Harold Scheub Research Articles

THE STRUGGLE FOR AUTHORITY IN GEORGE MCCALL THEAL’S KAFFIR FOLKLORE (1882)

This article focuses specifically on George McCall Theal’s collection of folktale texts, Kaffir Folklore (1882), as an example of an early South African ethnographic publication, and argues that the folktale transcriptions contained therein, although a part of Theal’s general colonialist project, are hybrid, containing the voices of both coloniser and colonised. The key argument is that the presence of the African voices in this text reveals simultaneously that Theal’s editorial aspirations were never absolutely imposed, and that agency and influence (albeit limited) of the colonised Xhosa co-authors were present. The article offers an analysis of the paratext (the preface, the introduction and the explanatory notes) of Kaffir Folkore, rather than a close reading of the tales themselves. To facilitate an understanding of Theal’s editorial practice, Kaffir Folkore is compared to Harold Scheub’s The Xhosa Ntsomi (1975). More generally, drawing on postcolonial folklore and book-history scholarship, the article explores how folklore texts of the colonial era, although contributing to the establishment of a literary and cultural orthodoxy in modern South Africa, constitute a telling hybrid genre, which invites a re-evaluation of colonial relations, and of individual texts themselves. In short, these texts synthesise different literary traditions (European and African), different mediums (the oral and the written), different disciplinary approaches (ethnography, folklore, literature), and most significantly, the voices of different subjects. Kaffir Folklore (1882) epitomises this synthesis.

Trickster and hero: two characters in the oral and written traditions of the world

trickster and the hero, found in so many of the world s oral traditions, are seemingly opposed but often united in one character. 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. 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.

The uncoiling python: South African storytellers and resistance

Harold Scheub is the well known author of a number of books on African tales (he prefers the term story), with a concentration on the Xhosa ntsomi. These books have been appearing since the early 1970s and have been influential and inspirational, while his magisterial essay A Review of African Oral Traditions and Literature was a very useful intervention in the debate around the local legitimacy of modern (especially Europhone) African fiction writing.

Harold Scheub. Shadows: Deeper into Story. Madison: Parallel Press (University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries), 2009. 398 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $25.00. Paper.

Harold Scheub. Shadows: Deeper into Story. Madison: Parallel Press (University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries), 2009. 398 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $25.00. Paper.

The Works of Harold Scheub: The Bibliographer's View

This brief introduction touches only on the works involving the oral tradition. Though the bibliography is roughly chronological, I divide the discussion into 1) articles, 2) books, and 3) reference sources. It is important to emphasize that bibliographies record dates of publication, not the date when the work was writ? ten. This is all the more the case with the germination of ideas. For example, Harold Scheub told me of his plan to publish a book of narratives by Nongenile Masithathu Zenani in 1971; it did not see publication until 1992 (see reference 43). This introduc? tion contains some reminiscences such as the above and, as we all know, thanks to Professor Jan Vansina, the oral tradition is not to be implicitly trusted.

Du c�t� de chez Scheub

Du cote de chez is a remembrance of the classes taught by Harold Scheub in the early 1970s, at a time when student revolutions on the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, were matched by radically new approaches to the study of oral traditions espoused by Scheub. It is a homage to the brilliant scholar who revealed what wonders lay buried under the misnomer folktales and then crafted a set of critical tools appropriate to the analysis or oral narrative performance. Finally, it is an acknowledgment of the enduring relevance of Scheub's methodologies across a range of artistic expression in the Black Atlantic ecumene.

