The Cow-Tail Switch and Other West African Stories

by Harold Courlander, George Herzog, Madye Lee Chastain (Illustrator)

The stories of West Africa are about men and animals, about kings, warriors, and hunters. They tell about clever people and stupid people, about good ones and bad ones, about how things and animals got to be how they are. Some stories in this book will make you think. Some will make you laugh. All of them are retold with folk spirit full of generosity and vitality.


Africa is many things --
Cow-tail switch --
Kaddo's wall --
Talk --
One you don't see coming --
Kassa, the strong one --
Anansi's fishing expedition --
Younde goes to town --
Singing tortoise --
Time --
Messenger to Maftam --
Guinea fowl and rabbit get justice --
Anansi and Nothing go hunting for wives --
How Soko brought debt to Ashanti --
Hungry spider and the turtle --
Throw mountains --
Ansige Karamba, the glutton --
Don't shake hands with everybody

Genres: Africa, Short Stories, Childrens, Young Adult, Fiction, Middle Grade, Mythology

143 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1947

Reviews

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for Newbery, would not have picked it up otherwise, would have missed a fun & enlightening read.

Concise, a fast and enjoyable read, with lovely pictures. The notes and the vibe make it feel authentic and respectful, and I have seen some of the stories in more modern books, so I trust this as appropriate. (re' another review: The K-word just shows up in the notes as an alternate term for the 'corn' in the story, so I see that as no problem.)

I will keep and reread this book. I would love to teach it in conjunction with a collection of Aesop's fables, probably to children age 8-10.

I wonder if Sansa memory chips were named after the WA'n musical instrument?

[Doria · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent collection of West African folk tales, told in spare but clear prose, eminently readable and tellable, and appropriate for a wide range of ages, child to adult. This edition is notable also for its excellent notes and useful pronunciation guide, which is an invaluable guide for anyone who is interested in reading the stories aloud and/or telling them with any kind of authenticity and awareness of their socio-cultural provenance. Courlander's collections remain some of the finest to be found, and this one provides a terrific selection of Ghanian and Ashanti tales, both for those who are new to this narrative tradition and those who are familiar with its many satisfying delights.

[SmokingMirror · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a thrilling find from the thrift shop, but it didn't satisfy me the way King's Drum and Other African Stories did. The Anansi stories were the type in which the trickster gets tricked, and overall too many of the stories were about people being foolish, and instead of learning something wise, they simply were shamed into realizing they were foolish.

The edition I read is a recent one, but the book was originally published in 1947, and was awarded the Newbery honor for that year. It does, however, contain some assertions that generalize about African people in a way that is offensive now. The K-word also appears.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars. This is a collection of tales - I hesitate to use the term "fables" since there is usually no clear lesson - that the anthropologist/folklorist collected in West Africa. All in all it was a quick, pleasant read. I think my favorite was the story of the man and the musical tortoise. Courlander was a Caucasian novelist and scholar who specialized in Haitian/Caribbean, African, and Native American cultures and story telling, but he's most "famous" as the author of "The African" - the novel that Alex Haley copied extensively for his own novel "Roots". I read this for my 2019 Reading Challenge and my Newbery Challenge (Honor Book, 1948).

[Amber Scaife · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of traditional stories from West African. Fun and interesting - I always love a good Anansi story and he's nicely represented here.

[Mckinley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Could have been jazzed up a little but I liked the stories reminded me of reading the Grimm's fairy tales in German before they were jazzed up.

[Christina Packard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting tales to learn from.

[Cheryl Gatling]

My husband says he was introduced to this book as a child, when the school librarian read to them from it. Years later he read some of these stories to our own children. Last week he got the book out of the library so he could read stories to his mother who has dementia. I was impressed with how they seemed to reach her when not much does. She laughed and snorted at the appropriate times. I think it says something about the primal nature of these stories that they can speak to the very young and the very old.

Among the most memorable were the title story, “The Cow-Tail Switch” which has a dead man brought back to life, which is treated more or less as a commonplace event, and his many sons argue amongst themselves who deserves the most credit for that. Also “Talk” which is just a silly story where a yam starts to talk to the man digging it out of the ground, and then all the things start talking, and chaos ensues. There’s a story whose name I don’t remember that was a favorite of my daughter’s. A man travels to a place where he doesn’t speak the language. He asks people about the remarkable things he sees. All the people tell him “Minu” which means, “I don’t know,” but he thinks it is the name of a person.

