Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters - John Steptoe

I remember sitting in elementary school and hearing a teacher (I don't remember who) read my class Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters by John Steptoe. I remember feeling a connection with each sister - with Nyasha who was sweet and loved to serve others, but also with Manyara who was slightly selfish and wanted to put herself first. I remember being entraced by the transition of Nyoka from garden snake into a king. I loved this book so much that during my senior year, when each student in my Advanced English class had to choose a book to read to the class to depict the oral tradition from which it came, I chose Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters. I brought in props, I wore my skirt and headwrap that my sister got me in Zambia, and did my best to read the story with the same sense of expression that I had in my head for each character. 

As I read it again for this class, I still found myself enamored with it, even over 15 years after the first time that I read it. The language that John Steptoe uses is lyrical and traditional of a fairytale, but somehow still harkens back to the rural setting of the story in a small village in Africa. Throughout the book, we as the reader are led to side with Nyasha and her good heart, just as throughout the typical Cinderella story, we are led to side with Cinderella and her good heart rather than her two evil stepsisters and her evil stepmother. There is an underlying part of us that hopes that Nyasha's good behavior will be rewarded by the King, and in the end, it is. 

The lifelike almost portrait-style illustrations of Steptoe allow readers make a more personal connection to each of the characters, even characters not mentioned more than once or twice like the little boy in the forest and the king's mother (as seen in the picture above). There is realism and tenderness seen here in this image between a woman previously unknown to Nyasha. 


After doing research about John Steptoe as an author, I discovered that he died extremely prematurely at the age of 39, only one year after finishing writing and illustrating Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters. He won both Caldecott Honors and Coretta Scott King Honors for various books that he has illustrated and written, and it is a travesty that someone who accomplished as much as he did during his short life span couldn't have stayed around just a little longer.