Sunjata: Gambian Versions of the Mande Epic by Bamba Suso and Banna Kanute (Penguin Classics)

Rating:
Summary: The real Africa exposed
Review: I have read many books that show africa in a negative light and say that Africa people have never accoplished anything. The books are still coming out from the Bell Curve to J.Phillipe Rushton. I feel all these people have a biased eurocentric view of the world and are writting these just because of politicks. I read Sunjata and it really changed my perpective of Africa history. Sunjata is worth a read for anybody uif they want to know the truth about Africa and not the biased perceptions we have of the so called dark continent.

Rating:
Summary: It's a cultural problem, I think.
Review: Naturally, I was interested in reading African epic--and in a Penguin Classic, no less (the answer to the inevitable question asked by Penguin obsessives is: green. Just like the Asian ones. BO-ring). And this slim tome was certainly interesting from an anthropological point of view; however, it didn't work quite as well for me as entertainment.

I think the major problem here is that the storytellers who narrated these versions of the story are--naturally--presupposing a certain level of basic familiarity with the story, and so they have no compunctions about downplaying those aspects of it that are less interesting to them personally while highlighting those that they like. This makes for a disorienting experience to someone--like me--who knew nothing about the original legend. The inclusion of two different versions is no doubt, in part, an effort to remedy the problem, but it doesn't really work--the two stories are very different in tone, yes, but that doesn't mean you can just sort of combine them, as it were, to get the whole story.

The biggest blame here, however, should go to the woefully inadequate scholarly apparatus. The introduction is short and makes only a token attempt at providing the necessary background information, and annotations--even of things that are totally incomprehensible to the foreign observer--are conspicuously absent.

This book might be of interest to established students of Sunjata looking for different versions to study, but for beginners, it ain't much. An underwhelming job from Penguin, I'm afraid.