A favorite of mine was “Kaddo’s Wall,” where a rich man gets his comeuppance for having been greedy and selfish. I also liked a strange story where some hunters decide to kill the “monster” Sleep, because it steals productive hours from people, but they can’t catch it. And it is true, that you can never see the moment that sleep catches up with you.

Many of the stories are silly, and entertaining. Many of them have lessons, and the number one lesson is, like Kaddo’s Wall, that it is wrong to be selfish, and good to be generous, which is a wonderful lesson, and still needed today as much as ever, and was a reason not just to enjoy these stories, but to love them.

[Mona Ammon · Rating 3 out of 5]

TITLE: The Cow-Tail Switch: And Other West African Stories
WHY I CHOSE THIS BOOK: It is a Newbery Honor Books; and it met my reading challenge criteria being connected to the book before it, The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child, being same format, short stories
REVIEW: Overall interesting stories. Although I liked some better than others. My two favorite were: the one about the guy who tricked his neighbor into doing all the work. Sounds horrible but it was cool. The neighbor is one who always tried to trick others trying to get something for nothing. So it was fun to see the tables turned on him. The other one I really liked was about a guy who was known for his honesty. This enraged a chief who wanted to prove no one could not lie all the time. His plan, which was kind of dumb, was to tell the honest guy to relay a message to the chief's wife, but then the chief wouldn't do the things the message said he would. I always thought about being untruthful was about intentionally telling a falsehood, not passing on misleading information that you could not know was not accurate. But anyhow .... how the honest man kept his reputation without realizing it was in jeopardy or that he was doing anything clever... was wonderful to behold. The back stories on the stories at the end of the book was very instructive.

[Melinda · Rating 3 out of 5]

A folktale with a poignant moral at its end. Ogaloussa leaves for the hunt, but does not return. His four sons and wife forget about him until a fifth son is born. When this son, Puli, utters his first words, he asks, "Where is my father?" This prompts the four older sons to wonder this same question and set out in search for him. When they come upon the remains of his bones, the four sons realize that they each contain the ability to bring him back to life. One son puts his bones together, another covers his bones with flesh. The third son puts blood in his veins and the fourth son adds breath to his body. I liked the addition of these supernatural qualities to the tale.
Upon returning home, Ogaloussa shaves his head and with the hair, creates an exquisite cow-tail switch (it was not until I read this story that I discovered what this actually was.) During a village celebration held in Ogaloussa's honor, his four older sons vie to own the switch. Despite what each son performed to return life to Ogaloussa, it was only the youngest son who remembered him, thus, earning the switch. The moral of this tale is that a man is not really dead until he is forgotten.

[Bish Denham · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a great collection of West African folk tales. I was particularly thrilled to read the stories of Anansi as I grew up hearing stories about him in the Caribbean and have written a collection of ten retold Jamaican stories, called Anansi and Company.

In reading these stories I got a clear feel for how the culture of the West Africa trickled into the Caribbean, how it took root, changed and adapted. It was like reading "origin" stories. Some were odd (by Western standards) some were humorous, some serious. But at their heart I could relate to them because of where I was raised.

Perhaps not everyone will appreciate them but that may be because they did not grow up, as I did a white child within a black majority, in a culture that was closer to it's African roots than in other parts of United States.

Wonderful!

[Carol]

I don’t quite know how to rate this. Many of these stories are framed as myths, but plenty of others are more like tall tales. They’re very stripped down and I wish they had been a little more fleshed out — but I don’t know enough to know if that wish is at odds with how these stories are properly told.

I do appreciate this for its basic introduction to some common West African folklore stories and tropes — I think these stories are starting to gain wider incorporation into the greater body of folklore-inspired novels, and it’s worthwhile to understand the tradition that those authors are working out of.

Overall, since I don’t know what I don’t know, I’m forbearing from rating this book numerically, but would say it might be worth a look if you don’t have access to other resources.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book as a recommendation from a former student, but it didn’t have the same positive effect for me after completing the book as it did on her. The tales/fables are quite different than many of the ones I have read from Native American cultures in both structure and substance. Besides the few tales with the famous trickster, Ananasi, most of these stories were dry, didn’t have a clear message, and did not give me the detailed aspects of the many different African tribal cultures that I was hoping for from the book. Easy read for middle school aged kids, but might not impress upon them what African traditions have to offer.

