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INTRODUCTION
- University of Wisconsin Press
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INTRODUCTION The tale-teller is the person who most regularly and persuasively touches every member of the community. This creator moves behind the facts of history, and clarifies, defines, and elucidates the experiences of the people. She thereby sustains the society's traditions, those institutions that give context and meaning to daily life. Noplani Gxavu's story "Malikophu's Daughter" and Emily Ntsobane's tale "The Deadly Pumpkin" are developed in similar ways: each has to do with a transition and a resulting transformation in the life of a young person. But there is an important distinction here as well: Gxavu's story of a boy's puberty ritual is decidedly positive, while Ntsobane's depiction of a girl's rite of passage is fraught with uncertainty. If storytelling contains promise, it is at best an ambiguous promise. ONE "The art of composing oral imaginative narratives," said Nongenile Masithathu Zenani,2 "is something that was undertaken by the first peoplelong 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 narratives had initially been created in olden times, long ago. That time was ancient even to our fathers, it was ancient to our grandmothers. And our grandmothers said that iintsomi [oral 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. "But those ancient stories were quite different from those of the contemporary age. The current stories, those that we hear now, tend to be written down. As if from nowhere, we suddenly find that they are being written. "But the genuine iintsomi were never, at any time, written down. They were composed orally by the old people. And when we too asked how this tradition came into existence, we were told that it was a craft that had been practiced at the very beginning, in the old times. Such stories go back as far as ancestral time, to the age of the first people. But these works did not resemble what we have in contemporary times."3 149 150 Part Two: Ambiguous Promise Southern African folktales are not always of the happily-ever-after variety. Storytellers confront life realistically, and, while it is true that they deal in fantasy images, those images are meant to give dimension to reality, not to embellish it. True, the images shape our experience of the real, and if stories are hopeful they are not unrealistic in their yearnings and their goals. There is a dualism in storytelling in southern Africa, with some stories emphasizing the positive, suggesting hopeful realities; other stories, while containing such hope, give pause to the unbridled imagination, allowing the narrower confines of reality to limit and discipline the desires of the imagination. The two stories in this section reveal this uncertainty, even nervousness , between the reach of the imagination and its reining-in by reality. Both were performed in the Transkei in September of 1967, one by Noplani Gxavu, a Gcaleka woman of thirty-five, living in Nkanga, in Gatyana District; the other by Emily Ntsobane, a forty-year-old Hlubi woman living among the Mpondo in Mgugwani, in Lusikisiki District. TWO Underlying the historical facts of Ndumiso Bhotomane and the epic grandeur of Masithathu Zenani is the tale, the basic production of the oral tradition. It is in the tale that myth is given contemporary form, that epic is localized, that history is legitimized. Tales typically treat momentous changes in the lives of individuals as they navigate the arc of life: the rites of passage, the movements from one state to another, and all the attendant uncertainties and dreads and hopes. To understand the history of a people, to comprehend a society's epic tradition, one must first grapple with the tale tradition, on which all else in the culture depends. The crucial generating unit of oral narrative performance is the image.4 Images, when organized into eductive patterns, evoke an.emotional response from members of an audience. Message in such imaginative performances is the emotional experience of forms and relationships...