Black Folk Tales

This book contains 13 Hausa folktales from Nigeria as retold and also illustrated by Erick Berry, the pen name of Evangel Alenna Champlin who lived in West Africa in the 1920s. While in Africa, she met and married Oswald Best, who was an official in the British Civil Service. They later moved to the United States, and Erick Berry went on to become a well known children's book illustrator as well as an author. Both she and her husband wrote books about Africa; in addition to this book of African folktales, Berry is also the author of Girls in Africa, and she did the illustrations for her husband's book, Garram the Hunter: A Boy of the Hill Tribes, a novel also set in Nigeria. - Summary by Laura Gibbs