Modern Languages And Cultures Department: Fill & Download for Free

Wendy Laura BelcherEarly African Literature: An Anthology of Written Texts from 3000 BCE to 1900 CECollected and edited by Wendy Laura BelcherIn progress. The material below is extracted from the very rough draft of the introduction (with citations stripped out). It is in progress, so many early Africa literature texts have yet to be named below. I welcome comments and suggestions of texts!IntroductionContrary to the general perception, the African literatures written before the twentieth century are substantial. Whatever limits can be imagined—in terms of geography, genre, language, audience, era—these literatures exceed them. Before the twentieth century, Africans wrote not just in Europe, but also on the African continent; they wrote not just in European languages, but in African languages; they wrote not just for European consumption, but for their own consumption; they wrote not just in northern Africa, but in sub-Saharan Africa; they wrote not just orally, but textually; they wrote not just historical or religious texts, but poetry and epic and autobiography; and they wrote not just in the nineteenth century, but in the eighteenth century and long, long before.Yet, the general public and even scholars of African literature are often unaware of these early literatures, believing that African literature starts in the late 1950s as the result of colonization. In this view, Africa is a savage Caliban who is introduced to writing by a European Prospero and Things Fall Apart is his first articulation. Westerns assume that whatever writing happened to be done on the continent was not done by Africans or in African languages and scripts until very recently. This lack of awareness of three thousand years of African writing is particularly surprising given the legions of pre-twentieth-century African texts that historians have uncovered and studied in the past fifty years. While historians labor to overturn long-held misconceptions about Africa as a place without history, literary critics have done little to overturn misconceptions of Africa as a place without literature. The extraordinarily rich trove of pre-twentieth century African continental literatures has yet to be written about in any depth by Euro-American literary critics. Certainly, no book addresses their work at length and almost no literary essays published outside of Africa address the continental works.African literature written over the last millennia remains largely invisible for several significant reasons. One, many of the texts written more than two hundred years ago have not survived, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Scholars know they existed because travelers reported on them and extant texts make reference to now lost texts. Two, many were never published as print books and of those few manuscripts that were, most were published in obscure places. Three, very few of the texts written in an African language have been translated into any European language. For instance, the hundreds of Ethiopian indigenous texts remain obscure because only a handful have been translated into English. Indeed, in the dramatic cases of texts written in Meroitic or Libyco-Berber, the texts cannot be translated as the language and script is no longer understood. One of the great challenges of the twenty-first century will be archiving and translating the vast libraries of East and West Africa. Fourth, many continue to see sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa as geographic and literary domains separated by a gulf, rather than, as historians and archeologists continue to prove, having deep links to each other. As the origin of the human species, Africa is home to the most diverse peoples of any continent, one of its great strengths. That some of these Africans are lighter-skinned than others is an irrelevancy. All those born on the African continent, and whose forbearers were born on the continent, are Africans and have contributed to its vibrancy. The obsession with the race or region of African authors has resulting in obscuring the literature of the continent and prevented productive comparative work.This lack of knowledge about early African literature torques the study of modern African literature. Analyses of contemporary writing in the United States, Britain, or Europe often take into account a centuries-old literary tradition rooted in different but related forms and themes. But research on African literature today tends to ignore the continent’s long literary history, with most scholars today focusing on African writing in European languages produced since 1950. For example, few situate later Nigerian experiments in English like Tutola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard, Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy, and Iweala’s Beast of No Nation in relation to the English of earlier West African texts, such as the eighteenth-century diary of Antera Duke, an Efik slave-trading chief in what is now Nigeria. Likewise, few lay Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart alongside the work of Nigerian authors of the nineteenth century who were also concerned about the interaction of Christianity and local beliefs—including Egba clergyman Joseph Wright (1839), the famous Yoruba Anglican bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther (1837), and the Hausa writer Madugu Mohamman Mai Gashin Baki . Senegalese poet Léopold Sédar Senghor’s work on the Queen