Zanzibar Tales: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Zanzibar Tales, credited to George W. Bateman, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Zanzibar Tales by George W. Bateman. If you have read any accounts of adventure in Africa, you will know that travelers never mention animals of any kind that are gifted with the faculty of speech, or gazelles that are overseers for native princes, or hares that eat flesh. No, indeed; only the native-born know of these; and, judging by the immense and rapid strides civilization is making in those parts, it will not be long before such wonderful specimens of zoölogy will be as extinct as the ichthyosaurus, dinornis, and other poor creatures who never dreamed of the awful names that would be applied to them when they were too long dead to show their resentment. As to the truth of these tales, I can only say that they were told to me, in Zanzibar, by negroes whose ancestors told them to them, who had received them from their ancestors, and so back; so that the praise for their accuracy, or the blame for their falsity, lies with the first ancestor who set them going. You may think uncivilized negroes are pretty ignorant people, but the white man who is supposed to have first told the story of “The House that Jack Built” was a mighty poor genius compared with the unknown originator of “Goso, the Teacher,” who found even inanimate things that were endowed with speech, which the pupils readily understood and were not astonished to hear; while “Puss in Boots” was not one-half so clever as the gazelle that ran things for Haamdaanee. It would be a severe task to rattle off “Goso” as you do “The House that Jack Built.” (Summary by the author)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Zanzibar Tales
• Author credits: George W. Bateman
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 13
• Combined MP3 track duration: 2:41:23

Catalogue topics

• africa
• natives
• animals
• children
• myths
• legends
• Tanzania

Track guide

1. 00 To My Readers — 4:31
2. 01 The Monkey, the Shark, and the Washerman's Donkey — 8:49
3. 02 The Hare and the Lion — 10:10
4. 03 The Lion, the Hyena, and the Rabbit — 5:48
5. 04 The Kites and the Crows — 7:01
6. 05 Goso, the Teacher — 7:27
7. 06 The Ape, the Snake, and the Lion — 11:26
8. 07 Haamdaanee Part 1 — 16:36
9. 08 Haamdaanee Part 2 — 20:05
10. 09 Haamdaanee Part 3 — 13:50
11. 10 Mkaaah Jeechonee, the Boy Hunter — 19:34
12. 11 The Magician and the Sultan's Son — 9:48
13. 12 The Physician's Son and the King of the Snakes — 26:17

Listen to this recording

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.