Moral Lessons in African Folktales (Family ed.)

This book challenges us to take a cursory glance at our contemporary world, where modern man’s scientific and technological ingenuity has led him to soar thorough the galaxy and made the heavens part of his domain; and contrast that with his level of morality today. Open any newspaper or listen to the radio and television news and you can’t help but lament on the appalling moral depravity and obscene behavior of our contemporary man. If you cast a glance around, you will see abhorrent and appalling moral depravity lurking in our faces.

With this intractable moral depravity on the ascendancy, the author nostalgically reminiscences the upright morality of the good old days, and admonishes us to heed Plato’s philosophical advice: ‘now since men are by nature acquisitive, jealous, combative, and erotic, how shall we persuade them to behave themselves? By the policeman’s omnipresent club? {now, AK 47}. It is a brutal method, costly and irritating. There is a better way, and this is by lending to the moral requirements of the community.’

Throughout this book the author emphasizes the significance of proper moral education in shaping the character of children, youngsters and even adults; because as he reminds us: ‘morals are the rules by which society exhorts its members and associations to behavior consistent with its order, security and growth’ {Will & Ariel Durant}.

The author noted that in the traditional African societies, the wise elders, like the ancient Greek philosophers, strongly emphasized the teachability of moral values and therefore deliberately inculcated these values into their youngsters, so much that their societies did not degenerate into what Ariel & Will Durant described in 1500 Europe: “ the students are refractory and insolent in the extreme…in most university towns the citizens hesitated to go out at night for fear of the students, who on some occasions attacked them with open knives. As for adults, the preachers described them as quarrelsome, hypocrites, gluttons, drunkards and adulterers………. Vice of all sorts is now so common that it is committed without shame, nay, people even boast of it in sodomitish fashion; the coarsest, the most indecent sins have become virtues.”

The author advises that in our contemporary era, we owe it to ourselves, our children, our great grandchildren and our beautiful world to continue to teach and accelerate the level of moral education into our youngsters through community groups, religious and secular instructions, and various books exhorting moral training.

The stories in this book are some of the folktales filled with moral lessons that have been handed down from many generations to the present in many African countries from Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroons, Liberia, the Gambia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania to Zimbabwe.

The traditional African elders who inhabited an ancient continent brimming with wisdom successfully utilized these folktales to socialize their youngsters to the moral requirements of their society to insure order, security and growth.