Gbaya Riddles in Changing Times

Gbaya Riddles in Changing Times Philip A. Noss Abstract While the ridde constitutes a game that challenges the intellectual adroitness of the riddler's peers, it is a metaphor that confronts the apparently impossible with what is. If Harold Scheub is correct in affirming in his book The Poem in the Story (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2002) that the riddle is “a model for all oral art,” then the dynamics of riddle change are significant for the entire gamut of literary art. This paper presents the Gbaya riddle of Cameroon and the Central African Republic in its historical context with mutation, replacement, and creation of new riddles. By remembering and retaining from the past, borrowing from the present, and creating anew in the midst of constant change, the Gbaya riddle maintains its life of entertainment and instruction. The vicissitudes of change are made friendly through the metaphor of the riddle. Riddles are associated with the games of children at play in the schoolyard or in the village square.1 In academia, riddles are accorded the status of a minor literary genre. Ithe spirit of the riddler, however, Harold Scheub challenges the readers of his latest book, The Poem in the Story,with the apparently extravagant claim "The riddle establishes a model for all oral art" (124). If this claim is true, then the evidence of changing metaphors and their dynamics in riddles is highly significant for understanding and appreciating the entire gamut of oral literary art. Sumgba is the Gbaya term for riddle, but while this is its denotation, its connotations are those of challenge and confrontation, sometimes playful but not always.2 A riddling session is launched with a high-pitched cry of "Sumgba!" followed by the shouted exclamation "Girimm!" This response is pronounced loudly in a low tone, for it represents the sound of the great drums of a chief announcing news of weighty import to the community, or it depicts the sound of enemy troops clashing in battle. The riddle competition may be among friends, but the challenge constitutes a summons to combat, and the opponents' response signifies that the battle is joined! The challenger launches the attack with a riddle, "The pregnant woman doesn't leap over a gully!" to which the well-known answer is given, "The tortoise."3 A second [End Page 34] or a third attack may not be as easily met: "I went to visit my in-laws; no one greeted me, only the dead greeted me." Cultural norms dictate that one has many responsibilities toward the family of one's fiancée or one's wife that must be fulfilled personally. Visits to one's in-laws are therefore important social events, and one should expect to be welcomed with words of greeting. On this visit, however, the riddler was not received by the greetings of the living but of the dead.4 If a correct answer is given, the challenger may meekly acknowledge "Yes" or he/she may exclaim, "You found it!" If, on the other hand, the answers offered are unacceptable, the challenger formally declines each with the archaic negative "Singkom!"If the opponents are unable to provide the correct answer, they may seek to placate the attacker by surrendering villages and towns and even cities. The challenger will reject each locality that is offered on the grounds that his or her own family members live in this one, in-laws live in that one, he or she has visited this one or lived in that one. This contest continues until at last the voracious appetite of the attacker is satisfied and he shouts his acceptance of his opponents' surrender: "I take this village and that town and that city, I execute all their inhabitants—it is dry leaves!" The correct answer to the riddle is dry leaves. When one walks in green leaves, they do not make noise; when one walks in dry leaves, they make a loud rustling or crackling sound. The Gbaya description of the riddle is to say that it is something one "calls" for which there is a response. That is, there is an implied question of identification in the "call" to which...

Orality: The Power of the Spoken Word (review)

