Description

With practitioners in the country’s filmic genre (Nollywood) failing to put Africa’s folk narratives on screen through animation and other performance forms for their economic value, the job has fallen on writers to bear the burden of archiving the abundant, rich oral tradition. And the writers are discharging this duty admirably to serve the dual purposes of entertainment and education in sound morals.

Indeed, the writers have continued to march on in helping to retrieve Africa’s threatened oral heritage encapsulated in the folktales. The most recent being Dr. Bukar Usman’s The Bride Without Scars and Other Stories (Klamidas Communications Ltd, Abuja; 2017) under its Klamidas Classic Folktales imprint. In this collection of folktales that will charm both children as well as adults alike, Usman has written 10 folktales that could have been set on any part of Nigeria as human and animal characters cut across regions and geography in their universal application in teaching valuable morals of greed, meekness, goodness, pride, and all the emotions that govern man in his relationship with others in any given environment.

Five of the tales are focused on human beings while the remaining five are based on animals in their world but which have implications for man as the most advanced animal. The title story, ‘The Bride Without Scars’ is the story of how pride goes before a fall and how character should be valued more than physical appearance. A beautiful girl without blemish scorns the many suitors that come for her hand in marriage because they have scars until the snake shows up without scars after borrowing a human form to woo her. She agrees to marry ‘him.’