Martin. The Honey Hunters

The Honey Hunters is a children's book by Francesca Martin, with art by the author, published in 1992. It is available at the Internet Archive. 

The story is wonderful: a boy follows a honeyguide in search of honey and accumulates animal companions along way: rooster and bush-cat, antelope and leopard, zebra and lion, plus an elephant. 

There is not a cumulative style as the companions assemble, but all the elements in the chain are repeated at the end, specifically in pairs: the boy breaks the honeycomb into four parts, one part for each pair, but then the pairs start fighting. Rooster and bush-cat fight, antelope and leopard, zebra and lion, plus the elephant who takes the whole piece for himself. The boy tells everybody to stop fighting, but it's too late: now rooster is now always at odds with bush-cat, elephants at odds with humans, etc.

The artwork is one of the best features of this book; the animal drawings are beautiful and expressive, and there are also many animals depicted who are not part of the story... but they could have been, and those extra animal illustrations could be used as a prompt for young storytellers to expand on the story and extend the chain.

In a tiny note at the beginning of the book, Martin says that the story is a traditional folktale of the Ngoni people, but that is all; she does not tell readers about where the Ngoni live in Africa or about her actual source, nor does she explain just what a honeyguide bird is and does. Martin is also the author of Clever Tortoise, another book based on an African folktale that she published some years later, and in that book she does an excellent job of explaining her connection to the story, as you can see in the screenshot below; I wish she had done something similar to The Honey Hunters. In that book, she also uses Swahili names for the animals, which would have been a fine option for this book too!