This collection of folk tales is made available with two objectives in mind.

        The primary goal is to increase interest in Liberia’s storehouse of oral literature which, although undeniably rich, is often overlooked or given short shrift by students of African oral traditions.

        The tales presented here were taken from “Legends of Liberia,” which received limited circulation in its original mimeographed form. Collected by Peter Pinney, a native of New Zealand, they were published by the Government of Liberia, Interior Department, sometime in the 1960s. A second edition,  released by the Society of Liberian Authors in 1973 with few editorial changes, focused renewed and wider attention to these tales.

        It is hoped that this substantially reorganized collection will bring these delightful stories to the eyes, ears and hearts of many more, especially the thousands of Liberian children uprooted and exiled by decades of violence.

        A second purpose is to draw attention to the genres and other patterns that run through these stories. These patterns, which transcend linguistic and even national boundaries, have long been obscured by a tradition among Liberianists that emphasized ethnic differences over commonalities. Following that tradition, each chapter in Pinney’s book consisted of tales drawn from one ethnic group or “tribe.”

        As a supplement to that mode of organized, tales are also arranged on this Website by genres, determined by a combination of literary features, such as tone, characters and perspective of author to audience. The five genres employed here are: Historical Accounts, Why Things Are the Way They Are, Trickster Tales, Fantasy and Wonder Tales, Dilemma Stories, and Morality Tales.

        Although much more research remains to be undertaken, two patterns emerge when these tales are arranged by genre. The first concerns the trans-ethnic spread of these genres. In other words, these tales - or very similar ones - may be found among linguistically and ethnically divergent groups, not only in Liberia, but throughout West Africa and parts of its Diaspora in the New World.

        To cite just one example, the trickster spider is known to the Kpelle as NaaSi and to the Ashanti as well as Jamaicans as Anansi, a similarity that is too close to be coincidental. Such similarities suggest the people of West Africa share certain fundamental cultural elements, rooted perhaps in earlier long-distance networks of communication and trade.

        This anthology also points to an apparent convergence of some themes and genres in these tales with certain underlying cleavages in the societies that produced them, such as between men and women over the sexual division of tasks, between “land-owning” clans and “strangers,” between hunters and other specialists on the one hand and farmers on the other, and between free people and unfree laborers. Tensions between these groups often supply the themes and sub-texts of these tales.

        Although the concerns of women and others occasionally seep through, these tales generally present the perspective of free male specialists who dominated rural Liberian societies. For  example, the various historical accounts often illuminate inadvertently, through their emphatic claims and strategic silences, that rival claims existed to political and economic power.

        While the dilemma tale was much more common among Mande-speakers - the Vai and Kpelle in particular, this association might have been due to a range of existential features of these societies other than the ethnicity of their producers.

        In time, the study of Liberia’s oral traditions might shed some light on local antecedents of various journalistic and oratory practices. It could also help lay the basis for the emergence a truly national literature. At the very least, I hope you find delight in reading and retelling these treasures of the ages.