The Black Cloth
The Black Cloth (French title Le Pagne Noir: Contes Africains) is a collection of African folk tales by Bernard Binlin Dadié. It was first published in 1955, in French; an English translation by Karen C. Hatch was published in 1987. The stories were published at a time when many African writers (including Dadié and such authors as Birago Diop) were creating a new outlet for traditional African art, converting oral literature into written literature, and adapting writing to convey the tradition of orality. Background The 1940s and 1950s saw a great wave of African prose literature, a time that gave rise to "the African novel". At the same time, writers sought to express the more traditional oral prose in print, and to somehow make up for the loss of "an atmosphere warmed with music, handclapping, laughter, dancing, and singing". Prose authors sought ways of "embellishing and enriching" their narratives. Senegalese author Birago Diop, who published Tales of Amadou Koumba in 1947, was one of the forerunners in this genre. Diop, however, rendered tales by one particular griot; Dadié chose to dispense with some aspects of tradition—he did away with some of the traditional structural devices (such as the lengthy introductory and closing formulas), and some of his stories were original creations. Authors who followed Diop and Dadié in that tradition include Hama Tuma. Contents Of the sixteen tales in the collection, three are by Dadié himself: "The Mirror of Dearth", "The Black Cloth", and "The Man Who Wanted to be King". Ten of the stories involve Anansi the spider, the West-African trickster character; these are "generally in a light vein". Two are initiation tales involving orphans who are driven to perform seemingly impossible tasks by their stepmothers. Both orphans are courageous and take up their task willingly, and their stories have happy endings; both "initiation routes start from a known place to an unknown destination from where they return to the known place". The stories Dadié reworked from oral tradition were originally in Anyin, Nzema, "and other vernacular idioms", according to Robert Farris Thompson (who does not, however, note that Dadié invented three of the stories). Table of tales The Mirror of Dearth The Black Cloth The Pitcher Spider's Hump L'Enfant Terrible Spider's Ox Spider and the Tortoise Mother Iguana's Funeral The Pig's Snout The Hunter and the Boa The Sacred Cow The Bat's Relations The Yam Field The Dowry Three of the stories were included in the second edition of the Norton Anthology of World Literature: "The Mirror of Dearth", "The Black Cloth", and "The Hunter and the Boa. They were excised from the third edition. Selections were included in Nommo: African Fiction in French South of the Sahara by John D. Erickson. Allegory and New World connections The title story features a young orphan girl named AÏwa, whose mother has died and whose stepmother sends her on an impossible mission: to wash a black cloth until it is white. The girl, always singing and smiling, succeeds, after she