Story

Notes

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Henry Callaway, a nineteenth century collector of Zulu oral traditions, commented (c. 1870), "The initial difficulty of getting any religious material is considerable.... Even the tales of the people are a hidden lore held in the keeping of the women-it is not common to meet with a man who is well acquainted with them or is willing to speak of them in any other way than as something which he has some dim recollection of having heard his grandmother relate." Marion S. Benham, Henry Callaway (London: Macmillan, 1896),252. 2. Mdukisa Tyabashe, quoted in Harold Scheub, The Tongue Is Fire: South African Storytellers and Apartheid (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996),220. 3. The performer was Eva Ndlovu, a forty-five year old Ndebele woman. The story (2S-2388 of my collection) was performed on November 15, 1972, at about 2 P. M., in the Matopo/Gulati area of Zimbabwe. In the audience were one woman, five teenagers, and five children. 4. Tradition is a recurrent theme in southern African oral tales. The Xhosa storyteller Nongenile Masithathu Zenani, for example, had strong opinions about the European-style schools that spread through southern Africa from the mid-nineteenth century. She created a fictional situation to urge her point: "... I'm quite old ... ," one of her characters announces during a debate regarding the establishment of such a school in the area, "and I've never heard of this school nonsense before! At home, milk used to be poured out into a spoon, then we'd drink it. At home, all that we talked about was in regard to what ought to be done concerning our home. If there were a misunderstanding between my aunt and my father, the people were called together and the case was judged in court. Nothing was written down. Now I wonder. You want things for writing. Is it because things will work out better then? Perhaps, without knowing it, you're misleading yourselves with all this writing business ...." The speaker concludes, "... this is how we live according to the laws of the Xhosa and of nature and tradition." He adds, "... keep in mind that Xhosa custom is traditional. It is of ancient tradition, and it requires traditional responses." The World and the Word: Tales and Observations from the Xhosa Oral Tradition, ed. Harold Scheub (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992),121. In the end, Mrs. Zenani does not neglect the present in favor of the past, but urges the people not to forsake African tradition so readily. 283 Copyrighted Material 284 Notes to Pages 7-10 5. See, for example, the Pardoner's prologue and tale in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. 6. At Game Pass in the Kamberg area of the Natal Drakensberg. A. R. Willcox, The Rock Art of South Africa (Johannesburg: Thomas Nelson and Sons [Africa], 1963), plate x, facing pp. 42 and 43. 7. The most ancient form of storytelling that is available to us today is in the form of rock art, including the creations of San artists in southern Africa. Thirty thousand years ago in Africa and Europe, long before the invention of writing, artists were painting and engraving on rock surfaces. In France and Spain, rock art was at its height between twenty thousand and ten thousand years ago. Jalmar Rudner and lone Rudner, The Hunter and His Art, A Survey of Rock Art in Southern Africa (Cape Town: C. Struik, 1970), 1. In Africa, this art form is found in the Sahara Desert, in the eastern part of the continent, and in the south. The finest paintings are found mainly in caves and in the mountains , sites that "probably also served as places of refuge and sanctuaries for the artists and their peoples" (Rudner and Rudner, 3). "An age of five centuries for the oldest surviving art is I should say certain, an age of twenty centuries quite possible, but longer than this unlikely for rock paintings or petroglyphs under the conditions in which they are found." Willcox, Rock Art of South Africa, 51. 8. "The Naron say, in olden times the trees were people, and the animals were people, and one day [God] bade them be animals and trees." Dorothea F. Bleek, The Naron: A Bushman Tribe ofthe Central Kalahari (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), 26. A. R. Willcox observes, "Their many tales of transformation of humans into beasts or birds and vice versa show how clearly they identified themselves with the animal kingdom...