. He soon prefers this, to going to school. But when his father and his teacher find out what he is doing, they arevery angry.

Greed, dishonesty and pride are the themes of these four stories, designed to encourage reading for pleasure. The stories are "The Three Hunters", "Nyakalondo and the Merciless Father", "Hare Learns a Lesson", and "Lion, Hare and the Thorn".

Sundiata is the story of a man who lived in West Africa almost 800 years ago. It is the myth of a hunter's prophecy that a king will marry an ugly foreign woman who will give birth to a son, who will come to rule the kingdom on Mali. It is a tale of conquest and heroism.