of Sheba is not considered in the context of the thirteenth-century Ethiopian text about her, Kebra Nagast.Selection of TextsWhatever the reasons that these literatures do not get the attention they deserve, the time is well past to start giving them that attention. This book therefore seeks to introduce these literatures and provide excerpts from a few. Influenced by recent trends in literary theory, particularly new historicism, I have selected texts using broad definitions of the basic categories. By “written text,” I mean anything inscribed by human hand or machine on any surface—whether parchment, paper, or stone—that uses a system of signs (symbolic or orthographic) that can be read by many members of a particular cultural group. By “Africa,” I mean the entire African continent and the peoples who originated there. By “African author,” I mean anyone born on the African continent to someone born on the African continent. I do not exclude authors on the basis of race, although I do note the author’s national or ethnic background. In the case of North Africa, I have been more exclusionary, focusing on African texts by those whose families were not originally from Europe or the Middle East. Thus, I have not included North African Roman or Greek authors. Since African diasporic literature written in the Americas has been collected and published frequently elsewhere, I do not include African diasporic authors unless they were born on the African continent. By “literature,” I mean any original text with elevated language or an active “I”, but specifically poetry, epic, romance, hymns, fictional narrative, epistles and belles letters, personal manifestos or philosophy, diaries, biography, and autobiography. Although many African translations vary significantly from their Arabic or Greek originals, I have not included any translations of texts written outside of Africa. By “written African literature,” I mean a text composed and written down in any language by an African author (or, in some rare cases, his or her amanuensis). I do not exclude texts written in European languages. I do exclude oral texts—although Africa has always had a vast unwritten literature in the oral forms of drama, epic, and poetry, that is not the subject of this book. A desideratum remains studying oral and written African literature together; I hope this book will aid that process.Our exclusion of certain authors or texts is never an argument about their importance or salience, but only due to such authors and texts finding adequate representation elsewhere. Thus, I do not generally include texts written by Europeans in Africa, although many Europeans who lived on the African continent for long periods had imbibed local thought and can be seen as part of a larger African literature. Such authors are generally represented well in travel anthologies.Quite frequently, texts are omitted because no English translation is available, no translation is possible, or all copies of the text have been lost. It is quite clear that for every extant pre-twentieth century African text, a thousand others did exist but were destroyed by the elements or conquest.Categories of TextsIn practice, this means that four general categories of written African literature are represented in this text. A prominent category of early written African literature is that written by Africans outside of Africa, in particular those who spent the majority of their lives in Europe or the Americas and were trained in Western educational systems. This includes not only the literature written by the millions of Africans taken to the new world as slaves, but also that written by the hundreds of African youths whom Europeans sent from the continent every year to study in England, France, Portugal, Italy, Holland and Germany from the 1400s on. While the genre of the slave narrative has been widely explored by literary scholars, this later type of the writing done by free Africans in Europe has received less attention, perhaps because much of it was not written in English. For instance, a rich but almost entirely unexplored body of early written African literature is African scholarship in Latin for European universities. I suspect that many discoveries of African literature will be made as more material from European universities is digitalized and the African authorship of some of these theses becomes known. Likewise for early written African literature in Portuguese.Another category of early written African literature is texts written by Africans on the African continent in Arabic. These include medieval inscriptions in Arabic from eleventh-century gravestones in Mali; letters written by the Emperor of Morocco in the 1600s to various European heads of state; Tarikh el-Fettach, a fifteenth-century manuscript about Jews in Tendirma, near Timbuktu; Tarikh es-Soudan, a seventeenth-century manuscript written by Abd-al-Rahman al Sadi of Timbuktu about the lives and wars of the kings of Mali in the 1200s, Kitab Ghanja, a chronicle from the 1700s in modern Ghana, and so on. Various archival projects in West and East Africa are bringing to light even more African manuscripts dating from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Unfortunately, a tendency to see Arabic as a language foreign to the African continent, despite being in use there for over a thousand years, leads to dismissing Arabic African literature as not indigenous. This would be tantamount to dismissing British literature as Italian because of the Roman invasion 