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh, cultural appropriation. These stories are well-written and engaging, and do a good job of sharing another culture in an understandable and enjoyable way. They seem to have been connected in a respectful way. And since it was published in 1947, the chances of these stories getting the attention they did if they were written by someone other than the white man who wrote them down is unlikely. But these are all described as "adapted from," so who knows what has changed from the original telling, and it was white men who profited, not those who have handed down the stories for generations.

[Molly · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of stories from West Africa. The tales are mostly amusing with some being very odd. I like that there are notes at the end explaining the origin of each tale and a glossary of African words found in them. Overall, I enjoyed this collection.

[Charlie Moses · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting collection of folk tales from Western Africa.

[Cate · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars if I could. It wasn't bad, wasn't great. Mostly just meh.

[Bat713 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice anthology of West African stories. There are notes in the back explaining each tale. Each tale is a nice story piece from a different tribe. Very similar to Uncle Remus in places,

[Anne Jennen · Rating 2 out of 5]

West African folk tales

[Ava · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was good.

[Desiree']

1948 Newbery honor book

[❄Elsa Frost❄ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fun read--and was pretty humorous for a folklore collection! Usually the folklore collections I come across have some really depressing stories and the "moral" isn't clear. But this was a delightful read, and displayed its moralistic endings well! My favorite in this collection is "Talk," for sure. It's hilarious and entertaining!

I ended up coming across this book because of the novel Redemption in Indigo, which is a retelling of "Ansige Karamba, the Glutton." (To make it clear, "Ansige Karamba, the Glutton" is an original folklore tale and is included in this collection of African folklore.) I'm glad I came across this collection after reading this wonderful novel, and I definitely recommend this book.

[Brennan Wieland · Rating 3 out of 5]

Out of these stories I only read "Kaddo's Wall".

It was a simple story with an easy to understand moral. Since it was short, it didn't go much into detail about anything. The story did get its point across though, with the moral being about being kind to others and sharing what you have, because you never know when you might need there help.

I enjoyed this story, its interesting and easy to understand. I felt like it could have been longer though and gone into more detail.

[Fadi Baidhani · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is about stories,it is folktails.,the writer of the book is




i choose this book because i wanted to learn about west african stories.i also wanted to learn more about them so i thought they reading about there stories could help me.i liked this book because there are very funny stories.i think the type of reader that would like to read this book is a person who loves to learn about other people or a person who loves stories.

[Bethany Lovhaug]

I read the story "Talk". It was about a man who was picking yams and the yam told him to not dig him up. Soon a bunch of things were talking to this man (cow, palm tree, branch, rock). Because of this he ran. People questioned him, but soon things were talking to them too. Finally the chief stopped them and questioned them. He claimed they were mad, so he sent them back to work. Then his stool talked to him. The end.

[Jacki · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love folktales. They tell so much about the culture that spawned them. In this book, we see the variety of tribal cultures of West Africa. We have a glimpse into their world of language barriers, hunting expositions, social pride, and humor. They are delightful to read and a fantastic learning tool in Language Arts and Social Studies.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of African folk tales including how a frog's hands got flat, a gluttonous man, a story about bulls, a turtle teaching a spider a lesson, how a tribe gets debt, Anansi and a man named "Nothing" getting wives, a singing tortoise, sleep, and talking vegetables. Interesting lessons. I found these to be entertaining; some of them I even laughed out loud.

[Thomas Bell · Rating 2 out of 5]

The stories are definitely off the beaten path and in my opinion quite lame, but they are less stupid than those found in 'Tales from Silver Lands.' One thing I did like was that the author included where and when all the various stories came from.

[Christie Halstead · Rating 3 out of 5]

Easy and fun to read, but being folk tales, most weren't very engaging. I did like Throw Mountains. It was basically a tall tale. The title story was good too. Anansi's Fishing Expedition was good too.

[Laurie D'ghent · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've always liked fables, so this was a fun book to read. It lost a star for pictures inappropriate for children.