Swahili Tales

Record summary

Edward Steere’s Swahili Tales is a nineteenth-century collection of narratives recorded in Zanzibar, including animal stories, wonder tales, moral episodes, and tales associated with wider Indian Ocean circulation. It is especially useful for studying folklore in a multilingual trading society where African, Arab, Persian, South Asian, and Islamic literary influences could overlap. The collection provides a comparison point for questions about borrowing, localization, and the boundary between oral tale and written story. Individual narratives should be checked in the Swahili originals where available and compared with later regional versions.