2000 years ago. Misconceptions of Africa as a savage, untouched paradise do not square with the reality of Africa’s millennia of trading relationships with non-Africans and its long traditions of Islam and Christianity.The final category of early written African literature is that written by Africans on the African continent in African languages, sometimes in African scripts. The African languages with the largest bodies of extant texts are Gəˁəz, Kiswahili, Hausa, Amharic, and Somali [more].We do not want to suggest that these categories cannot be fruitfully read together. For instance, if I look at some of the early writing by just one ethnic group in West Africa over just one century I find it occurring in several languages and over several continents. There were at least half-a-dozen eighteenth-century Akan writers (Gonja Chronicles?) whose manuscripts have survived. These texts by these Akan authors must be seen as the result of a particular African discursive system, not just as tainted by the European languages in which they were sometimes written. All these men were shaped by the same African culture and their texts should be read in light of each other.African ScriptsAs the table shows, ancient Africa had many indigenous scripts, including hieroglyphs and hieratic, both developed in Egypt around five thousand years ago to represent the ancient Egyptian language. Egyptians then invented Demotic, which was related to Hieratic, and Coptic, which was related to Greek and used to represent an African language. Nubians used all the Egyptian scripts, but also invented their own, Meroitic, to represent the African languages of Meroitic and Old Nubian. Meanwhile in North Africa and the Sahel, Africans invented the Libyco-Berber scripts to represent a variety of Berber languages, while East Africans invented Ethiopic (or Gəˁəz) to represent the African language of Gəˁəz. In the medieval period, Africans in East, West, and North Africa used the Arabic script, but in the early modern period, Africans invented Ajami, which is related to the Arabic script, for their East and West African languages. It is only in the twentieth century that the Roman alphabet came to be used widely in Africa. By the late eighteenth century, Africans also invented the secret ideographic writing system of Nsibidi. That Nsibidi was “discovered” by Europeans only in the twentieth century suggests that other unknown African scripts may have been used during the early modern period. It is also worthwhile to mention Adinkra, a pictographic script invented by 1817 in what is now Ghana, and Vai, an alphabet invented in Liberia in the 1830s. In the twentieth century, Africans invented over a dozen scripts, but only a few are still used.…Poetry in Africa - WikipediaAfrican poetry encompasses the wide variety of traditions arising from Africa's 55 countries and from evolving trends within different literary genres. It is a large and complex subject, partly because of Africa's original linguistic diversity but primarily because of the devastating effect of slavery and colonization, which resulted in English, Portuguese and French, as well as Creole or pidgin versions of these European languages, being spoken and written by Africans across the continent.As Anouk Ziljlma points out, "because there are literally thousands of indigenous languages spoken in Africa and many more dialects, every African country has an official language (or 11 in the case of South Africa). This official language acts as the 'lingua franca' for (at least) a reasonably sized region."According to Prof. Joseph A. Ushie of the University of Uyo English department, in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria: "Modern written African poetry has a double heritage — pre-colonial and Western. As in most post-colonial situations, the tilt of our writing should be more towards the pre-colonial African literary heritage as manifested in the song, dirge, folktale, elegy, panegyric or riddle. Essentially, such art was meant for the whole community rather than for a few initiates."Oral Poetry from AfricaAmazon Best Sellers: Best African PoetryTheories of African PoetryAfrican Poetry Book FundFootnoting African Poetry | BrickAfrican Poetry: IntroductionPolitics and the Development of Modern African Poetry…..Kama Sywor Kamanda — WikipédiaKama Sywor KamandaTranslated worksEnglish : Wind Whispering Soul, 2001; Tales, 2001Italian : Le miriadi di tempi vissuti, 2004; La stretta delle parole, 2004Japanese : Les Contes du griot, t. I, 2000; t. II, 2005Corean : African fairy Tales from Kama Sywor KAMANDA ,2005Chinese : Les Contes du griot, t. I, 2003; t. II, 2004English : Fairy Tales by KAMANDA, Xaragua Editions CO, U.S.A., 2013English : Tales of KAMANDA (Volume1), Books of Africa, 2016.English : Amana "The child who was a God", Books of Africa, 2016.English : Prince Muntu, illustrated by Izumi ISHIKAWA, Books of Africa,2016English : Fairy Tales by Kama Sywor KAMANDA , (EUE), 2020 (ISBN 978-620-2-53297-6)International recognition and awards1987 : Prix Paul Verlaine, Académie française1990 : Prix Louise-Labé1991 : Grand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire for La Nuit des griots.1992 : Poésiades special mention, Institut académique de Paris1993 : Jasmin d’Argent for poetic originality, Société Littéraire du Jasmin d’Argent1994 : Prix Théophile-Gautier, Académie française1999 : Melina Mercouri Award, Association of Greek Writers and Poets2000 : Poet of the millenium 2000, International Poets Academy, India2000 : Honorary citizen of Joal-Fadiouth, Senegal2002 : Grand Prize for Poetry, International Society of Greek Writers2005 : Top 100 writers in 2005, International Biographical Centre, Cambridge2005 : International Professional of the Year, 2005, International Biographical Centre, Cambridge2005 : Man of the Year 2005, American Biographical Institute2005 : Certificate of Honor for an exceptional contribution to francophonie, Certificat Maurice Cagnon, Conseil international d’études francophones2005 : Geuest Writer of Honour, EXPO 2005, Aichi, Japan.2006 : Master Diploma for Specialty Honors in Writing, World Academy of Letters, US2006 : International Peace Prize 2006, United Cultural Convention, US2009 : Prix Heredia, Académie française [bronze medal] for Œuvre poétique: édition intégrale.Kama Sywor Kamanda - WikipediaKama Sywor KAMANDA is an award-winning Congolese French-speaking writer, poet, novelist, playwright, speaker, essayist and storyteller from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.He is also a committed intellectual who contributes to the evolution of ideas and the history of Africa. He was born in Luebo in the province of Kasaï Occidental in Congo-Kinshasa on 11 November 1952. His first publication, Les Contes des veillées africaines was an immediate success. From the beginning of his career, his literary work has stood out due to its originality, its unique style and its themes.As per literary critics: Kamanda owes much of his world renown as a writer to his "Kamanda Tales", as they should be called for their evocative power and literary quality, which rank this African writer among the greatest classic authors such as Andersen, Grimm, Perrault and Maupassant. Kama Sywor Kamanda is considered as the Africa's greatest storyteller.…..Literary careerThrough his story-telling, Kamanda has been able to combine personal memories, tradition and imagination. It is not a collection of stories, but a literary work in its own right, nurtured by folk themes and local legends. Playwright, storyteller, poet and novelist, Kamanda has produced a huge and internationally recognized literary work. Since the publication of his first book, Les Contes des veillées africaines, in 1967, he has written a dozen books totalling a thousand poems, a dozen plays, two essays and several collections bringing together hundreds of stories. His literary output also includes several novels.Storyteller. He is known for his literary tales which are inspired by his personal experiences, his imagination and the traditions and realities of the African continent. Kamanda’s tales are enchanting stories imbued with the culture and civilization of all African lands. His literary genius has been universally recognized in his lifetime. Due to the originality of the form and the substance of his writings, it is difficult to categorize it in a literary movement. Poet. Kamanda has breathed new life back into contemporary poetry and restored its grandeur, thanks to the wealth of his language and mastery of metaphor. Critics and some of the greatest poets of his time, including Mario Luzi and Léopold Sédar Senghor, have emphasised the power of his verses and the richness of his imagery.According to the Bulletin Critique du Livre Français (BCLF, No. 529, entry 150655, Jan. 1990): "The poetic cry of Kamanda touches us and overwhelms us all the more because it is truly poetic.The suffering of uprooted lives and dualisms, the quest for love and hope. Elegiac poetry where the plaint takes speech as a fertile source, to speak of the dry land, the indifference of the other, the dead end. But the most heartbreaking cries right through this African tradition take on the warm bright colors of childhood, of a past the exiled poet finds within himself. The jasmine, the wisteria, these "sweet children like the blackness of the ebony", explode with a savour for which we were unable to be guardians or lovers. The poet’s struggle is so fundamental, the choice of his words so evident that they rank him among the greatest chanters of misery and compassion. Violent like Hugo, able to use litanies like Peguy, as lyrical as Eluard. His work takes on all forms of the universal clamor which, from the beginning to the end of time, talks continuously to the attentive ear.” Kamanda has received many awards, including, in 2009, the French Academy’s Prix Heredia for Œuvre poétique : édition intégrale i.e., the complete edition of his poetic works.Novelist: Kamanda constantly embodies Africa and its dreams. His writings reveal him to be a genuine résistant against totalitarian powers, but he also comes to the aid of men and women fighting in silence for their rights or their survival, and that of their children. A committed writer, he has always considered himself a "lost soul between the dreams and the illusions, the joys and the sorrows of the African world." His novels depict the life of African peoples at the time of dictators and under the influence of racist and neo-colonialist sects, and the social and economic consequences of the black populations deprived of any financial clout to influence their own destiny. He highlights the contradictions of the black people of all continents who both serve exclusively the interests of their tormenters, over those in their own community that struggle for their rights and resist predation, and are victims of racist, ideological and religious issues that overwhelm them. L'Insondable destin des Hommes expresses a deep and original reflection on bad governance, political violence