"We spend our years as a tale that is told": oral historical narrative in a South African chiefdom

Abstract

This book brings together questions to do with oral history and narrative which have in the past often been kept apart. In doing so, it draws on a complex set of approaches from historical, anthropological and literary scholarship to throw new light on oral historical narrative, illustrating this with special reference to events and storytelling in a Northern Transvaal chiefdom. It looks to four major aspects: the events referred to by the informants, the present-day context in which these narratives occur, the conventions and forms which enable narration and an intervening period of changes and development for both the conditions and craft of telling and the meaning and form of the story itself.