Folktale performance is a popular cultural activity among the Guji-Oromo, an ethnic group in southern Ethiopia. While Guji-Oromo children gain pleasure from hearing and telling folktales, they also learn cultural practices and values as a result of tale performance. Parents tell folktales to their children in order to teach survival skills and cultural norms, but children also share folktales among themselves. This article analyzes how children produce meanings from the folktales they hear and tell. Using data from ethnographic fieldwork, I suggest that children are actors in their own socialization. As they tell and talk about stories, they reflect on the morals of former generations while also critiquing the social complexities of their immediate environments. While the children are eager to engage with modernity, their interpretations also bolster existing cultural norms.Lik e par ents all over the world, adults in Africa use verbal art in order to socialize children; folktales, for example, often dramatize the skills, moral standards, and values that are useful for reproducing and successfully navigating customary ways of life (e.g.may be seen as the primary purveyors of cultural knowledge: one dictum holds that "a child listens and learns; a child is not mature enough to

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Although the educational value of African oral traditions, particularly folktales, has been discussed widely in social studies of children, education and folklore, riddling is not commonly investigated as a part of children's everyday social practice. In this article, I present riddling as a part of children's expressive culture, through which they play together and learn about their local environment. I generated the data through ten months of ethnographic fieldwork among Guji people in southern Ethiopia. Based on analyses of the times and locations of this activity, as well as the social interaction involved, I argue that children perform riddling in order to entertain themselves and to learn from their immediate social and natural environment through discrete peer networks.

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In this article, I address African indigenous knowledge of early childhood development by discussing young children’s cultural spaces of care, play and learning among the Guji people of Ethiopia. I analyze practices in the cultural spaces of young children and show how participatory community-based care and learning are pivotal in the tradition of early childhood development in the Guji people. Furthermore, I present the features of play and learning traditions in which young children are social actors in sustaining social interaction and stability in their neighborhoods. My discussion is based on data drawn from 10 months ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the rural villages of the Guji people.