The Black Cloth
The Black Cloth (French title Le Pagne Noir: Contes Africains) is a collection of African folk tales by Bernard Binlin Dadié. It was first published in 1955, in French; an English translation by Karen C. Hatch was published in 1987. The stories were published at a time when many African writers (including Dadié and such authors as Birago Diop) were creating a new outlet for traditional African art, converting oral literature into written literature, and adapting writing to convey the tradition of orality. Background The 1940s and 1950s saw a great wave of African prose literature, a time that gave rise to "the African novel". At the same time, writers sought to express the more traditional oral prose in print, and to somehow make up for the loss of "an atmosphere warmed with music, handclapping, laughter, dancing, and singing". Prose authors sought ways of "embellishing and enriching" their narratives. Senegalese author Birago Diop, who published Tales of Amadou Koumba in 1947, was one of the forerunners in this genre. Diop, however, rendered tales by one particular griot; Dadié chose to dispense with some aspects of tradition—he did away with some of the traditional structural devices (such as the lengthy introductory