Tale
Contes dahoméens
Not translated into English
Julien Alapini · 1941
Synopsis
The collection brings together tales that the author, a schoolteacher, drew from the oral tradition of Dahomey, where they were handed down from generation to generation among the Fon and other peoples, and which he transcribes in French. The stories are not described one by one. The book is counted among the first attempts to fix African oral literature in a European language, for readers at home as well as abroad, and the author mixes in it, as elsewhere, ethnography and storytelling.
Context
Published in Paris and Avignon by Les Livres nouveaux, the 135-page volume opens the work of an author who studied the entertainments, oral literature, songs, proverbs and riddles of his country, before devoting studies to divination and the initiated, then writing for the theatre. He approached these traditions as a Christian, described the old beliefs as superstitions and meant to continue the work of the colonial ethnologists; critics see in him, as in other Dahomean authors of his time, an interpenetration of ethnology and literature.
Who it is for
For those interested in the oral literature of Dahomey and in the way a man of letters of the colonial era set it down in writing.
Prizes and reception
Cited by Adrien Huannou's history of Beninese literature, it remains a document on the beginnings of writing in Dahomey.