Ashanti to Zulu: African Traditions

Margaret Musgrove, publishing her first book, built an alphabet around twenty six African peoples, one for each letter from A to Z, opening with the Ashanti of Ghana and closing with the Zulu of southern Africa, and moving through the Baule, Chagga, Dogon, Ewe, Fanti, Hausa, Masai, Sotho, Tuareg, Yoruba and a dozen more along the way. Each entry pairs a full page illustration with a short paragraph naming one specific custom or belief distinct to that people, a particular kind of dance, a marriage tradition, a form of dress or craft, rather than treating the whole continent as a single undifferentiated culture the way many earlier children's books about Africa had done. The book makes no attempt at a single narrative thread; it reads instead as a gallery, one dignified formal portrait after another, its structure asking a young reader to slow down and take each people on its own terms rather than race through toward an ending.

Leo and Diane Dillon, working in the same layered, richly detailed style that had already won them the medal the year before, paint each people's representative figures in careful, individualized dress and expression, avoiding a repeated stock face across all twenty six entries. It suits children around six to ten and works better as a book to dip into a few letters at a time than to read start to finish in one sitting, since its real reward is in how differently each spread treats its own subject rather than in any accumulating story.