1930: African Stories

Here's a book published in 1930, thus entering the public domain on January 1 2026; it's not a major anthropological study like Rattray's Akan-Ashanti book from yesterday, but it is still valuable:

African Stories
by Albert Helser
Internet Archive

Albert Helser was a founder of the Church of the Brethren Mission in Nigeria, and so his collection of folktales of the Bura people of northeastern Nigeria falls into the missionary category. Still, it can be useful, as it contains 54 stories, which Helser explains in the preface represent just half of the stories that he collected. To his credit, Helser wrote down the stories in the Bura language first, and then translated them into English; he also worked with transcriptions provided by the Bura students in the missionary school. He says that his translations are as literal as he could make them, and to my knowledge this is the only extensive collection of Bura tales available in English.

Helser is also the author of Education of Primitive People: Presentation of the Folklore of the Bura Animists, along with other books based on his missionary work, online at Hathi Trust.