African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 293
Seitel, Peter. 1980. See So That We May See: Performances and Interpretations of Traditional
Tales from Tanzania. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press.
Stoeltje, Beverly J. 1988. Introduction: Feminist Perspectives. Journal of Folklore Research 25, no.
3.
——. 1995. Asante Queen Mothers: A Study in Identity of… In Gender and Identity in Africa, eds.
Meththild Reh and Gudrun Ludwar-Ene. Munster: Lit.
——. 1997. Asante Queen Mothers. Queens, Queen Mothers, Priestesses, and Power, ed. Flora
Kaplan. New York: The New York Academy of Sciences.
Stoeltje, Beverly J., Christie Fox, and Stephen Olbrys. 1999. The Self in Fieldwork. Journal of
American Folklore 112, no. 444: 158–82.
Yankah, Kwesi. 1995. Speaking for the Chief: Okyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
ERNEST OKELLO OGWANG
BEVERLY J. STOELTJE
See also Queen Mothers; Women’s Folklore
GERMAN STUDY OF AFRICAN
FOLKLORE
A journal or a series of monographs specializing in African folklore does not exist in the
German-speaking countries. Materials on this topic have mostly been published in
periodicals of African linguistics, oriental studies, and ethnology (cultural anthropology),
such as Afrika und Übersee, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft,
Zeitschrift für Ethnologic, and Paideuma, or in separate works and in chapters of books.
A lexicon for research on folktales, narratives, and oral traditions in Africa, initiated by
Wilhelm Möhlig and Herrmann Jungraithmayr was, however, completed in 1998. A
number of entries relevant to the African continent are also to be found in the
Encyklopädie des Märchens (Encyclopedia of Folktales), which is being edited in a
special program at Göttingen University. A limited number of articles on African oral
literature are published in the periodical Fabula: Zeitschrift für Erzählforschung (Fabula:
Journal of Research on Folktales).
History of Research
Materials to some extent relevant to folklore are already to be found in the works of
missionaries and travelers of the mid-nineteenth century, for example, Johann L. Krapf,
Heinrich Barth, and Gustav Nachtigal. However, a scholarly focus on African folklore
does not predate the late nineteenth century, and it can roughly be divided into three
major periods: (1) from about 1900 to the end of World War I, when Germany was a
colonial power, (2) the period to the end of World War II, and (3) the phase from the
1950s to the present. Due to the considerable number of noteworthy works on folklore