Tale
The Marriage of Wisdom and Other Tales
Wilton Sankawulo · 1974
Synopsis
Kpelle tales retold in English by a man from Kpelle country, who spent his life putting into writing what was spoken at home. The sources give the title, the date and the genre, and nothing more: neither the number of tales, nor their subject, nor what the one that gives the collection its title says.
Context
The writer of this collection came from the interior of the country and not from the coastal elite, and he rewrote in English what he had heard in Kpelle: these are a writer's versions and not transcriptions, with the choices and losses that this implies. He continued all his life, with novels and other collections, up to a book published after his death. Kpelle is the most widely spoken language of Liberia, and it has almost no written tradition: it is through these retellings in English that an outside reader can approach its store of tales.
Who it is for
Short tales, rewritten in English. They are not literal transcriptions of the Kpelle oral tradition.
Prizes and reception
The collection has been reissued in Liberia and is one of the few books to give Kpelle tales in English, in a country where publishing remains almost non-existent.
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