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Editor's Note: This book is part of a series of children's books written 100 years ago.  That said, this is a book that is presented here as part of the historical record, not as a recommended children's book.  It is an important read to understand all of our past and current bias against cultures different from ourselves.  It also describes elephant and gorilla hunts that most find abhorrent today. Still, an important read, with all of this in mind....

 

Our Little African Cousin

By

Mary Hazelton Wade  

Illustrated by

L. J. Bridgman

 

Boston:
L. C. Page & Company
Publishers

Copyright, 1902
By L. C. PAGE & COMPANY (INCORPORATED)
 

Published, June, 1902
Fifth Impression, March, 1907
Colonial Press
Electrotyped and Printed by
C H. Simonds & Co.
Boston, Mass., U. S. A.


MPUKE

Contents 

I. THE BOY

II. BLACKSMITH AND DENTIST

III. WORK AND PLAY

IV. THE ELEPHANT HUNT

V. SONG AND STORY

VI. THE BATTLE FEAST

VII. THE AFRICAN MEDICINE-MAN

VIII. THE GORILLA

IX. THE GORILLA HUNT

X. THE RACE OF DWARFS

XI. HOW THE DWARFS LIVE

XII. SPIDERS

XIII. LAND-CRABS

 

List of Illustrations 

MPUKE

THE VILLAGE

HUNTING ELEPHANTS

“HIS FOLLOWERS LOOK UPON HIM WITH THE GREATEST ADMIRATION” 

“HE SAT DOWN ON HIS HAUNCHES”

“AFTERWARD THE WHOLE ROOF IS COVERED WITH LEAVES”

Preface

FAR away, toward the other side of the round earth, far to the east and south of America, lies the great continent of Africa. There live many people strange to us, with their black skins, kinky, woolly hair, flat noses, and thick lips. These black people we call Africans or negroes, and it is a little child among them that we are going to visit by and by.

Different as these African people of the negro race are from us, who belong to the white race, they yet belong to the same great family, as we say. Like all the peoples of all the races of men on this big earth, they be­long to the human family, or the family of mankind. So we shall call the little black child whom we are going to visit our little black cousin.

We need not go so far away from home, indeed, to see little black children with woolly, kinky hair and flat noses like the little Afri­can. In the sunny South of our own land are many negro children as like the little negro cousin in Africa as one pea is like another. Years and years ago slave-ships brought to this country negroes, stolen from their own African homes to be the slaves and servants of the white people here. Now the children and great-grandchildren of these negro slaves are growing up in our country, knowing no other home than this. The home of the great negro race, however, is the wide continent of Africa, with its deserts of hot sand, its parching winds and its tropical forests.

So, as we wish to see a little African cousin in his own African home, we are going to visit little black Mpuke instead of little black Topsy or Sammy, whom we might see nearer by.

It's away, then, to Africa!


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