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

African Folktales at Internet Archive: Dictionary of African Mythology

After yesterday's post about African Mythology A to Z, I wanted to follow up with another A-to-Z book: A Dictionary of African Mythology: The Mythmaker as Storyteller by Harold Scheub, just a click away at Internet Archive.

Scheub has collected 400 African stories in this book, arranged alphabetically by the first name of the story's protagonist. The stories are told in summary form, highly readable, with information about the cultural and geographical provenance of each story, as you can see in this screenshot of a Lamba story from Zambia: Kabunda, Whose Mother Brought Fire.

This is a wonderful book to browse through, and you can also use it as a reference book, especially since the Internet Archive version is searchable. So, for example, if you want to see all the Nigerian stories in the book, you can do that by searching:

There is also a monumental bibliography in the back of the book, running to over 25 pages, along with indexes and appendices with the myths listed by country, by language and culture, and by themes and motifs. The thematic index is the most useful since that's not something a computer-based search can generate. Unlike traditional tale type and motif indexes, Scheub has organized this index based on what he sees as the "grand myth" and its features: Beginnings - First Connections (between heaven and earth) - Separation - Struggle between God and Man - Second Connections - Endings.

This book was a labor of love for Harold Scheub, one of the great 20th-century scholars of African storytelling. I've written about other books of his in previous posts: The African Storyteller: Stories from African Oral Traditions and The World and the Word: Tales and Observations from the Xhosa Oral Tradition. 

So, find a book by Harold Scheub and plunge in. There is a wealth of stories in these books, each jus ta click away at Internet Archive.

A Dictionary of African Mythology:

The Mythmaker as Storyteller

by Harold Scheub

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

African Folktales at Internet Archive: Scheub's African Storyteller

Yesterday I wrote about an anthology of African stories by Paul Radin who was one of the leading anthropologists in the first half of the 20th century, and today I want to write about one of the leading anthropologists in the second half of the 20th century: Harold Scheub, who was born in 1931 and who died very recently, in 2019. You can read about his life and career at Wikipedia. There are several of his books available at Internet Archive based on his work in southern Africa which I will feature in later posts, but the book for today is the anthology that he edited of stories from all across Africa: The African Storyteller: Stories from African Oral Traditions. The book is just a click away at the Internet Archive. 

The book has actually appeared in two different editions; the edition at the Internet Archive is from 1990, and the edition I have is from 1999, but the books are fundamentally the same (there are a few stories that are different, but the overall organization is the same; you can compare them here). The stories are organized thematically, with introductory materials to each section about the theme, along with notes and commentary on each story. If you are thinking of buying a used copy of the book (which are widely available because the book was commonly used as a college textbook), either edition is good!

In addition to the 50 stories in the book, there are wonderful little insets throughout the book where Scheub quotes passages from other scholars and researchers who study African storytelling traditions, like this passage from A. C. Jordan, whose book Tales from Southern Africa I had featured here a few weeks ago:

The stories come mostly from published sources in English, but there are a dozen stories that come from non-English sources, including some translations from oral performances, including two extraordinary stories that Scheub recorded: the Zulu story of the trickster Chakijana, and the Xhosa story of the hero Sikhuluma (the roles of the hero and the trickster were Scheub's special areas of interest). 

Scheub also includes photographs from those storytelling sessions, like this photograph of Nongenile Masithathu Zenani, a Xhosa storyteller, whose work appears in this book edited by Scheub: The World and the Word: Tales and Observations from the Xhosa Oral Tradition, available at Internet Archive also.

I'll have more to say about Scheub's work with Xhosa storytellers in future posts, and with this anthology he does a brilliant job of sketching a framework for the larger dimensions of the storytelling traditions across the African continent: HIGHLY recommended.

The African Storyteller:

Stories from African Oral Traditions

by Harold Scheub