Ellis 1894 as a Source for Yorùbá Folktale
What A. B. Ellis's 1894 collection contains, why its tale texts are usable, and exactly where its colonial framing has to be refused.
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Di tale for short
Ten tales in this section come from one book: A. B. Ellis, The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa, published in London in 1894. It is the earliest substantial published collection of Yorùbá folktale narrative that this compiler was able to obtain in full, it is in the public domain, and it prints its tales at narrative length rather than in summary. It is also a book written by a serving British colonial military officer whose closing chapter ranks West African peoples in stages of evolutionary progress. Both things are true and this file sets out how the corpus handles that.
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Di different versions
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