Retold from: Folk tales of Southern Nigeria

Tales of Southern Nigeria are short, wise stories of West African peoples about why the world is arranged the way it is.

Southern Nigeria lies on the Gulf of Guinea: there are great rivers, mangrove swamps and tropical forests, and dozens of peoples with their own languages live side by side. In their tales animals, the Sun, the Moon and even Water speak, and almost every story explains some wonder.

We retell them from “Folk Stories from Southern Nigeria, West Africa” (1910) by the Briton Elphinstone Dayrell. He served in the region as a district commissioner and wrote down the stories that local people told him. The preface to the collection was written by the famous Scottish collector of fairy tales Andrew Lang.

The site already has the tale “Why Sun and Moon Live in the Sky”, about the hospitable Sun and Moon, who invited their friend Water to visit with all her inhabitants, and she kept on rising and rising.