and economic predation as the main reasons for the migration of African youth condemned to death in the desert and at sea. In La Joueuse de Kora, he evokes his ideal of justice and truth and his quest for peace and collective happiness without racism or apartheid, while his characters and intrigues in La Traversée des mirages are inspired by the actors and realities of political life.Playwright: Kamanda surprises by the originality of his theatrical themes and by his erudition. His knowledge of today’s Africa and that of yesteryear is indisputable. He shares with his audiences a broad swathe of African memory, for which he is the recognized spokesman, if not the guardian. His theatre is inspired by Africa past and present. Ancient Egypt finds a new literary existence through his playwriting skills. The Pharaohs and Queens of ancient Egypt finally have a new literary life and an author who pays them a long-awaited tribute hoped for a thousand times over. Literary recognition of the great African rulers, to which they were entitled, but which no one hitherto had dreamed of legitimizing. Ramsès II, Candace 1ère, and Toutankhamon are Kama Sywor Kamanda plays that testify to Africa's contribution to universal civilization. Kamanda is not bound by his native Africa; he travels the world and carries us with him through his imagination, poetry and love of peoples and cultures of the world. Thus he invites us to discover Japan and all its traditions in On peut s'aimer sans se comprendre.…….https://www.amazon.fr/Oral-Literature-Africa-Ruth-Finnegan/dp/1906924716Ruth Finnegan's Oral Literature in Africa was first published in 1970, and since then has been widely praised as one of the most important books in its field. Based on years of fieldwork, the study traces the history of storytelling across the continent of Africa. This revised edition makes Finnegan's ground-breaking research available to the next generation of scholars. It includes a new introduction, additional images and an updated bibliography, as well as its original chapters on poetry, prose, "drum language" and drama, and an overview of the social, linguistic and historical background of oral literature in Africa. This book is the first volume in the World Oral Literature Series, an ongoing collaboration between OBP and World Oral Literature Project. A free online archive of recordings and photographs that Finnegan made during her fieldwork in the late 1960s is hosted by the World Oral Literature Project (http: //www.oralliterature.org/collections/rfinnegan001.html) and can also be accessed from publisher's website….https://www.amazon.fr/Epic-Traditions-Africa-Stephen-Belcher/dp/0253212812"Belcher's volume contains a much needed and extremely well-integrated overview and discussion of a vast inter-related West African culture complex that deserves and requires the kind of original, insightful treatment it receives here." --David ConradEpic Traditions of Africa crosses boundaries of language, distance, and time to gather material from diverse African oral epic traditions. Stephen Belcher explores the rich past and poetic force of African epics and places them in historical and social, as well as artistic contexts. Colorful narratives from Central and West African traditions are illuminated along with texts that are more widely available to Western readers--the Mande Sunjata and the Bamana Segou. Belcher also takes up questions about European influences on African epic poetry and the possibility of mutual influence through out the genre. This lively and informative volume will inspire an appreciation for the distinctive qualities of this uniquely African form of verbal art.…..In the DR Congo, our ethnic histories are intertwined with those of our legendary heroes. Our heroes are all celebrated in famous epics: Lianja (Mongo), Mubela (Lega), Mwindo (Nyanga), Lofokefoke (Mbole), Kudukese (Tetela), etc.Since around the fourteenth century this heroic narrative has been handed down the generations orally within the Mongo People, and has now been published in English for the first time. The translation captures the African imagery, idiom and forms of literary expression. With the themes of peace, unity and reconciliation at its centre, the author encompasses and depicts the rich cultural heritage of the Mongo people. The narrative is simultaneously an expose of the great deeds of a legendary Mongo hero and the fascinating socio-historical, economic and religious context in which the Mongo have lived and continue to live…….L'EPOPEE DE LYANJA, par le ballet national zairoisL is for the Lianja epic (Epics from A to Z)TUESDAY, APRIL 14, 2015L is for the Lianja epic (Epics from A to Z)I have read a large number of epics for this challenge. This one was not only new for me too, but I also have to admit that it is, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful pieces of oral literature I have ever read. Because I loved it so much, today's post is going to be a little longer than usual, so I can fit all my favorite parts into it. