A Collection of Stories and Its Preservation in the Digital Age

Extract

There is never an end to stories.

“The art of composing oral narratives,” said Nongenile Masithathu Zenani, a Xhosa storyteller,

is something that was undertaken by the first people, long ago, during the time of the ancestors. When those of us in my generation awakened to earliest consciousness, we were born into a tradition that was already flourishing. Narratives were being performed by adults in a tradition that had been established long before we were born. And when we were born, those narratives were constructed for us by old people, who argued that the stories had initially been created in olden times, long ago. That time was ancient even to our fathers; it was ancient to our grandmothers, who said that the tales had been created years before by their grandmothers. We learned the narratives in that way, and every generation that has come into being has been born into the tradition. Members of every generation have grown up under the influence of these narratives.

In the late 1960s and in the 1970s, I made a number of research trips to southern Africa for the purpose of studying the oral traditions of the Xhosa, Zulu, Swati, and Ndebele peoples. The Xhosa and Zulu live in South Africa, the Swati in Swaziland, and the Ndebele in the southern part of Zimbabwe. During each of those trips many of the performances and discussions were taped. I witnessed thousands of performances.