Little Black Sambo

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Little Black Sambo, from the cover of the 1899 edition

The Story of Little Black Sambo, a children's book by Helen Bannerman, a Scot living in India, was first published in 1899. In the tale, the little boy has to sacrifice his new red coat and his new blue trousers and his new purple shoes to four tigers, including one that wears his shoes on his ears, but Sambo outwits these predators and returns safely home, where he eats 169 pancakes for his supper. The story was a children's favorite for half a century before it became controversial. The story takes place in a fairy tale India, and the tigers racing around the tree are turned into ghee, rendered as "butter."

The book has a controversial history. The setting of Bannerman's story was clearly in India - as can be seen by the presence of tigers and the reference to ghee - and thus it is likely that Sambo is an Indian boy. The original illustrations portray Sambo in the European version darky iconography (see golliwog), with black skin, wild hair and bright red lips. As the book made its way across the Atlantic to the US, the illustrations were re-interpreted in terms of the possibly more demeaning American version of darky iconography known as blackface. As a result the word "sambo" has a long history as a racial slur against African-Americans.

However, regardless of the degree of racism in the original story, many pirated versions were knocked off at a cheaper price, gaining Little Black Sambo greater availability in its day. These imitations often were more degrading, as pointed out in an on-line essay by David Pilgrim.

In 1996, noted illustrator Fred Marcellino observed that the story itself contained no racist overtones and produced a re-illustrated version, The Story of Little Babaji, which changes the characters' names but otherwise leaves the text unmodified. This version was a best-seller.

Julius Lester, in his Sam and the Tigers, also published in 1996, recast "Sam" as a hero of the mythical Sam-sam-sa-mara, where all the characters were named "Sam."

A modern printing with the original title, in 2003, substituted more racially sensitive illustrations by Christopher Bing, in which, for example, Sambo is no longer so inky black. It was chosen for the Kirkus 2003 Editor's Choice list. Some critics were still unsatisfied. Dr Alvin F. Poussaint said of the 2003 publication:

"I don’t see how I can get past the title and what it means. It would be like . . . trying to do 'Little Black Darky' and saying, 'As long as I fix up the character so he doesn't look like a darky on the plantation, it's OK.'"

The book has been controversial in Japan as well, both for racism and piracy. Little Black Sambo (the Japanese title is Chibikuro Sambo) was first published in Japan by Iwanami Shoten Publishing in 1953. The book was a pirated version of the original, and it contained drawings by Frank Dobias that had appeared in a US edition published by Macmillan Publishers in 1927. Sambo was illustrated as an African boy rather than as an Indian boy. Although it did not contain Bannerman's original illustrations, the pirated book was long mistaken for the original version in Japan. It sold over 1,000,000 copies before it was pulled off the shelves in 1988 after being accused of depicting racist characterizations. Just after Iwanami's success, most of the Japanese publishers, including Kodansha and Shogakukan, the two largest publishers in Japan, published their versions of pirated Little Black Sambo. In 1988, all these publishers followed Iwanami and withdrew their books from the market altogether.

In 1997, a race-free version of the book, Chibikuro Sampo (“sampo” means “taking a walk” in Japanese), replacing the protagonist with a black Labrador puppy that goes for a stroll in the jungle, was published by Mori Marimo from Kitaooji Shobo Publishing in Kyoto. The same year, the translations of the two other race-free versions appeared: Sam and the Tigers, by Julius Lester and Jerry Pinkney, and The Story of Little Babaji, by Fred Marcellino .

Bannerman's original was first published with a translation of Masahisa Nadamoto by Komichi Shobo Publishing, Tokyo, in 1999.

The Iwanami version, with its controversial Dobias's illustrations and without the proper copyright, was re-released in April 2005 in Japan by a Tokyo based publisher Zuiunsya, because Iwanami's copyright expired after fifty years of its first appearance.

Also, The chilean children's band Mazapan makes in a musical version of little Black Sambo named Negrito Sambo (Little Black Sambo)

The comic book Jack of Fables published by the DC label Vertigo makes reference to Little Black Sambo in the character Sam, an elderly black groundskeeper at the Golden Boughs Retirement Community.

A popular U.S. restaurant chain of the 1960s and 1970s, Sambo's, borrowed characters from the book (includig Sambo and the tigers) for promotional purposes, although the Sambo name was originally a combination of the founders' nicknames: Sam (Sam Battistone) and Bo (Newell Bohnett). Nonetheless, the controversy about the book led to accusations of racism that contributed to the 1,100-restaurant chain's demise in the early 1980s.

[edit] References

Barbara Bader, "Sambo, Babaji, and Sam," The Horn Book Magazine. September-October 1996, vol. 72, no. 5, p. 536.
Phyllis Settecase Barton, Pictus Orbis Sambo: A Publishing History, Checklist and Price Guide for The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899-1999) Centennial Collector's Guide. Pictus Orbis Press, Sun City, CA.