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did!OriginsThis epic, like yesterday's, is named after its main hero. The culture it belongs to is the Mongo, a Bantu ethnic group that lives in the tropical forests of the Congo Basin in Central Africa. This story has been narrated since the 14th century; the English text I read is based on the performances of three storytellers, recorded in the 1980's. The narration is divided into three nights' performances (the introduction of the book describes really well what these performances look like).The Lianja epic, unlike many others I have read for this challenge, is a story of peace. It is the tale of a foretold hero-messiah who will come to lead warring tribes to brotherhood and prosperity. It is exciting, eloquent, visually captivating, all-around gorgeous, and has a strong, amazingly relevant message of peace, forgiveness, and cross-cultural understanding.The HeroLianja, while definitely the most important, is not the only hero in the story - in fact, he is not even born until the third night of the performance. He is preceded by a line of strong and wise men and women, like Bokele who leads the Mongo out of darkness into the light, Lianja's father the half-spirit Ilele, or his mother Mbombe, who is not only a famous wrestler, but also named Lady of Wisdom for her advocacy for peace. Lianja also shares his destiny for peace with his twin sister Nsongo.The HighlightsToo many to count, really. Here are some of my favorites:1. The prominent role of women. They fight beside their husbands (they lead armies and they have their own groups of experienced female warriors), they decide their own destiny, and they give speeches of wisdom to the community. One time the elders of a council try to shut wise woman Mama Isaso up, and instead a spirit appears to tell them that they should listen.2. The descriptions of nature. This epic teems with beautiful, detailed descriptions of scenery, nature, and everything that lives. My favorite line is "The clouds played acrobatic games across the sky."3. The questioning of the enemy's motives. Multiple times in the epic heroes ask themselves: What made our enemies hate us? What do they think about us? Even evil spirits are described like this: "They are infinitely asking themselves the meaning of their lives. As they are questioning themselves and how to change their lives they are lost in their thoughts and thus go around all the cosmos creating havoc, death and misconduct among the living."4. This line: "How much better is life among strangers with light, than home without the sun and the moon."5. Choosing a wife: After every nation and kingdom sends girls he can choose form, Ilele turns down the "short-listed" (sic!) bride, saying he wants to marry a girl he had "met, talked with, and loved." He goes on a journey, and joins a group of girls at a dance celebration, picking one he likes. But when he says "I want you to be my wife" this it he response he gets: "Your wife? What do you mean by your wife? A first wife? A second one? Or just for the occasion?" (This smart girl turns out to be a half-spirit herself, and they don't get married). Eventually, Ilele wrestles Mbombe in a pool of palm oil and defeats her, and they get married (she actually wants to marry him before the wrestling, but she says she can't give any suitor preferential treatment). In the wedding song the ideal wife is described as "a girl of plentifulness, selflessness and greatness, a girl of bravery, courage and without self praise, a girl of kindness, power and a sense of humor." Damn right.6. Talk before action. Most conflicts in the epic are solved through talking them out. When Mbombe is bullied for her too-long pregnancy, the elders gather the community and explain to them how their words hurt her, in simple terms so they can understand. The epic says "Even those who spoke ill of Mbombe did not quite hate her, though they may have said some things out of jealousy." When Mbombo's husband is killed by the rival Sau-Sau (instigated by evil spirits), she is the first one to stand up and say the Mongo should not take revenge, because violence does not bring a solution. She only starts grieving after she makes sure no one goes off to avenge her husband.7. The miraculous birth of Lianja: Mbombe, after years of pregnancy, becomes a sort of All-Mother: She gives birth to insects, birds, animals, and an entire race of people, before at last her twins are born, fully grown and ready for action. One of the small details I really liked is that Mbombe approaches her children with caution: They might be hers, but they have just been born, and she does not know what they are like, or how they think. They are, essentially, grown-up strangers to her.8. The tortoises. Tortoises play important roles in the epic. My favorite part is when Mbombe lies to Lianja, telling him his father had died when a tree fell on him (she doesn't want him to go on a revenge quest). Lianja sends the tortoises to investigate. Tortoises stage a re-enactment of the accident to see if a tortoise can get away from a falling tree. When they succeed, they report back to Lianja that his father could not have died that way. CSI: Tortoise. (They also say "trees hate to drink human blood.")9. Minimum casualties. After the epic final battle, and killing the evil chief-spirit that ruled the Sau-Sau, Lianja brings all his dead warriors and his enemies back to life to start a new nation together. They cut down the tree that started the war, and plant a tree of peace in its place. Lianja then sets out to lead his people to a Promised Land, and many other groups join them on the way. When they are attacked and they have to fight. Lianja always brings back the dead from both sides.10. One of the beautiful parts of the journey is the time the traveling nation takes refuge in the branches of a baobab tree from a group of evil ogres. The tree protects them, and in exchange they heal the tree when the ogres try to cut it down. Powerful image.…