The Tongue Is Fire: South African Storytellers and Apartheid

Preface

Preface "But the tongue," said the apostle, James, "can no man tame. . . ."1 He might well have been writing of the storyteller, the bard, the historian, who, in the world's oral traditions, breathe life and meaning into the past, and vividly draw its connections with the present. Political rulers and others have throughout history sought to tame the tongue of the storyteller, but success in such endeavors is only sporadically successful, is never long-lasting. Storytellers, and this includes the poets and the historians in the oral tradition, fuse idea and emotion into story, and in that interchange audience members are wedded to the past, as a significant exchange occurs: the past influences and shapes the experience of the present, at the same time that the experience of the present determines what of the past is useful and meaningful today. Because it is the storyteller who makes the choices, it is the storyteller who most persuasively provides the insights and the contexts that give the lives of audience members meaning. And that is what gives political rulers and others pause. At the same time, the storyteller works within a tradition that assures he does not become an apostate ... until the times call for that more radical posture. Writing about African nationalism in apartheid South Africa, Z. Pallo Jordan, later a minister in Nelson Mandela's government, wrote, ". .. the 'folk' can be a revolutionary concept employed for the reaffirmation of a national identity." His father, the Xhosa writer, A. C. Jordan, he asserted, selected the oral tale "as the medium through which to express his protest against the existing order. He sought to transform the tale into a great collective symbol around which the African people could be mobilized for social and political change."2 This is a study that gives voice to the observers and commentators, the storytellers and poets and historians who are seldom heard from outside their immediate environs. The collection of stories, histories, and poems that comprise this volume was begun in 1968 and continued into the middle of the 1970s. That period seemed to be the height of apartheid in South Africa, but, in retrospect, occurring as it did between two events that were to precipitate a major change in that country, the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the Soweto Uprising of 1976, it was a time when the end of the racist regime might have been forecast. The volume has its origins in two experiences that I had in 1968. The first was a visit that I made to friends in Soweto, the vast sprawling xv xvi Preface township fifteen miles outside Johannesburg, and the abysmal symbol of South African apartheid. I had been playing tapes of some of the stories that I had collected in the South African rural countryside, and doubting young Africans argued that the lack of any clear statements about apartheid revealed that these traditions were antiquated and not relevant to contemporary issues and history in that country. When I returned to the countryside, I told some of the storytellers what the youthful Africans had said. One storyteller said, "Our traditions were here long before apartheid came to South Africa, and our traditions will be here long after apartheid is gone. How do you think we have survived these three hundred and fifty years? It is the truths embodied in the images of the stories that helped us to endure. The stories deal with eternal truths, not with the exigencies of the moment." Other raconteurs agreed. The second experience occurred while I was working among the Zulu, in Mahlabatini District in southeastern Africa. I was walking alone at dusk that day, in a densely hushed valley. The heat of the day was palpable in the listless mist that touched the tall grass and browsed along the dirt paths. I encountered a solitary Zulu man-his name was Mandla Madlala, and I was to come to know him well in the months and years that followed. As we walked along the path on the floor of the vast valley, dusk became dark and the old man told me of his experiences working in the gold mines, of his early separation from his family because of the system of apartheid, of the misery that system brought to the people of South Africa. His final words that evening, which still echo in my memory , were these: "Inkululeko! Freedom! The word is beautiful, the word is precious. We have struggled against this political system...