South Africa has a wealth of children’s books featuring talking animals. These come from two sources: the traditional folktales of the indigenous peoples, and original stories composed by white writers.

In the second half of the nineteenth centuries a few white scholars and academics collected traditional stories from the indigenous people of the country. These have formed the basis of many retellings for children ever since. Throughout the twentieth century white writers continued to collect stories and publish them in translations for children. Latterly black writers have also made their contribution in English, drawing on their knowledge of their own folklore, and a few texts in African languages have also appeared. An important collection of the tales of the so-called Cape Malay people of the Cape, the descendants of enslaved people, was published in Afrikaans by a white writer and subsequently translated into English (Du Plessis 1945).

South Africans are proud that our folktales form a major genre of our children’s literature. At least 150 such books have been published, mainly in English and Afrikaans. In the first half of the twentieth century they far outnumbered similar books of Australian and Canadian indigenous folktales.

It is appropriate that the earliest books retold the stories of the San and Khoi people, who preceded the Africans in South African. The first children’s book of animal folktales, Old Hendrik’s Tales (Vaughan 1904) consisted of stories about animal tricksters told by the Khoi people. The animal stories of the San, by contrast, reflect their cosmology. Their animal characters are "the people of the early race", whose actions explain the nature of the universe. One of these ancestors is the Mantis, their trickster deity.

Many African stories feature animals. These are the ones that have traditionally been the favourites for telling to children, and they form the majority in children’s books. The most common themes are tricksters, pourquoi (aetiological) stories, moral fables and stories about animals and birds that converse with human beings, often as their helpers.

It must be acknowledged that the conversion of an oral performance to a written story in another language entails a radical distortion and reduction of the original. A description of how Dorothea Bleek first heard the stories of the San brings home how different her experience was to that of a child reading a translation. Beginning in 1870 her father and aunt brought San teachers to live with them in Cape Town so that their stories and lore could be transcribed. When Dorothea grew up, she continued to edit and publish the material which they had collected (e.g. Bleek 1923). Lewis-Williams (2000:26) describes her childhood experience:

/Han…kass’o was gentle and kindly. The colonial children gave him much pleasure, and he played with them and made them birthday presents, such as a set of diminutive bows and arrows or a !goin!goin, a bullroarer that /Xam people used as an instrument to make the bees swarm. The children loved to hear him tell his stories. They could not understand the /Xam language, so a member of the Bleek family gave them an outline before the performance began. Then, enthralled, they watched his "eloquent gestures", feeling rather knowing what was happening.

While acknowledging that written translations are inadequate, we can still appreciate, first of all, that our oral heritage has not been entirely lost, and secondly, that we have something unique on paper for our children to enjoy.

In rendering the oral stories in written translation, white South African writers have used various models. English-speakers have tended to make them conform to an English model of fairy story, whereas Afrikaans writers, understandably, have favoured the Germanic tradition. The influence of ethnographic studies can also be seen, for example in a book which attempts to bring together a number of disparate stories to form a "creation cycle" (Seed 1974).

Since the first decade of the twentieth century, white writers have also written their own animal stories. South Africa’s best-known children’s story of all time is Jock of the Bushveld by Percy FitzPatrick (1907), which is based on the author’s adventures with his dog when he was a pioneer in the wild interior. It is similar to its contemporaries, the great North American animal stories of Jack London, Charles Roberts and Ernest Thompson Seton, but we do not know whether FitzPatrick was familiar with their work. The dog in his story is not anthropomorphised. Jock of the Bushveld had no parallels in South Africa and only a few imitations.

A very popular genre has been the talking-animal story. Two of the earliest, and still best known, were from the pen of a frequent visitor to these shores, Rudyard Kipling, and appeared in his Just So Stories (1902).

