Ever since rumors broke out that Disney was considering a live-action remake of Tangled featuring a Black Rapunzel, Twitter exploded with angry tweets about “woke culture ruining everything” and Disney bowing to some “liberal agenda.”
Now, Matthew Torres, known as @storytimeguy on Instagram, is wading into the debate with some eye-opening claims. He alleges that popular children’s author Andrew Lang might have borrowed a bit too liberally from African culture and folklore for classic fairytales like Cinderella and Rapunzel.
“Did you hear they want to make Rapunzel Black? First, Ariel, now this? The woke agenda is ruining everything,” Torres mockingly states in his video.
The funny thing about that is, Rapunzel was Black.”
Torres continues by suggesting that Lang stole real-life stories rooted in the Xhosa People, a Bantu ethnic group native to South Africa, for his version of Cinderella (1889) and Rapunzel (1890), and when he was called out on it, the children’s author went on full-on racist.
“Andrew Lang is famous for Cinderella, Hansel & Gretel…and many more. I mean, his uncredited wife is the one that did the actual hard work of translating this stuff. He [Lang] found the stories,” Torres alleges.
Who he found the stories from? Nobody knows. That was until someone pointed out that the Xhosa people of Africa had a lot of similar stories. Stories that were older than Andrew Lang’s,” he added.
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So, do these allegations have merit?
Well, according to Madamenoire, while specific Xhosa folklore directly paralleling Rapunzel is limited, there appears to be an African tale origination from South Africa, published several years before Lang’s works, which indicates striking parallels to Cinderella.
Titled Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters by John Steptoe, this renowned Xhosa story follows a heroine named Nyasha who marries a prince and is celebrated for her qualities of selflessness, generosity, and kindness.
Historian William Bascom also documented a similar version from the Hausa people of West Africa in his 1970 article Cinderella in Africa. This version, dating back to 1911, features a young girl mistreated by her stepmother and stepsister, who is forced into menial tasks and offered meager scraps to eat. She forms a bond with a frog near a borrow pit, who promises to help her attend a festival that her family prohibits her from attending.
Now, before you start an uproar campaign on Instagram, calling out Disney and Lang for stealing everything from us, there is evidence that the first documented version of Cinderella might not actually originate from African folklore but rather from Chinese culture.
Make up your mind!
I know, I know, but according to historians Peiyi Ou and Xiaohong Zhang, Yeh-Shen is a Chinese tale collected by Duan Chengshi during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) and first recorded in “Youyang zazu.”
In this tale, the protagonist is persecuted by her stepmom but ultimately marries the king with magical assistance. She attends a festival in disguise and loses a show that only fits her tiny foot. During the 30s and 40s, American and Chinese folklorists translated the famous tale into English, introducing it to Western audiences.
As discussed in Torres’ video and highlighted in the prelude of Mariah Cox’s version of Cinderella, Lang observed in the 19th Century that Cinderella, in its various global adaptations, consistently features a protagonist from humble origins achieving a favorable marriage through supernatural means.
But Lang’s argument that the story’s complex narrative couldn’t have emerged from what he described as a primitive or “shoeless” and “naked” society is exceptionally racist and insulting.
One thing we can all agree on, and that Torres has pointed out correctly, is that Andrew Lang wasn’t the first to create Cinderella.
