Once upon a time, there was a series of books called The Dumpy Books for Children. These bound paper books were smaller than your hand. Little Black Sambo was the fourth in a 40-book collection of The Dumpy Books. Little Yellow Wang-Lo was 26th, Simple Simon was 38th, and The Story of an Irish Potato was last.
Who Was Little Black Sambo?
He was the son of Black Mumbo and Black Jumbo.
Mumbo-jumbo is a term for gibberish, which a Brit once told me comes from Gibraltar, the large rock at the tip of Spain, just across from Morocco at a narrow neck that’s the only way for ships to pass between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea.
For centuries, sailors from around the world created their own language from bits and pieces of dozens of their native languages.
This shared language was essential to the operation of sailing vessels crewed by sailors of many different nationalities. People who study such things use the term polyglot to describe these linguistic mishmashes. The Brit said gibberish is the incomprehensible language spoken by sailors who come and go through Gibraltar. We’d call it nonsense and meaningless speech.
Mumbo-jumbo is also a term connected with superstition and rituals.
In West Africa, Mumbo-Jumbo was the name of a Mandingo ancestor, a scary god who did a lot of dancing.* His chanting would have been perceived by Europeans as mumbo-jumbo.
Mumbo-jumbo came to mean anything unintelligible.
To a proper English ear at teatime in exotic India and Africa, two places where colonial England “owned” substantial property and resources, all native speech would incomprehensible and thus mumbo-jumbo.
So here we have Little Black Sambo, son of two superstitious parents with brown skin.
You’d think he’d be Little Brown Sambo, but back then, all non-white skin was “black.” None of this brown, red, yellow, tan, George Hamilton nonsense. It’s the God-given English superiority** over those damn fuzzy-wuzzies. It’s what English settlers in India and Africa called all of those strange black people with wooly hair.
Some people consider the name Little Black Sambo racist. Well, of course it is.
The English and all other colonizers came upon natives (people born there) everywhere their ships landed. Local inhabitants spoke dozens of different languages, all of which sounded like the jabbering of a mob of imbeciles inside Bedlam Hospital.***
These dark people didn’t dress like Europeans.
In the hot climates, the savages wore hardly any clothes at all and ran around barefoot all the time and sounded more like animals than people. Can you imagine for a moment how you’d react when meeting your first Ubangi or bone-in-the-nose spear-carrying cannibal? Now pretend you’re Jane Eyre.
Helen Bannerman was a Scotswoman who lived in India for more than 30 years.
She was married to a British officer in the Indian Medical Service and lived in Madras, India. She is known for her tale of a brave and clever Indian boy with good parents, a fitting subject for young children.
The very proper Helen Bannerman wrote Little Black Sambo in 1899 while on a train trip with her daughters from Madras to a camp in the hills. The poor dears had no social media devices or Nintendos and had to be read to out of books. Bannerman illustrated the story herself.
She put her unpolished illustrations on the same page as the text so kids could follow along with the rhythmic story (one tiger, two tigers, etc). As time passed, the illustrations changed, as did Little Black Sambo’s name (Little Babaji), and ultimately, the story itself.
Let’s take a look at the original Little Black Sambo.
The story begins with a small boy dressing in his finest clothes. His parents doted on him. Mumbo (his mother) made him beautiful little blue trousers and a beautiful little red coat. His father Jumbo bought Little Black Sambo a beautiful little green umbrella and “a lovely little pair of purple shoes with crimson soles and crimson linings” to go with what is a rather loud outfit, wouldn’t you say?
Little Black Sambo went out for a stroll in the jungle, proud of how beautiful he looked.
By’m by, he came upon a tiger who growled, ”Little Black Sambo, I’m going to eat you up.” Shrewdly, Little Black Sambo offered the tiger his beautiful little red coat and the tiger accepted it, spared Little Black Sambo’s life, and walked away saying, “Now I am the grandest tiger in the jungle.”
Little Black Sambo kept on through the jungle and by’m by, whaddaya know, he came upon another tiger who growled, ”Little Black Sambo, I’m going to eat you up.” The second tiger took the same deal as the first, but with the blue pants and walked away saying, “Now I am the grandest tiger in the jungle.”
The third tiger is my favorite because he (that’s how she wrote it) because he said wait a minute!
