The World and the Word
Subtitle: Tales and Observations from the Xhosa Oral Tradition
Contributors: Harold Scheub (Editor)
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: January 1993
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 499
ISBN-13: 9780299133108
Subjects: Customs; Oral And Folk Literature; Archaeology / Anthropology; Literature: Folklore/Mythology; Republic of South Africa; Folklore & Mythology; Folklore; Social life and customs; South Africa; Tales; Xhosa (African people)
Description: A master storyteller of the Xhosa people of South Africa, Nongenile Masithathu Zenani gives us an unprecedented view of an oral society from within. Twenty-four of her complex and beautiful tales about birth, puberty, marriage, and work, as told to the renowned collector of African oral tradition, Harold Scheub, are gathered here. Accompanying the stories are Zenani's detailed commentaries and analyses and Scheub's striking photographs of her in performance. The combination of these historical and cultural observations with a richly symbolic collection of tales from a single traditional storyteller make The World and the Word a remarkable document. "The storyteller's materials are simple," Zenani told Scheub, "the world, and the word." She presents to us the entire world of the Xhosa people, how they first came to be, the origins of their customs, how they order their world and deal with transgressors, how they manage all of life's transitions from birth to death. She depicts both the world as it exists and as it is shaped in the words of the story-teller. Inheriting tales from the Xhosa tradition, Zenani has transformed them into imaginative new stories marked by her own artistry.