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How to outsmart death
In this magnificently illustrated picture book, Hermann Schulz tells the story of the cunning queen Sambona, who lives on a small island in Lake Victoria – and who is keen to carry on doing so for a bit longer. As she is already old, though, her name is on a long list that tells Death whose turn it is next to meet their ancestors.
Among Mama Sambona’s people, though there are certain rules that even Death has to abide by. If he comes three times in vain to fetch someone, then he has to give up for many years, and the person can carry on living. If, for example, the person is looking after a child, then Death has to leave again.
The old queen is extremely familiar with these rules: the first time Death comes to visit her, she’s in the middle of helping her niece with her homework. The second time, she is out in the fields, harvesting millet so that the little girl has enough to eat. Since she knows, however, that it won’t be quite so easy to get rid of Death the third time round, she organises a huge party with drumming and dancing. When Death, as grim as ever, appears, she simply takes him by his bony hands and starts to dance with him. „And since Death also had a sense of humour and loved dancing more than anything else in the world, he let himself be carried away“, and he has such fun „that he forgot all about everything else“.
With his simple story, Schulz is operating in the universal narrative tradition of the fairy-tale; when you read his story, you feel as if transported to the fireside or the camp-fire.. The old woman’s ever-surprising ideas mean that the apparently unavoidable is repeatedly postponed, and we ultimately find that the human delight in music and dance touch even Death.
This crafty way of dealing with death – often a taboo subject in the Western world – is unusual, but it offers children a whole host of new perspectives. For one thing, we have the old woman who is so different from the old women of our children’s acquaintance. She smokes a pipe, is witty and humourous, and likes dancing. Then there is Death, who initially appears scary with his black-and-white colours, his grim look, and his bony hands. And yet he has a wonderful time at the end, comes to terms with the fact that Mama Sambona has put one over on him, and isn’t really such a bad guy after all – just one who’s doing his job. We ultimately learn, too, that good ideas can sometimes provide the solutions to even the most difficult situations.
Tobias Krejtschi brings the whole thing to life with his fabulously colourful illustrations. Mama Sambona and her surroundings are depicted in earthy hues of red and brown, and radiate African warmth and joie de vivre. Death, by contrast, is a tall, angular man with a pale face and a dark suit. Everything around him is black or grey except for his helper, the unfortunate little pink hare. Thus the book switches from bright and cheerful to dark and threatening until Death finds himself surrounded by nothing but bright people – and thereby seems a bit brighter himself. The large-scale illustrations are complemented by small woodcut and linocut vignettes which break up the pages of text and – rather like Schulz’s narrative style – clearly refer to African artistic traditions.
One could of course complain that the story is reinforcing a stereotypical image of Africa rather than giving children an idea of the actual reality of the country. This, though, isn’t a textbook but a fairy-tale – and in fairy-tales, surely, it’s perfectly fine for everything to be right with the world!
Heike Friesel
February 2008
[Translated by Helena Ragg-Kirkby]
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