Custom and myth Book

3 stars. This is a collection of tales - I hesitate to use the term "fables" since there is usually no clear lesson - that the anthropologist/folklorist collected in West Africa. All in all it was a quick, pleasant read. I think my favorite was the story of the man and the musical tortoise. Courlander was a Caucasian novelist and scholar who specialized in Haitian/Caribbean, African, and Native American cultures and story telling, but he's most "famous" as the author of "The African" - the novel that Alex Haley copied extensively for his own novel "Roots". I read this for my 2019 Reading Challenge and my Newbery Challenge (Honor Book, 1948).