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From time beyond memory, mankind has resorted to the telling of folktales for relief from the labor and toil of daily life, as a means of imparting a significant portion of cultural tradition and fashioning a moral code, and as a tool for instructing the young and preparing them for adult life. Folktales are expressions of peoples' visions of the world and their sense of self. They tell the story of mankind's struggle in the ebb and flow of the human condition and the inter-relationship of innocence and knowledge, joy and sorrow, hope and despair, life and death.
What Creole says about the blues in James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" applies to folktales as well: "They were not about anything very new.... For while the tale of how we suffer, how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be told. There isn't any other tale to tell" (76). Folktales are not merely works of oral literature, however; they belong in the realm of cultural history as well, and therefore have great potential as instruments for the promotion of crosscultural understanding.
In her introduction to Favorite Folktales From Around the World (1986), Jane Yolen brings out the value of folktales as tools for lowering some of the barriers dividing mankind against itself: "Tales are powerful, they are a journey and a joining. In a tale we meet new places, new peoples, new ideas. And they become our places, our peoples, our ideas" (9). Julius Lester makes a similar point in his foreword to Black Folktales: "Folktales," he suggests, "are stories that give people a way of communicating with each other about each other" (vii).
Benin, formerly Dahomey, has a long and remarkably rich oral tradition going back countless centuries. Beninese folktale literature is a dense conglomeration of places, people, and ideas and it has a great deal to tell the outside world. But its ideas, its people, and its places have remained unknown and its voice inaudible, beyond Benin's borders, to all but a few scholars. Much of the blame for this state of affairs lies with the French colonial system, whose strict assimilationist policies virtually cut the ground from under the feet of the griot, the traditional cultural historian...