Reading Notes: West African Folktales, Part B
Story source: West African Folktales by William H. Barker and Cecilia Sinclair, with drawings by Cecilia Sinclair (1917).
The Moon and Stars
- Anansi-greedy trickster
- Kweku Tsin- his son, good-hearted, sometimes can outwit dad
- A dragon takes both to his castle, where there are other hostages
- The dragon's servant, a rooster, looks over them
- Kweku distracts the rooster w/ rice and throws a rope up to the heavens
- The hostages start climbing
- The dragon starts climbing, but Kweku throws bones behind him and plays the fiddle
- The dragon has to eat bones and return to the ground to dance
- Kweku cuts the rope
- Gods happy w/ Kweku saving everyone so they make him the sun, the dad the moon, and his friends the stars
How the Tortoise got its Shell
- Chief sent servants to prep for yam festival
- Mr. Klo was sent to get palm wine from Koklovi who own the palm fields
- Koklovi says Klo must fight him in order to get all the palm trees
- Klo won and put all the wine in his pot and carried the trees on his back
- He was drunk and it was raining so he was late for the yam festival
- The party was so noisey that no one could hear him knocking on the doors
- It rained for 2mo and Klo had died outside, w/ the trees laying on top of him
- When people finally came out of the palace and dug him up
- The pot and dust had caked together to form a shell
- They took him back to the palace and gave him meds
- He was brought back to life, but now he crept along the floor with a shell on his back
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