Favorite children’s books from “World Africa” – News in France

(…) And it is by responding to this call that listeners and readers allow themselves to be carried away as one embarks “in a canoe, an automobile, a spaceship” towards the journey proposed by the writer Eugène Ebodé: Grandfather Ouidi in the Sahel. The Cameroonian man of letters is in fact presenting at the end of the year a collection of tales of a new genre, where traditional ingredients (stories by an ancestor, meeting under a baobab tree, animals gifted with speech, etc.) mix with others, more surprising and modern (plane to Dubai, checks and bank notes, discussions on human rights, etc.).

The result is a series of nine original tales, offered to the wisdom of readers. Here, there is no moral or formal conclusion: the stories follow one another, amusing, astonishing, such as the one featuring a donkey demanding to be treated with dignity or this other in which a hunter triumphs over a cheetah thanks to the vigilance of a kitten. As for the Sahel, it is the ultimate setting, a space magnified by the storyteller, in an era beyond current times. In short, tales dedicated to the joy of reading and being read, to the pleasure of laughing and sharing.