Auntie's Paint Brush

$14.95

Auntie’s Paint Brush and Other Stories of African Children Written by Martha I. Bruce, PhD Illustrated by Odé Aduma

A naughty boy upsets his friends by swiping a paint brush from a kindly lady who always welcomes them into her home. Another boy wants to buy his mother a gift, but has no money. A girl encounters an unexpected fright while helping with school chores. Another girl gets along very well with her parents, her older sister, and older brother; but she has to deal with a twin brother who teases her unmercifully.

Children in every culture face similar problems – but often with twists that are unique to their own environments. The children in Dr. Martha Bruce’s stories live in Nigeria, where things are indeed a little different.

Chuka loves to paint pictures, like children everywhere, but when he paints beautiful images with his stolen paint brush, a spirit turns them into ugliness. The spirit frightens Chuka into returning the paint brush by threatening him from under his bed.

Kalu sees a pair of earrings that cost one naira in a stall in the marketplace. He dreams about buying them as a Christmas present for his mother. As Christmas draws near, he begins finding and collecting kobos – coins like pennies, but different from them, because merchants see them as worthless, and won’t accept them. So even if Kalu collects a hundred kobos, the equivalent of one naira, he may not be able to buy the earrings.

In American school chores involve tidying up the classroom and cleaning erasers. Binta’s teachers have no wood for their cook stoves, so she and her friends have to collect firewood in the bush, where there are evil spirits. Unfortunately, an evil spirit in the form of a snake becomes confused and nearly attacks her in a case of mistaken identity.

The fourth story is told in verse in the voice of a girl who bears the brunt of sibling rivalry, much like children everywhere. Her solution is a little different, however. She wants to sell her brother in the goat market.

Whether you read these stories to your children simply as wonderful tales in themselves, or as a way of immersing them subtly in another culture, these are wonderful stories, wonderfully illustrated by artist Odé Aduma.