ABSTRACT
Africa certainly possesses the kind of tales that could equally be termed Marchen – house tales, folktales, traditional narratives, oral tradition, myths – indeed ‘fairy tales-without-fairies’ – many of them with parallels to the fairy tales gathered together in Europe in the nineteenth century. There are narratives structured and controlled, with repetitive episodes like those described by Vladimir Propp or exemplifying the famous Aarne-Thompson themes and motifs. Fables too are represented, under that very label, about characterful animals that recall Aesop, Vishu Sarma and La Fontaine. And many of the early collections, as now too, use words that have long been at least near-synonyms of fairy tale – myths, folk tales, fables. Early but isolated studies of African oral literatures include Jacques-Francois Estienne Roger’s retelling of Wolof fables from Senegal, and some awareness of Arabic fairy-tale material in Northern Africa.
