The Story of Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman

In The Story of Little Black Mingo, the girl protagonist must contend with a “mugger” (a crocodile specific to the Indian subcontinent) that is conspiring to eat her whenever she carries the “chatty” that the “dhobi” uses to the river. And if we were to look at Bannerman’s other works such as The Story of Little Black Mingo (1900), once again, the textual narrative is replete with evidence that this tale is also set in India. If we were to focus simply on the textual narrative of The Story of Little Black Sambo, there is no doubt that Bannerman’s protagonist is an Indian child navigating an Indian landscape. As a wife of an Indian Medical Service officer, Bannerman spent more than thirty years in Madras and made frequent trips to Kodaikanal. In fact, in the French-language edition of Bannerman’s book, Sambo Le Petit Négre (1948), the little boy is depicted eating tiger-striped pancakes!īannerman herself was no stranger to India.

Not only does he recover his possessions, his mother, Black Mumbo, uses the ghee to make pancakes for the entire family. However, it is Little Black Sambo who has the last laugh when the tigers begin fighting among themselves and ultimately chasing each other around a tree until they are transformed into a pool of ghee. Published first in England in 1899 and then in the United States the following year, it tells the story of a little boy who is forced to surrender his clothing and his umbrella to four tigers so as to avoid being eaten by them. The neatly packaged narrative that the dust jacket offers belies the fraught history of Bannerman’s original text, The Story of Little Black Sambo. Printed within a minaret-shaped column on its dust jacket, these lines preface one’s reading of Harper Collins’ children’s book The Story of Little Babaji (1996). For this new edition of Bannerman’s much beloved tale, the little boy, his mother, and his father have all been given authentic Indian names: Babaji, Mamaji, and Papaji. As a gift for her two little girls, wrote and illustrated The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899), a story that clearly takes place in India (with its tigers and ‘ghi,’ or melted butter), even though the names she gave her characters belie that setting.

The Story of Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman