The Dancing Palm Tree: And Other Nigerian Folktales

112 pp. Woodcuts by Helen Siegl. ""The Dancing Palm Tree and Other Nigerian Folktales" offers to children everywhere a little taste of the literary heritage shared every day by their counterparts in Nigeria. Village or hamlet, town or city, any locality where people can gather, finds an eager circle of listeners ready to hear the tales that have come down from family to family there in West Africa for hundreds of years. And the old tales are just as entertaining and as instructive and as appealing today as they were when they were first told. All the tales in this collection were gold by Olawale Idewu, a young Nigerian student in an American college, lonesome for home and happy to share the stories that are part of his heritage. Ola's homeland is Western Nigeria, populated largely by a people known as the Yorubas, a proud, ambitious, sociable people that have long been among the leaders in Nigeria. And the influence of the Yorubas and other peoples of West Africa has spread farther than one might suspect, for most Afro-Americans who now live in the United States and in Latin America can trace their origins to exactly that part of Africa. Here, then, can be found some of the tales which are a rightful part of the heritage of a tenth of our own population, and thus part of the heritage of us all."