Introduction

THE ART OF THE STORYTELLER^[1]

Nongenile Masithathu Zenani

Translated by Harold Scheub

The art of composing imaginative narratives 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 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.

But those ancient stories were quite different from those of the present age. The current stories, those that we hear now, tend to be written down. As if from nowhere, we suddenly find that they are being written.

But the genuine stories were never, at any time, written down. They were composed orally by the old people. And when we too asked how this tradition came into existence, we were told that it was a craft that had been practiced at the very beginning, in the old times. Such tales go back as far as ancestral time, to the age of the first people. But these works did not resemble what we have in contemporary times.

At first, nothing was bought. People ate food very unlike the food that is eaten today. At first, for example, pumpkins were not eaten. In the same way, ancient stories were not like the stories of today. When we ask how it came about that there are now such things as edible pumpkins, the old people say that initially pumpkins were not cultivated. A pumpkin was merely a thing over there on the hillsides, growing wild like all the other plants. It was domesticated because of the enlightenment of the people of later generations; they saw that it was edible, this thing that they had previously regarded as simply a wild plant. In the beginning, a pumpkin was just a thing that was in the forest, something that one might knock against with his foot and not even know what he should do with it. This was also the case with maize. It was not regarded as something edible in the beginning. A plant that seems to date from the beginning is millet; they say that millet was the first food.

All these things have followed this pattern. So it is with oral narratives: their origin is with the ancestors, the ancient grandmothers. Such narratives were a part of an active tradition when we were born. In the old days, when we performed these stories, the old people would listen to us. Then they would say, "This child knows the stories!" Or, "This one does not know them! He speaks a thing that he does not know. There's no story like this one. This child is just chattering about his own things." It would be clear that the good storyteller was composing a story that was really ancient, a really genuine narrative. So we children continued to be separated like that, repeatedly, separated in that way into two groups by the old people.