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Specimens Of African Love, a non-fiction book by Henry Theophilus Finck |
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African Story-Books |
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_ While the main object of this discussion is to show that Africans are incapable of feeling sentimental love, I have taken the greatest pains to discover such traces of more refined feelings as may exist. These one might expect to find particularly in the collections of African tales such as Callaway's _Nursery Tales of the Zulus_, Theal's _Kaffir Folk Lore_, the _Folk Lore of Angola_, Stanley's _My Dark Companions and their Stories_, Koelle's _African Native Literature_, Jacottet's _Contes Populaires des Bassoutos_. All that I have been able to find in these books and others bearing on our topic is included in this chapter--and how very little it is! Love, even of the sensual kind, seems to be almost entirely ignored by these dusky story-tellers in favor of a hundred other subjects--in striking contrast to our own literature, in which love is the ruling passion. I have before me another interesting collection of South and North African stories and fables--Bleek's _Reinecke Fuchs in Afrika_. Its author had unusual facilities for collecting them, having been curator of Sir G. Grey's library at Cape Town, which includes a fine collection of African manuscripts. In Bleek's book there are forty-four South African, chiefly Hottentot, fables and tales, and thirty-nine relating to North Africans. Yet among these eighty-three tales there are only three that come under the head of love-stories. As they take up eight pages, I can give only a condensed version of them, taking care, however, to omit no essential feature.[147]
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