In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • A Collection of Stories and Its Preservation in the Digital Age
  • Harold Scheub

There is never an end to stories.1

"The art of composing oral narratives," said Nongenile Masithathu Zenani, a Xhosa storyteller,

is something that was undertaken by the first people, long ago, during the time of the ancestors. When those of us in my generation awakened to earliest consciousness, we were born into a tradition that was already flourishing. Narratives were being performed by adults in a tradition that had been established long before we were born. And when we were born, those narratives were constructed for us by old people, who argued that the stories had initially been created in olden times, long ago. That time was ancient even to our fathers; it was ancient to our grandmothers, who said that the tales had been created years before by their grandmothers. We learned the narratives in that way, and every generation that has come into being has been born into the tradition. Members of every generation have grown up under the influence of these narratives.2

In the late 1960s and in the 1970s, I made a number of research trips to southern Africa for the purpose of studying the oral traditions of the Xhosa, Zulu, Swati, and Ndebele peoples. The Xhosa and Zulu live in South [End Page 447] Africa, the Swati in Swaziland, and the Ndebele in the southern part of Zimbabwe. During each of those trips many of the performances and discussions were taped. I witnessed thousands of performances. During those years, I never used a car: I walked up and down the southeastern coast of Africa, 1500 miles each time, working with storytellers, myth-makers, epic performers, oral historians, and poets

In southern Africa, there are no professional storytellers (there are professional bards, poets in the retinue of kings, for example): everyone is a potential storyteller. So I worked with storytellers in all aspects of life, mainly in the rural areas, from elders to the young. I taped performances and took pictures with the consent of storytellers and audiences. Nor did I attempt to set up storytelling sessions in any artificial way: I was invited to such sessions. My work in southern Africa was a collaborative project between the storytellers and me. The performers agreed to allow me to witness and to document their work, and I agreed to return the entire collection to South Africa when freedom came. Arrangements have now been made to send a complete copy of the finished project to the University of Cape Town.

Although the conditions of collecting materials were not always optimal, the voice tapes and the films effectively document the traditions. I taped versions and variants of the same stories, in various parts of southern Africa, to learn about regional and artistic variations: this was very helpful in understanding the nature of storytelling. I had many lengthy discussions with storytellers and their audiences about storytelling, oral history, poetry, and these were invaluable to me in the development of my description and analysis of the traditions. It is my sense that no other such collection of oral materials exists, whether in southern Africa or in any other area of Africa.

This was an effort to provide a full documentation of the oral tradition as it existed in these language areas during three historic years in this region, especially in apartheid South Africa. In the Transkei, among the Xhosa, I collected materials from, among others, the Bhaca, Bomvana, Gcaleka, Hlubi, Mfengu, Mpondomise, Mpondo, Ndlambe, Ngqika, Thembu, and Xesibe peoples; in kwaZulu, I worked among groups that comprise the Zulu community, including the Biyela, Buthelezi, Cele (in the Transkei), Cubeni (Nteta, Shezi), Cwango, Hlongwa, Khumalo, Mpungose, Mtimkhulu (Hlutyini/Hlubi), Ncineka, Ndebele (in both kwaZulu and Zimbabwe), Ndwandwe (Nxumalo), Sibiya, Zulu, and Zungu. The stories and other materials range from very brief stories of a few minutes to a full epic of some three hundred hours.

The collection consists of 192 voice tapes. Each tape contains approximately twelve hours of stories, histories, etc., (2,304 hours). The tapes, [End Page 448] recorded at several machine speeds (15 /16, 17 /8, 31 /4), are tensilized polyester-backing...

pdf

Share