A clever young fellow persuades an equally clever chief's daughter to marry the king of Dahomey, and both the young man and future queen prosper in the bargain.

A clever young fellow persuades an equally clever chief's daughter to marry the king of Dahomey, and both the young man and future queen prosper in the bargain.

" . . . a landmark in research of African oral traditions." —African Arts " . . . a significant contribution to the understanding of Yoruba religious belief, magic, and art." —Journal of Religion in Africa Yoruba texts and English translations of a divination system that originated in Nigeria and is widely practiced today by male and female diviners in the diaspora. A landmark edition.

This book is an exposition of the sociocultural past, present, and futuristic preview of the Emevor-speaking people of the Niger-Delta, Nigeria. The work is the product of the author’s reminiscences and introspection into the historiography, geography, economy, language, education, and the multifarious rich sociocultural milieu of the people. It deals with the traditional customs, beliefs, totems, astronomy, time and event reckoning, marriages, traditional religions, ancestral worship and Christology, oracle divination, obituary and obsequies, initiation into Ehwa womanhood rites and sabbatical fattening of brides, festivals, identity of people, governance, heroes/heroines and modern pacesetters, and the changes provoked by modernity. By using simple language, graphic descriptions, and vivid and clear explanations of the phenomena and events, the author has taken the reader through the maze, as it were, with the needed compass to navigate through these labyrinths.

The deep forest and broad savannah, the campsites, kraals, and villages—from this immense area south of the Sahara Desert the distinguished American folklorist Roger D. Abrahams has selected ninety-five tales that suggest both the diversity and the interconnectedness of the people who live there. The storytellers weave imaginative myths of creation and tales of epic deeds, chilling ghost stories, and ribald tales of mischief and magic in the animal and human realms. Abrahams renders these stories in a narrative voice that reverberates with the rhythms of tribal song and dance and the emotional language of universal concerns. With black-and-white drawings throughout Part of the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library

This annotated bibliography-organized geographically by world region and country, describing nearly 700 books representing 73 countries-is a valuable resource for librarians, teachers, and anyone else seeking to promote international understanding through children's literature. It is the third volume sponsored by the United States Board on Books for Young People. The first, Carl M. Tomlinson's Children's Books from Other Countries (1998) is a compendium of international children's literature with annotations of both in and out of print books published between 1950 and 1996. Susan Stan's The World Through Children's Books (2002) was the second and it included books published between the years 1997 and 2000. Crossing Boundaries includes international children's books published between 2000 and 2004, as well as selected American books set in countries other than the United States. Editor Doris Gebel has compiled an important tool for providing stories that will help children understand our differences while simultaneously demonstrating our common humanity.

Classical material was traditionally used to express colonial authority, but it was also appropriated by imperial subjects to become first a means of challenging colonialism and then a rich field for creating cultural identities that blend the old and the new. Nobel prize-winners such as Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney have rewritten classical material in their own cultural idioms while public sculpture in southern Africa draws on Greek and Roman motifs to represent histories of African resistance and liberation. These developments are explored in this collection of essays by international scholars, who debate the relationship between the culture of Greece and Rome and the changes that have followed the end of colonial empires.