These stories of the former Slave Coast, Benin today, are paraded before our eyes the life of the peoples of the Gulf of Guinea hundred years, with its strong colors, its drama, its magic and humanity.

This volume brings together some forty folktales from the Gulf of Guinea, what a century ago was known by the name of Slave Coast, then as Dahomey, and today as Benin. Dr. Trautmann, doctor of the French colonial troops, collected during the colonial era, and he did carefully avoiding any personal intervention to avoid altering the character of the stories, away, and, before the true author, who is the community indigenous to the country where harvested documents. Folktales allow us to get a very accurate idea of ​​the mentality of the people who created them. This collection is no exception: in these stories live all human passions, and this is what they have universal, but expressed and embodied by characters and some environments intense and very personal local color. The village, jungle, rivers, wild animals, spirits in constant communication with humans, kings, warriors, wizards, boys and girls, husbands and wives, are the protagonists of these stories we describe a close and yet full of magic, exotic and distant world humanity.