Africa at the Internet Archive: Cameos From the Kraal

Carrying on with the theme of lovely artwork from yesterday and the day before, I want to share an old book... one that is about to go into the public domain in just a few days, on January 1, 2002! The book is Cameos From the Kraal by M. W. Waters, published in 1926: 

M. W. Waters was Mary Waterton Waters (1886-1961), who was the daughter and granddaughter of missionaries in the Cape Colony of South Africa. In addition to this collection of Xhosa folktales and anecdotes rendered in English, Waters was the first white writer to compose a play in Xhosa, U-Nongqause (not yet translated into English), which is about Nongqawuse, the prophetess of the Xhosa cattle-killing movement of the 1850s. One of the stories in this book, The Native Doctor, is also about Nongqawuse, and the best source of information that I found about Waters was in this recent dissertation about Nongqawuse: History in the Literary Imagination: The Telling of Nongqawuse and the Xhosa Cattle-Killing in South African Literature and Culture (1891-1937) by Sheila Boniface Davies.

In an earlier post I provided an overview of some of the sentimentalizing South African literature of this type (books by Vaughan, Metelerkamp, and Marais), but Waters' book stands out as rather different from the others. Yes, it is still racist and paternalistic in the extreme, but she does not impose the same kind of narrative frame on the stories; instead of sentimentalizing African household servants, the book begins with her going into the Xhosa people's kraal and asking to listen to their stories. 

Most importantly, unlike the other books, the art here is by an African artist. Sad to say, Waters does not give the name of the artist, referring to them only "a raw native" on the book's title page, followed by this brief note: "The illustrations in this book are remarkable in that they have been drawn by an untrained native who had never received a lesson in drawing."

And the drawings really are remarkable! Here are the illustrated pages; click on each image for a larger view, and here is a list of all the stories and their titles: The Feast of Meats (Jackal and Wolf) / Why Jackal Laughs at Night / Why the Tortoise Moves So Slowly / The Battle of the White Eagle / The Winter's Tale / The Native Doctor / The Mpundulu, or Lightning Bird / Mfene, The Rain Doctor / Why Some Men Are Black, and Some Are White / Why Dogs Sniff at One Another's Tails / The Secretary Bird, Wisest of All Creatures / How the Monkey Got His Tail.

The Mpundulu, or Lightning Bird

Jackal and Wolf

Why Jackal Laughs at Night

Makulu, the Grandmother

How the Monkey Got His Tail

Men and Women at Work (Lazy Monkeys)

So, the book is already available at Internet Archive, and when it enters the public domain on January 1 2022, that means it should start to appear all over the Internet and also in affordable reprints too. I'll be glad to see that: this anonymous African artist will find a global audience at last.

Cameos From the Kraal

by M. W. Waters