A Selection of Nigerian Folktales: Themes and Settings

The Treasury of Nigerian Tales (TNT) series is a quartet of Pan-Nigerian tales edited by the eminent folklorist, writer and historian, Dr Bukar Usman. A Selection of Nigerian Folktales: Themes and Settings, the second of this huge narrative sequence, is unprecedented in many respects. It is the first pan-Nigerian anthology of folktales. Its 700 folktales, taken from all the geo-political zones of the country, made it, at the time of its publication, Nigeria’s largest collection of folk stories.  

In qualitative terms, this book, A Selection of Nigerian Folktales: Themes and Settings, further distinguishes itself from past collections by the canonical and narrative attributes of the selected tales and by the proficient distribution of the tales into 18 typological classes, which are reflective of their themes, settings, and traditional delineations. This display of cultural sensitivity complements the editor’s vision of achieving translational equivalence while retaining, as much as possible, some of the stylistic devices basic to the orality of the original tales. The editor’s detailed introductory essay competently introduces the reader, especially the non-Nigerian reader, to the tales’ cultural essence and nuances.

A Selection of Nigerian Folktales: Themes and Settings monumentally captures the primordial imagination and folk wisdom of Nigeria’s various groups. It is evidently the most important collection of folktales from Nigeria since 1854, the year a potpourri of tales and proverbs from what later became a part of Nigeria was first published by a European missionary. No. of pages: 768.