Artfulness in the early South African oral‐style story: Ernest Glanville's ‘Abe Pike’ tales

Abstract

The focus of this article is Ernest Glanville's collection of stories Tales from the Veld (1897) and its place in the South African oral‐style story tradition. Glanville's tales are set on the Eastern Cape Frontier in the last part of the nineteenth century and employ a narrator, the loquacious but wily backwoodsman ‘Uncle Abe Pike’. This style of story reached its apogee with the ‘Oom Schalk Lourens’ tales of Herman Charles Bosman. Little, however, is known about earlier users of the oral‐style story and the contribution they made to the form. It will be argued that, like Bosman's Oom Schalk, Glanville's Uncle Abe is a complex figure who speaks in several voices. The ideology he articulates is complex and ambiguous: he is simultaneously racist and humane, condescending to the ‘Kaffir’ and sympathetic to Xhosa culture, loyal to the Queen and contemptuous of the colonial administration. For all of these reasons, Glanville's ‘Abe Pike’ tales are worthy of more attention than they have been accorded.