African Folktales at Internet Archive: Xhosa Ntsomi

Since the focus this week is southern Africa, I wanted to make sure to share this book by Harold Scheub: The Xhosa Ntsomi, just a click away at Internet Archive:

You will find 40 stories in this book, including fascinating examples of different versions of the "same" story as told by different Xhosa storytellers on different occasions. As Scheub explains in the preface, he watched over 2000 different storytellers at almost 4000 different storytelling performances in the Transkei and kwaZulu during the years 1967 and 1968... during which time he walked over 1500 miles as he moved from house to house and village to village, wherever he could listen to a storyteller's performance:

As for the title of the book, here is how Scheub explains the meaning of "ntsomi" in the book's introduction (click on the image for a larger view); as you can see, in this approach to the idea of storytelling, the performance dimension is essential for the dynamics of the story itself:

This book is a beautiful introduction to Scheub's approach to African storytelling in general, and I highly recommend reading the introduction as well as the stories themselves.

I've featured other wonderful books from Harold Scheub here at the blog in the past; here's a reminder list of them:

A Dictionary of African Mythology:

The Mythmaker as Storyteller

by Harold Scheub

The World and the Word:

Tales and Observations

from the Xhosa Oral Tradition

by Nongenile Masithathu Zenani,
edited by Harold Scheub

The African Storyteller:

Stories from African Oral Traditions

by Harold Scheub

There are some other great books by Scheub on my "Internet Archive wish list," so hopefully, I'll have more books by Scheub to write about here in future posts. For now, though, there is an abundance of stories you can read that he collected, translated, and annotated.

The Xhosa Ntsomi

by Harold Scheub