Savvy Sambo: Appraising an Icon

Abstract

Helen Bannerman's 'The Story of Little Black Sambo' (1899/1976) has been described as "a century-old lightning rod that is still hot to the touch" (Kennedy 2003, p. 5). During the century following its publication, this simple tale has been well loved as a charming, iconic children's story, and well vilified as a racist polemic. The reasons for its vilification have been the allegedly derogatory nature of the language, the story's sociocultural assumptions, and the crudity of Bannerman's illustrations. This controversy has resulted in a series of new versions of the story, many of which preserve the original text but reinterpret it through new attempts at politically correct illustrations. The most recent of these by Christopher Bing (Bannerman and Bing 2003) is perhaps the most striking.