Vanishing Culture: Preserving African Folktales

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The following interview with African folklore scholars Laura Gibbs and Helen Nde is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.


Selections from Laura Gibbs’ “A Reader’s Guide to African Folktales at the Internet Archive“
Crafting and sharing folktales by word or performance is a long-standing tradition on the African continent. No one owned the stories. They were community treasures passed down through the generations.

Over time, many disappeared. The few stories that were written image masking service down enjoyed a broader audience once published. As those books were harder to find or out of print, digitized versions kept some folktales alive.

Laura Gibbs and Helen Nde are among researchers of African folktales who rely on digital collections to do their work. They maintain that digital preservation is essential for these rare cultural artifacts to remain accessible to the public.

Much of the transmission of African stories through performance has been lost. “That’s a culture that has either completely vanished or is vanishing,” said Nde, who immigrated from Cameroon to the United States.


Helen Nde, author & African folklore scholar
In her forthcoming book on African folklore by Watkins Publishing (March 2025), Nde said 70% of her references were from sources she found through the Internet Archive. The Atlanta-based folklorist uses material either in the public domain or available through controlled digital lending (CDL) for her research. She also turns to the online collection to inform writing for her educational platform, Mythological Africans.

Many books produced on the African continent by smaller publishing houses are now out of print or very expensive. Nde said without access to a library that carries these folktales, they can be forgotten.

“What’s tragic is that quite often those books that are so hard to get are the books that are written by people from within the culture, or African scholars,” Nde said. “They speak the languages and in some cases, remember the traditional ways the stories are told. They understand the stories in ways that people from outside the cultures cannot.”