Mufaro’s beautiful daughters: An African tale

Steptoe, J. (1987). Mufaro’s beautiful daughters: An African tale. New York, NY: Lothrop, Lee, & Shepard.

This picture book is an East African version of Cinderella, with a bad sister, Manyara, and a good sister, Nyasha. Imbued with the virtues of kindness, generosity and humility, young readers will anticipate the rich rewards in store for goodness, and the punishment meted out for mean-spiritedness. The tale has all the important universal characteristics of a good fairy tale, with enchanted forests, shape shifters, and a handsome king at the end. 

I love the lush illustrations painted by Steptoe, which, like Pinkney’s Aesop’s Fables and Sharon Robinson and Kadir Nelson’s Testing The Ice, are rich stories on their own, but become absolute treasures combined with artistic illustrations. Steptoe’s work is a more impressionistic than, say, Nelson, but both Black illustrators have painted portraits that add humanity and diversity to stories with fairly universal themes. Steptoe’s paintings are almost romantic in style, exploding with flowers, lavish, with positive figures seemingly lit from within. It is an almost Renaissance-style visual journey laid over an African folk tale. 

I admire the author-illustrator, because he wanted Black children to feel proud of who they were.

"People sometimes send me questionnaires asking me who influenced me, what books I read. But I wasn't influenced by anybody. The Hardy Boys? How is that going to inspire me? What I'm saying is that black folks don't have anybody to inspire them…I think it's more important for me to write books that may present ideas to very young people…What I try to create are all the things I didn't have as a kid that I would have liked to read." (Natov & Deluca, 1987, p. 126)

The art from this story could so easily be added to Cinderella or Snow White, princessy-themed stories European-American children are used to reading. The motifs of the story are known: the bad sister gets her comeuppance while the kind sister is rewarded with a prince/king. But with African names and beautiful black features, these characters are fresh while still relatable. It’s an interesting segue for children into the genre of African folk tales. Steptoe gives readers something they are accustomed to—the experience of magical fairy tales—but with the opportunity to see something new.

Reference: Natov, R. & DeLuca, G. (1987). An Interview with John Steptoe. The Lion and the Unicorn, 11(1), 122-129.