The Black Cloth

The Black Cloth (French title Le Pagne Noir: Contes Africains) is a collection of African folk tales by Bernard Binlin Dadié.

At the same time, writers sought to express the more traditional oral prose in print, and to somehow make up for the loss of "an atmosphere warmed with music, handclapping, laughter, dancing, and singing".

Diop, however, rendered tales by one particular griot; Dadié chose to dispense with some aspects of tradition—he did away with some of the traditional structural devices (such as the lengthy introductory and closing formulas), and some of his stories were original creations.

[8] The title story features a young orphan girl named AÏwa, whose mother has died and whose stepmother sends her on an impossible mission: to wash a black cloth until it is white.

[9] Thompson also points to the many connections between The Black Cloth and the Americas, beginning with the trickster character Kacou Ananze, as Dadié calls Anansi, who also occurs in literature of the Caribbean and, in the American Deep South, is found as Aunt Nancy, and "teach[es] people to overcome adversity by wit—which can be a very precious gift indeed".

The silk-cotton tree occurs frequently in the stories, and is also found in African-Cuban folk tales; finally, there are many similarities in the dishes described by Dadié and the Creole cuisine of New Orleans and other places around the Gulf of Mexico.

[11] Hatch found that although the stories "owe much in their design to the expressive features and general structural patterns of the oral story-telling tradition", she also saw a distinct resemblance to the work of Guy de Maupassant, who, along with Victor Hugo, was much admired by Dadié.

"[14] Thompson comments on these adaptations too and on the descriptions of natural phenomena (which he deems "faithful to tradition"), and adds that the collection "demonstrates the sophisticated taste for song, epic, pun, riddle, satire and praise poem characteristic of African peoples south of the Sahara".