African Folktales at Internet Archive: Lion Outwitted by Hare

After yesterday's book of stories by South African storyteller Gcina Mhlophe — Stories of Africa — I wanted to do another book with stories from southern Africa today; this is one of Phyllis Savory's many African story books, and it is just a click away thanks to the Internet Archive: Lion Outwitted by Hare and Other African Tales.

The illustrations are by Franz Altschuler; here's one of his rabbits:

This book contains Bantu stories from South Africa (Matabele, Xhosa, Zulu), and also from Malawi and Kenya; the book contains a helpful preface about the different Bantu-speaking peoples whose stories are represented in this book — and of course there are stories about trickster hare all over Africa. As a result, many of hare's antics have become famous in the United States (Brer Rabbit) and the Caribbean (like B'Rabby in the Bahamas), and in South and Central America also (Tio Conejo) thanks to the power and persistence of the stories that African storytellers brought with them. Slave-owners tried to strip away all traces of African culture, but they could not stop the storytellers and their stories.

Phyllis Savory was born in 1901 in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), and here is what she says about her early encounters with these stories in the introduction to her book The Little Wise One: African Tales of the Hare: "As a child, with no companions apart from the workers on my parents' farm in the early days of the then Rhodesia of about 1907, I listened with avidity to the folktales told around the evening fires. The doings of Kalulu the Hare, called by many the Little Wise One, intrigued me to such an extent that I have followed the rascal throughout the years that followed, jotting down stories about him whenever I heard them... collected from attendants and carriers when I accompanied my father throughout the countryside as his typist and cartographer." 

Unfortunately, like so many collectors of stories back in the day, Phyllis Savory did not hot down the names of those storytellers amongst the "attendants and carriers" who worked for her father, which means they are not credited by name in her books. Yes, these are folktales: Savory no doubt heard many different versions of the "same" story from many different storytellers, but that is still no reason not to credit the storytellers, helping us to remember who the actual bearers of the tradition were and how they made her books possible. (In contrast, consider the approach taken in Grainger's Stories Gogo Told Me where the author credits each storyteller she worked with.) 

For a detailed analysis of the question of authenticity in books by writers like Phyllis Savory, Marguerite Poland, and others, see Samantha Naidu's Transcribing Tales, Creating Cultural Identities: An Analysis Of Selected Written English Texts Of Xhosa Folktales which you can read online (thank you, Sam Naidu! more of her work here). I share Naidu's optimism that asks us to confront the colonial past and neo-colonial structures today, listening for the diverse voices that we can hear if we try: "In post-apartheid South Africa, there is even greater opportunity to reshape stories, to recreate selves, and to redefine intercultural relations. This thesis has outlined how some of those stories, which use folktale texts as their central trope, are constructed and commodified. Not only do these reinvented folktale texts embody the heterogeneous cultural influences of South Africa, they also have the potential to promote, first, the understanding of cultural differences, and second, the acceptance of the notion of cultural hybridity in our society."

So, please read and enjoy the stories you can find in Savory's book, and take a look at Naidu's thesis too; it is full of important questions to keep asking.

As for hare and lion,

they are just a click away at Internet Archive:

Lion Outwitted by Hare and Other African Tales