African Folktales at Internet Archive: Reynard the Fox AND Oral Literature in Africa

After writing about the work of Wilhelm Bleek yesterday in the post about Specimens of Bushman Folklore, I wanted to follow up with an earlier book that Bleek published, not about San stories, but instead stories from the Khoekhoen, or "Hottentot" people, relatives of the San people who are indigenous pastorialists in southern Africa: Reynard the Fox in South Africa; or, Hottentot Fables and Tales by Wilhelm Bleek. This is a book that Bleek published in 1864, and it is just a click away at the Internet Archive:

Unlike the Bushman Folklore book, which was based on Bleek's own interviews with the San storytellers like //Kabbo which he transcribed and then translated, this book is based on Bleek's work in the library of George Grey, who was the governor of the British Cape Colony in South Africa in the 1850s. Bleek combed through the library's books and manuscripts seeking out any reports about the language of the Khoekhoen people, then called Hottentots, and also their folktales. The resulting collection contains 42 Khoekhoen fables, over half of which are animal stories: jackal stories, tortoise stories, baboon stories, and lion stories. (You can read more about the Khoekhoen people at Wikipedia.)

Bleek chose the title "Reynard the Fox in South Africa" in order to make a strong claim for the cultural value and literary pedigree of these African stories, comparing them to the medieval beast epic about the adventures of Reynard the Fox, a trickster very much like the trickster jackal and other sly animals in these African fables. In a later post, I'll have a lot to say about parallels and differences between African and European trickster traditions; for now, suffice to say that Bleek in all his work, and with the title of this book in particular, was seeking to counter the arguments of Europeans at the time who denied that there was any such thing as African culture (much less African cultures, plural), and who were even prepared to deny that the peoples of Africa were fully human.

To learn more about that 19th-century debate, I want to make a second book recommendation today: Ruth Finnegan's Oral Literature in Africa. As in the case of Bleek's book, Finnegan's book is making a claim right from the title: she argues forcefully for the use of the term "oral literature" to describe the many verbal art forms that have flourished in Africa for thousands of years: stories, songs, poetry, oratory, and so on, and in the opening chapter of the book she chronicles in detail the way that European colonizers and missionaries refused to acknowledge the existence of these oral literary traditions in Africa.

This is a book she originally published in 1970 which was then re-released in 2012 as part of the World Oral Literature series from the great folks at Open Book Publishers. Finnegan wrote a new preface to the book reviewing development over the thirty years since her book first appeared, and this time the book comes with digital audio at OralLiterature.org. I'll be featuring some more books by Ruth Finnegan in the weeks to come also; she is a prolific and inspiring writer, scholar, and teacher; you can find out more at her website.

Finnegan's book is available the Open Book Publishers site, and it's also available at Internet Archive. Highly recommended!

Oral Literature in Africa
by Ruth Finnegan