Daniel Irungu vividly describes the way his grandmother first told him the exciting stories in this book. "After hearing them from her, I told them to others and they in turn listened to me without moving. They looked at me with wide-open eyes and their faces shone in the red-yellow light from the burning, crackling fire." After he went to primary school and learnt to read and write he decided to put the stories on paper for the benefit of "those who could not come and listen to me to read for themselves and learn the moral lessons in them and at the same time learn how to tell the stories to others."