Reviewed by Gian Claudio Batic, University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’

This collection of folk tales is the natural complement to two preceding works published by the same author in 2004 and 2007: Kabba: A Nilo-Saharan language of the Central African Republic and (with Jean-Pierre Dingatoloum) Kabba-English-French dictionary, respectively, both published by LINCOM Europa.

This book is divided into five parts. The first four sections are devoted to the thirty-four Kabba tales collected by the author. In the first section, the stories are presented in the original language; the three following sections display French, English, and German translations, respectively. The final part of the book is comprised of a collection of eighty-one Kabba proverbs along with translations (in French, English, and German) and an explanatory/interpretative note.

Each tale is introduced by an illustration representing the main characters involved in the story. The name of the storyteller, as well as that of the translator (if any), is given below the title. The transcription of the Kabba version follows the orthography established by the author, with accent marks employed to mark low and high tones.

Rich in formulaic language, which works to establish a special connection between the storyteller and the listener, the thirty-four tales offer an important point of view upon the world, exemplifying human relationships from a culture-oriented perspective. Through metaphorical and symbolic conceptualization, these tales ‘imply acceptable norms of behaviour, cultural values, belief systems and acceptable relationships between people’ (vii).

The folk tales use animals to convey moral, educational, or social messages.. The employment of characters taken from the animal world is a crosslinguistic and well-known feature in African cultures and oral traditions. Common themes in the tales are easy to find, for example the struggle between strong (but naïve) and small (but clever) animals. Hausa oral literature, represented mostly by the tatsuniyoyi, is rich in animal characters depicting human weakness and strength: the tricky spider and the clever cockroach are constantly kept busy by their will to cheat and exploit stronger but ingenuous creatures, similar to the rat in the Kabba tale ‘The lion and the rat’ (19). These stories often involve a certain degree of magic and cruelty, with the explicit aim to warn against antisocial behaviors. It is the case of ‘A mother and her son’, a tale that targets the practice and notion of incest.

This book shows once more the author’s commitment in describing and documenting a minority language. The texts compiled here strengthen M’s previous grammatical and lexical descriptions by offering the scientific community a rich bulk of data.