The African Saga

The method was compilation, not fieldwork: Cendrars had not yet traveled in sub-Saharan Africa, and worked instead from the printed record — the tale-collections ethnographers, colonial officials, and missionaries had been publishing for years — selecting, arranging, and rendering them into a French that kept the spoken shape of the originals. The result introduced a very wide French readership to material most had never encountered as literature rather than anthropological data, and it is that reframing — these are tales, told by tellers, with the timing of performance — that gave the book its long life.

Its influence ran in two directions at once. In Paris it arrived amid the vogue for African sculpture that was reshaping the studios of Cendrars' own friends, and within two years he had drawn on its creation myths for La Création du monde (1923), the Ballets Suédois production whose Milhaud score and Léger designs remain landmarks of the period. Further out, the anthology reached the young writers who would build Négritude in 1930s Paris, for whom a widely circulated French volume of African literature was a fact of consequence. It appeared in Paris in 1921 as Anthologie nègre; English readers have known it since 1927 as The African Saga, and we shelve it under a plain-English title.

Several hundred short pieces grouped by kind: how-the-world-began myths, animal fables with the trickster in his many local names, tales of kings and hunters and clever wives, riddles, proverbs, and songs — gathered from across a continent's traditions and arranged for reading aloud.

Designed to be dipped into, a few tales at a sitting — the form they were told in.