African Folktales at Internet Archive: Nongenile Masithathu Zenani

Yesterday I wrote about Henry Callaway's book of Zulu folktales, and I included a story told Lydia Umkasetemba in that post, and today I want to focus on another South African storyteller: Nongenile Masithathu Zenani, and her book The World and the Word: Tales and Observations from the Xhosa Oral Tradition, edited by Harold Scheub; it's just a click away at the Internet Archive.

Even better: you can listen to actual recordings at the University of Wisconsin South African Voices collection online. 

Here is how Scheub describes his work with Nongenile Masithathu Zenani: The Art of Nongenile Masithathu Zenani, and you can listen to recordings like this story performance from 1967:

In the book, Scheub translates both Mrs. Zenani's stories and also her "commentaries," which are her observations about Xhosa culture, her work as a storyteller, her thoughts about the world and the word, as Scheub says in the title of the book.

And yes, this is Harold Scheub who published the anthology African Storyteller which I wrote about in an earlier post; that book also featured stories by Mrs. Zenani, along with photographs of her performances, like this one:

Back when Henry Callaway wrote down the story that Lydia Umkasetemba told him over 150 years ago, he was not able to record her performance with audio and images, but thanks to Harold Scheub, we have the opportunity to read and see and hear Nongenile Masithathu Zenani. She died in 1985, but her stories live on, and they are waiting for you to read them.

The World and the Word:
Tales and Observations
from the Xhosa Oral Tradition

by Nongenile Masithathu Zenani