In the first half of the twentieth century, a few writers tried, not very successfully, to imitate local African folktales. For example, "The Gift Bird" by Minnie Martin (1942:73-83) features a common character in African stories, the milk bird, but it is very European in the way she spells out the moral of the story and gives it a sentimental ending:

But the gifts of contentment and unselfish love which she had taught the little family in the old Hammerkop’s nest, remained with them until the dark shadows came to carry them over the Great Kloof, into the beautiful Valley where there is never any pain nor hunger and where all is love and gladness for ever. (1942:83)

By contrast, at the same time the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Harris had an amazingly deep influence, even down to the transplanting of his African-American dialect to this country. Reading those stories today, one cannot help being struck by the irony that colonial writers should have relied on the American versions of stories that had originated in Africa. To a lesser extent, the stories of Aesop, which also originated in this continent, also returned to provide a model.

Other influential models were the animal and toy fantasies of Kenneth Grahame, Beatrix Potter, Alison Uttley, J.M. Barrie, A.A. Milne, and Rudyard Kipling, and the stories of Jean de Brunhoff, Felix Salten and Père Castor.

The influence of the foreign models was obvious in the style of the stories, the frequent appearance of European fairies, the alien language, terminology and elements such as a "village green", and even the direct borrowing of names such as Cottontail (from Potter) and Rikki from (Kipling).

Foklktales, imitation folktales and literary animal stories lie at the heart of efforts by local white writers to develop a national children’s literature. In their original stories they attempted to create an authentic South African flavour by introducing, along with the incongruous exotic elements, typical local animals, insects, birds, landscapes and prevailing national concerns such as drought and veld fires (though not race), and they made deliberate attempts to use terminology and names from local languages (though they often got them wrong).

Mostly the authors simply wrote to entertain, exploiting the oddities of African creatures, but sometimes their aim was to be instructive, such as when Cecil Shirley explains the behaviour of a bird, Pilot Officer Drongo (1943:9):

Mr Drongo is both aeroplane and pilot in one... Drongo’s tactics in attacking, say, an Eagle, are similar to those of a fighter pilot attacking a big bomber.

The exotic elements petered out by the end of World War II, and since then truly indigenous literature of quality has flourished. There have been some notable works written in the style and tradition of African and San folktales, and also some extremely well-written original animal stories, especially those of Cicely van Straten (e.g. Huberta’s Journey 1988) and Marguerite Poland (e.g. Sambane’s Dream 1989).

A particularly local feel is created in stories in which the anthropomorphism serves to give human motives to the otherwise instinctive natural behaviour of wild creatures, as in "Grys-veer, the Secretary-bird of Witsands" (Lewis 1939:45):

In his rage, Grys-veer ran swiftly over the ground and even rose into the air and flew a short distance. After his flight he felt calmer and, coming down to earth, he continued his stately walk.

The tradition of comedy in talking-animal stories for young children continues, a fine example being Lesley Beake’s story (1989) about the very South African hare, Harry, who stows away on a plane to Paris but finds foreign life does not suit him.

Literary stories and translated folktales continue to be published in South Africa, indicating that they still find a willing audience among children who understand English.

Beake, Lesley. 1989. Harry Went to Paris. London: Puffin.

Bleek, D.F. 1923. The Mantis and his Friends. Cape Town: Maskew Miller.

Du Plessis, I.D. 1945. Tales from the Malay Quarter. Cape Town: Maskew Miller.

FitzPatrick, Percy. 1907. Jock of the Bushveld. London: Longman.

Kipling, Rudyard. 1902. Just So Stories. Hammersmith: Armada, 1991.

Lewis, Esme. 1939. Nunku the Porcupine and Other Stories. Cape Town: Unie-Volkspers.

Lewis-Williams, J.D. 2000. Stories That Float from Afar. Cape Town: David Philip, and College Station: Texas A&M University Press.

Martin, Minnie. 1942. Tales of the African Wilds. Durban: Knox.

Poland, Marguerite. 1989. Sambane’s Dream and Other Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Seed, Jenny. 1974. The Bushman’s Dream: African Tales of the Creation. London: Hamish Hamilton.

Shirley, Cecil. 1943. Little Veld Folk. Cape Town: CNA.

Van Straten, Cicely. 1988. Huberta’s Journey. Cape Town: Tafelberg.

Vaughan, A.O. 1904. Old Hendrik’s Tales. London: Longman.

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