Thoughts on Telling the Stories and Doing the Work

Over the past month, I've been highlighting African folklore books at the Internet Archive; you can see the range of books in the growing slideshow or by browsing the blog posts (the slideshow links to those posts). There are literally hundreds of books that I will be featuring over the coming year, and I am really grateful to the Internet Archive for putting digital lending into practice so that people can read contemporary books as well as the older books that are in the public domain.

This week, I've been focusing on books with stories from the San (Bushman) people of southern Africa. I've got one more book I want to feature in that series, but today I want to do something a little different: I'm going to write about a book that I am not recommending for people to read, and the reasons why not. The book in question is I. Murphy Lewis's Why Ostriches Don't Fly and Other Tales from the African Bush, published in 1997. 

The book was prompted by the South African safaris she took in 1995 and again in 1996 led by Izak Barnard, a "life coach" in South Africa and safari organizer. I was excited to find this book because it was published as part of the "World Folklore" series, like Heather McNeil's book Hyena and the Moon which I wrote about a few weeks ago (blog post). I am a fan of good book series, and when I find a good series, I like to acquire all the books from the series that I can find in affordable used copies. 

In this case, though, the series imprint let me down. Lewis's book is the opposite in every way from McNeil's book. McNeil documents the storytelling occasions of her trip, telling us about the storytellers (whom she paid for their work), and about her translators (also paid), and she provides the literal translation of the stories in addition to her own retelling, with notes about just how and why she adapted the stories in the ways that she did. 

Lewis does none of that. She claims that she heard "22 stories" from San storytellers while on a safari, but she provides no information about that beyond that one reference, and the stories that are in the book are not the stories she heard from San storytellers. Instead, they are from other published books, and of those books, the source she relies most heavily on is Laurens van der Post; his book The Mantis Carol is what sparked her interest in the San people, and she met with van der Post before making her first trip to Africa.

And so we come to the topic of Laurens van der Post. There are many of his books at the Internet Archive, but I have not featured him in this week of posts about San stories. It is true that his books introduced literally millions of people around the world to the San people, along with the influential BBC documentary (produced in 1956), The Lost World of the Kalahari, based on a book of the same title.

But here's the thing: van der Post was a self-aggrandizing, larger-than-life con man. He claimed to have heard stories as a child from a San nanny (whom he sometimes called Klara, sometimes Koba). He claimed to have lived with the San people. Given that some of this claims were demonstrably false, it's hard to know what to make of anything that he did or said. If you want to find out more, a recent biography about van der Post (who died in 1996 at age 90) is available at Internet Archive: Storyteller: The Many Lives of Laurens Van der Post by J. D. F. Jones. For a quick overview, here's the New York Times review: Master Storyteller or Master Deceiver?

About the supposed nanny, for example, Jones concludes that "there is no evidence for Laurens's stories that he had a Bushman nanny who would influence the course of his life." 

Yet, sad to say, the first story in Lewis's book is a story that van der Post claimed to have heard from his nanny, and she repeats other van der Post stories, citing him as the source. Now, in some cases, van der Post retold stories that are documented in books that report the words of actual San storytellers, like the books by the Bleeks and others. There are people who have dedicated their lives to documenting the stories, art, music, and lives of the San people (see, for example, the work of J. David Lewis-Williams which I wrote about last week). Laurens van der Post was not one of those people, but he was the determining influence on Murphy Lewis's book.

Because I was so surprised and disappointed by her book, I decided to find out more about her. What I learned from her website is that she has now shifted her attention to eastern Africa because, with the help of a past-lives therapist, she has concluded that she was a Maasai person in a previous life, and she now thinks she has found the Maasai tribe into which she had been born ten generations ago.

I kid you not.

You can read about that here: Africa Within: An American Woman's Initiation With the Maasai Warriors: Into the Heart of Wholeness. The story begins with how flattered she is that people think she looks like Karen Blixen there in her "pyth" (sic) helmet: I have heard the whispers about me since my arrival in Kenya, they liken me to Karen Blixen, alone, long hair down my back, pyth helmet. 

Now, if Lewis's new conviction about her life as a Maasai person led her to do the work that goes with learning about the culture she is now claiming as "her own" by way of appropriation, literally her own, then the result might be useful for others. But if the cultural appropriation just becomes a kind of tourism, like in her safaris in southern Africa, then there is nothing here of value for others. We are not really learning about the San people or the Maasai people from Lewis's writings; we are instead just learning about her (and Laurens van der Post and Izak Barnard, et al.).

I'll have more to say in future posts about cultural appropriation dilemmas (and I struggle with this myself of course, a lot)... but I wanted to share this cautionary tale today since Lewis's book, and the phenomenon of van der Post, was so relevant to the theme of San storytelling that I had focused on this week, especially since things went from bad to worse in her work, with what I guess you could call a kind of Jungian colonialism, occupying cultural territory by way of past lives. Ouch.