Harold Scheub

A fine collection of stories, histories, and poems of the Swati, Xhosa, Zulu, and Ndebele peoples of South Africa, gathered by the author, a writer and translator, from 1968 to the mid-1970s. The tales are divided into six sections which deal with such matters as cultivating the past, threatened dreams, and hope for the future. Includes an introduction to South African history and to regional storytelling. Excellent bandw photographs. Paper edition (unseen), $24.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

South African Storytellers and Apartheid

The Tongue Is Fire

Searchable database of over 400 entries from Harold Scheub's Dictionary of African mythology.

The Mythmaker as Storyteller

A Dictionary of African Mythology

In the years between the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the Soweto Uprising of 1976—a period that was both the height of the apartheid system in South Africa and, in retrospect, the beginning of its end—Harold Scheub went to Africa to collect stories. With tape-recorder and camera in hand, Scheub registered the testaments of Swati, Xhosa, Ndebele, and Zulu storytellers, farming people who lived in the remote reaches of rural South Africa. While young people fought in the streets of Soweto and South African writers made the world aware of apartheid’s evils, the rural storytellers resisted apartheid in their own way, using myth and metaphor to preserve their traditions and confront their oppressors. For more than 20 years, Scheub kept the promise he made to the storytellers to publish his translations of their stories only when freedom came to South Africa. The Tongue Is Fire presents these voices of South African oral tradition—the historians, the poets, the epic-performers, the myth-makers—documenting their enduring faith in the power of the word to sustain tradition in the face of determined efforts to distort or eliminate it. These texts are a tribute to the storytellers who have always, in periods of crisis, exercised their art to inspire their own people.

A Xhosa Performing Art

The Ntsomi

The trickster and the hero, found in so many of the world’s oral traditions, are seemingly opposed but often united in one character. Trickster and Hero provides a comparative look at a rich array of world oral traditions, folktales, mythologies, and literatures—from The Odyssey, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and Beowulf to Native American and African tales. Award-winning folklorist Harold Scheub explores the “Trickster moment,” the moment in the story when the tale, the teller, and the listener are transformed: we are both man and woman, god and human, hero and villain. Scheub delves into the importance of trickster mythologies and the shifting relationships between tricksters and heroes. He examines protagonists that figure centrally in a wide range of oral narrative traditions, showing that the true hero is always to some extent a trickster as well. The trickster and hero, Scheub contends, are at the core of storytelling, and all the possibilities of life are there: we are taken apart and rebuilt, dismembered and reborn, defeated and renewed.

Two Characters in the Oral and Written Traditions of the World

Trickster and Hero

What is the essence of story? How does the storyteller convey meaning? Leading scholar Harold Scheub tackles these questions and more, demonstrating that the power of story lies in emotion. While others have focused on the importance of structure in the art of story, Scheub emphasizes emotion. He shows how an expert storyteller uses structural elements—image, rhythm, and narrative—to shape a story's fundamental emotional content. The storyteller uses traditional images, repetition, and linear narrative to move the audience past the story’s surface of morals and ideas, and make connections to their past, present, and future. To guide the audience on this emotional journey is the storyteller’s art. The traditional stories from South African, Xhosa, and San cultures included in the book lend persuasive support to Scheub’s. These stories speak for themselves, demonstrating that a skilled performer can stir emotions despite the obstacles of space, time, and culture.

Story

Stories from African Oral Traditions

The African Storyteller

The oral and written traditions of the Africans of South Africa have provided an understanding of their past and the way the past relates to the present. These traditions continue to shape the past by the present, and vice versa. From the time colonial forces first came to the region in 1487, oral and written traditions have been a bulwark against what became 350 years of colonial rule, characterized by the racist policies of apartheid. The Uncoiling Python: South African Storytellers and Resistance is the first in-depth study of how Africans used oral traditions as a means of survival against European domination. Africans resisted colonial rule from the beginning. They participated in open insurrections and other subversive activities in order to withstand the daily humiliations of colonial rule. Perhaps the most effective and least apparent expression of subversion was through indigenous storytelling and poetic traditions. Harold Scheub has collected the stories and poetry of the Xhosa, Zulu, Swati, and Ndebele peoples to present a fascinating analysis of how the apparently harmless tellers of tales and creators of poetry acted as front-line soldiers.

South African Storytellers and Resistance

The Uncoiling Python

This collection of fascinating and revealing tales captures the sprawling diversity of African mythology. Four hundred alphabetically arranged entries touch on virtually every aspect of African religious belief, from Africa's great epic themes (dualistic gods, divine tricksters, creator gods, and heroes) to descriptions of major mythic systems (the Dogon, the Asante, and the San) and beyond. Scheub covers the entire continent, from the mouth of the Nile to the shores of the Cape of Good Hope, including North African as well as sub-Saharan cultures. His retellings provide information about the respective belief system, the main characters, and related stories or variants. Perhaps most important, Scheub emphasizes the role of mythmaker as storyteller--as a performer for an audience. He studies various techniques, from the rhythmic movements of a Zulu mythmaker's hands to the way a storyteller will play on the familiar context of other myths within her cultural context. An invaluable bridge to the richly diverse oral cultures of Africa, this collection uncovers a place where story and storyteller, tradition and performance, all merge.

The latest work from Harold Scheub, one of the world's leading scholars of African folktales, is the broadest collection yet assembled with tales from the entire continent of Africa, north to south. It brings together mythic, fantastic, and coming-of-age tales, some transcribed more than a hundred years ago, others dating to modern-day Africa. Scheub includes the work of storytellers from major African language groups, as well as many storytellers whose work is not often heard outside of Africa. This anthology offers a classroom-ready collection that should appeal to any scholar of African literature and culture. Realizing that these tales are part of a dying art, Scheub writes for the inner ear in everyone, bringing an oral tradition to life in written form.

African Tales

" ... selected not only African oral and written stories but also tales from around the world ..."--Pref., p. 11.

Deeper Into Story

Shadows

Professor of African Languages and Literature Harold Scheub

"The Xhosa ntsomi (sing. intsomi; pl. iintsomi) is a performing art which has, as its dynamic mainspring, a core-cliché (a song, chant, or saying) which is, during a performance, developed, expanded, detailed, and dramatized before an audience which is itself composed of performers, everyone in a Xhosa society being a potential performer."--Introduction.

The Xhosa Ntsomi

Pauline Smith

Sheila Scholten

Pauline Smith's many admirers will welcome this new volume, which contains writings which are out of print, have never before been published, or have not appeared in book form. This collection of largely unknown material spans the full range of her creative life, from the early 'Platkops' stories to her last uncompleted work. What gives this wide diversity of pieces coherence and added interest is their marked autobiographical bent.

Harold Scheub

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