Mary-Joan Gerson was inspired by her two years in the Peace Corps in Nigeria to adapt this ancient African pourquoi tale.
Mary-Joan Gerson
Mary-Joan Gerson was inspired by her two years in the Peace Corps in Nigeria to adapt this ancient African pourquoi tale, which was first recorded by an anthropologist named Ulli Beier, who lived in Nigeria for twenty years. While in the Peace Corps, Dr. Gerson worked on two projects that were designed to encourage writers and teachers to develop a Nigerian children's literature. She chose as context for this tale the Bini kingship era of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, in order to highlight the grandeur of African culture as well as its deep and abiding relationship to nature. Dr. Gerson is now a clinical professor of psychology at New York University, where she directs a training program in family therapy and teaches and does research in psychoanalytic development.
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