I’ve got paws, not feet, so whatever would I do with two pointy-toed shoes, lovely as they may be? Little Black Sambo suggested wearing them on his ears. Now I’ve never seen purple and crimson shoes on orange and black tiger ears, but I think #3 has a better claim to being the grandest tiger in the jungle than #1 or #2.
Without hands, the fourth tiger had no use for the umbrella because he had nothing to hold it with. Little Black Sambo suggested he use his tail, and off he went.
(Right about here, Little Black Sambo experienced a moment of cognitive dissonance knowing four tigers were each claiming they were the top tiger and that can’t be.)
By’m by, Little Black Sambo came upon the four tigers racing in a circle around the trunk of a palm tree.
Each was biting the tail of the tiger in front of him while his tail was in the jaws of the tiger behind him. They whirled faster and faster until they melted into a pool of butter (ghee in the original story). Black Jumbo was on his way home from work with a big brass pot in his arms, When he saw the melted butter, he put it in his pot, Little Black Sambo gathered his belongings, and together they went home to eat pancakes Black Mumbo fried in the tiger butter.
“And then they all sat down to supper. And Black Mumbo ate Twenty-seven pancakes, and Black Jumbo ate Fifty-five but Little Black Sambo ate a Hundred and Sixty-nine, because he was so hungry.”
Sure it was racist.
Those were the times when Europeans believed they were better than all those vulgar non-Europeans. Explorers and colonizers came upon places and people where nothing had changed in thousands of years. Stone Age people without the Flintstones silliness; people with bones in their noses, spear-carrying cannibals with poison darts. Below is a photo of local kids taken in Madras in 1899.
Some folks say we should not be so fast to judge those from the past.
After all, we sit atop a lofty perch of 126 years of knowledge since Bannerman wrote Little Black Sambo. Think about how casually we take for granted our ways of living, schools, moon rockets, SnapFace, cable tv, and paying for water. Try to judge things on their own terms. Try to think like someone living in the same year Bayer patented aspirin, Benjamin Harrison was the U.S. President, and Nelly Bly circumnavigated the globe in 72 days, beating Phileas’ Fogg’s record of 80 days.
So if racism is the standard, the question is not whether this book is racist or not (it is), but is it more, less, or equally racist for the times?
There are more than 50 versions of Little Black Sambo and the accompanying illustrations. The stories change, the main character has different names in different societies, and each has its own way of depicting Little Black Sambo or Sam or Little Babaji. But that’s a whole nother story on its own. Naively, I thought it would be a great subject for thesis or dissertation until I found it’s already been done.
Enough of Bannerman’s racism. Let’s take just a minute to see how Little Black Sambo was treated in the U.S.
American iIllustrators and cartoonists knew nothing about Indian natives, so they drew the racist images they did know.
In 1957, two guys opened the type of table-service restaurant once called a coffee shop.
They decorated it with scenes from the Little Black Sambo story. Sambo’s went public, the stock split five times, and twenty years after that first Sambo’s in 1957, there were more than a thousand Sambo’s restaurants in the U.S.
People began to protest Sambo’s was demeaning to blacks and the owners’ choice of names tells them they’re not welcome.
The owners attempted to counter this with research showing that three times as many blacks ate at Sambo’s than at any other full-service restaurant, so how can that be demeaning? They also insisted that their Sambo wasn’t Little Black Sambo. They created their Sambo by combining bits of their names. Sam Battistone and Newell Bonhet: Sambo’s.
For their Sambo to have nothing to do with Little Black Sambo seemed beyond unlikely to many.
Protests, demonstrations, and lawsuits piled up until the whole chain came crashing down. Some say justice done. Others say bad press ran off their best employees, with food and service suffering as a result. Once a restaurant goes bad, it’s only a matter of how much more money you want to lose.
*Speaking of dancing, have you read What Do You Know About Dog Dancing? People are the strangest species of all.
**Over everyone, actually. They got that way from bowing and scraping and tugging at their forelocks so much to kings and dukes and earls that they wanted someone of their own to kick around and be superior to.
***Bedlam was short for Bethelm Hospital, England’s first insane asylum (period correct terminology) for the treatment of mental illness, known for cruelty, neglect, and inhumane conditions. It gives us our word bedlam, meaning pandemonium, chaos, and mayhem.
Bonus
The book went viral. Soon there was a Little Black Sambo board game and a Little Black Sambo Dart Board (magnets, not spikes) to capitalize on the craze. They’re now collectibles, of course.
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