“It strikes me now as evening fills my soul that the tiger addressed in my poem is a shadowy beast, a tiger of symbols and scraps picked up at random out of books, a string of labored words* that have no life, and not the fated tiger, the deadly jewel that under sun or stars or changing moon goes on in Bengal or Sumatra fulfilling its rounds of love and indolence and death.”

“To the tiger of symbols I hold opposed the one that's real, the one whose blood runs hot as it cuts down a herd of buffaloes, and that today, this August third, nineteen fifty-nine, throws its shadow on the grass; but by the act of giving it a name, by trying to fix the limits of its world, it becomes a fiction not a living beast, not a tiger out roaming the wilds of earth.”

    – From The Other Tiger, by Jorge Luis Borges

* “tropes” was the word used by Borges. I had the audacity to alter it to “words,” because I didn't want to stumble the reader. After all, how many people know that trope means “overused figure of speech?”

The Story of Little Black Sambo, a children's book by Helen Bannerman, a Scottish woman living in India, was first published in London in 1899.

In the tale, a boy named Sambo outwits a group of hungry tigers. The little boy has to sacrifice his new red coat and his new blue trousers and his new purple shoes to four tigers, but Sambo outwits these predators and returns safely home, where he eats 169 pancakes for his supper.

Sambo overcomes the tigers by tying their tails together and watching them race around a tree until they turn into ghee – Indian for “butter” – which Sambo enjoys with his pancakes.

The story was a children's favorite for half a century, but then became controversial due to the use of the word Sambo.

Interestingly, the children's story takes place – not in Africa – but in a fairy-tale India with Caribbean elements.

– information extracted from Wikipedia