Where Animals Talk

West African animal tales as they were told on the Ogowe and the Benito: the leopard outwitted, the tortoise winning by patience, the antelope who marries badly, each with the moral its tellers gave it. Robert Hamill Nassau spent forty years in Gabon and Corisco and took the stories down from the narrators in their own languages. He prints the repetitions and the songs instead of tidying them away, and notes where a story changed between villages. Sixty plates from Fra Angelico to Goya, ranging across the Nativity, the funeral of St. Jerome, and portraits, offer a European counterpoint to the African tales.