Where Animals Talk; West African Folk Lore Tales/Part 3
Fang Tribe
FOREWORD
In this Part, are tales told me by an old Batanga man, of the Banâkâ Tribe. He could not give me the time to come to my room, and tell me, sentence by sentence, as the other two narrators had done. But, having some education, he wrote the stories in his native language, and, at my leisure, I translated them. The translation is literal, except when the short phrases, clear to native thought, would have been an imperfect sentence to an English eye; or, where an allusion to well-known native customs, perfectly obvious to a native, would have been obscure to most readers. In such cases, I have sacrificed to clearness the concise native idiom. To a student of higher criticism, the sentences which are mine will reveal themselves. In my literal translations of the native, I have used very simple short words, mostly of Anglo-Saxon origin. In my own paraphrases, words of Latin origin have appeared.
Some tales of this Part are of Fang origin from the Bulu Tribe of the interior. My Batanga friend told me he heard them from Bulu people visiting at the Coast, and he wrote them as they were then current on the coast. After I had translated them from his Banâkâ vernacular, I found, and pointed out to him, that some of them had already been printed in Fang, as specimens of Bulu idioms, in a published Grammar of the Bulu-Fang Language ("Handbook of Bulu, by G. S. Bates"). This explanation is proper to be made, that while, unknown to me, Mr. Bates was collecting direct from his Bulu informants in the interior, my Batanga friend had collected for me, from his Bulu visitors; and the tales were in my possession, translated into English by myself, before I saw Mr. Bates' book, or even knew of its existence.