SOURCE: A review of Hare and Hornbill, in World Literature Today, Vol. 53, No. 3, Summer, 1979, p. 550.

In the following review of Hare and Hornbill, Berner states that p'Bitek is uniquely qualified to translate a collection of East African folktales and comments on the tales' themes and subjects.

The ethnographers and missionaries who have produced collections of East African folktales have worked at a disadvantage because of their imperfect understanding of languages, narrative conventions and cultural contexts. Inevitably they have produced collections flawed by artificial texts and extraneous elements. As p'Bitek explains in his introductory note, this oral literature derives from the close relation of the storyteller and "a live, responsive audience, taking up the chorus, laughing and enjoying the jokes." p'Bitek is particularly qualified to deal with these tales; he has already produced a collection of renderings of Acoli oral verse [The Horn of My Love]; and his own...