Reviewed by: Orality: The Power of the Spoken Word Harold Scheub Orality: The Power of the Spoken Word By Graham FurnissHoundsmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2004. xii + 188 pp. ISBN 1-4039-3404-5 cloth. Xhosa mythmakers told me that the myths that they performed are not truth; they are a means to truth. In Orality: The Power of the Spoken Word, Graham Furniss, Professor of African Language and Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, quotes Abubakar Imam, a Hausa writer: "[T]he only real issue as far as I am concerned is whether what the poet says is the truth, the real truth!" Furniss comments, "Truth value hadn't been part of my aesthetic. Was truth value the summation of the convergence of form and content?" (96). Furniss raises evocative questions regarding truth and the aesthetics of the spoken word. In seeking ways to link those, he provides promising oral material for analysis, from such diverse sources as Chief Standing Bear, Hubert Humphrey, Geoffrey Howe, Hausa performers, and to a lesser extent Martin Luther King and Gandhi. In an appendix, he makes an attempt to develop a close analysis of Geoffrey Howe's resignation speech: "Dotted underlining represents emphatic movements of the head and body, continuous underlining marks hand movements made to emphasize a point" (171). But such typographical efforts, used vainly by other scholars when discussing oral traditions, do little to reveal "rhetorical force," rhythms, and patterns in any but the most obvious way. An explanation of the effect of Howe's speech will not be found by merely parsing stresses in his sentences. History becomes important here: Margaret Thatcher's record, Howe's remembered speeches and the shift in emphasis in this particular speech, the atmosphere of the chamber and the attitude of the parliamentarians, all placed within the context of England and of a wider Europe at the time. Howe could have uttered his speech in staccato fashion and it would still have had an impact. The combination of stresses (and other aspects of performance as well), the evocation of emotions (the result in part of those stresses, but stress is but a fraction of the effect of emotions in performance), and the shift in Howe's historical attitude account for the impact. At issue is how history is communicated, the means of communication being an integral part of historical truth. It is not possible to separate truth and "the convergence of form and content"; they are identical. As Furniss learned from Abubakar Imam, the challenge has to do with the analysis of this convergence. The appraisal of Howe's body movement and the historical impact of his words has promise, but history and performance are not yet persuasively linked. [End Page 128] I was always sensitive, when watching Xhosa and Zulu storytellers perform, to the difficulties of capturing these performances in writing: the use of the body, a controlled kind of dance, the relationship with the audience, the deeply expressed and felt emotions evoked by the images, the use of rhythm in ordering the imagery . . . and I soon concluded that simply to use typography to reveal this was insufficient. Italic, bold print, and slashes are not useful devices; they only oversimplify the complex activity that is at the heart of oral performance, of the truths being conveyed. This is an interesting amalgam of sources, from Bakhtin to Croce. But Furniss does not provide, nor perhaps does he intend to do so, rigorous analyses of the works he has selected, analyses that might have given dramatic support to some of his philosophical contentions. He lays out some but by no means all of the challenges confronting scholars of oral tradition. He points to the complexity of oral performance, providing potentially useful examples from various oral traditions: there is no question that the words of Chief Standing Bear et al., had an effect. But why? how? Abdubakar Imam's insistence on "the real truth" is the issue. Truth is not merely words; it is the performance of those words. Harold Scheub University of Wisconsin-Madison Copyright © 2006 The Indiana University Press

The Works of Harold Scheub: The Bibliographer's View

The Works of Harold Scheub: The Bibliographer's View

Harold Scheub. The Poem in the Story: Music, Poetry, and Narrative. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. 316 pp. Illustrations. Prelude. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $60.00. Cloth. $24.95. Paper.

Harold Scheub. The Poem in the Story: Music, Poetry, and Narrative. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. 316 pp. Illustrations. Prelude. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 24.95. Paper. - Volume 47 Issue 1

The poem in the story: music, poetry, and narrative

Harold Scheub has conducted many investigations into nonverbal aspects of storytelling. In this work, he searches out what makes a story artistically engaging and emotionally evocative, the metaphorical centre that Scheub calls the poem in the story.

A dictionary of African mythology: the mythmaker as storyteller

In this marvelous collection of hundreds of fascinating, mysterious, and revealing tales, Harold Scheub captures the immense sweep and diversity of African mythology. Scheub offers an unprecedented collection of 400 stories, arranged alphabetically, that touch on virtually every aspect of religious belief. Here are gods and goddesses, epic heroes and divine tricksters, along with epics of the world's origins, the struggle between the human and the divine, and much more. 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. Here, for example, is the tale of Abu Zayd (from the Bani Hilal of Tunisia), an epic hero who battles a jinni; and here too is a myth of how the moon and the toad created the first man and woman, from the Soko of Congo. Scheub not only retells each story, but provides 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 explores 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. In A Dictionary of African Mythology, Harold Scheub has constructed an invaluable bridge to the richly diverse oral cultures of Africa. In this magnificent collection, he not only provides hundreds of fascinating myths, but recaptures their cultural contexts--in which story and storyteller, tradition and performance, all merge.

Strategies in translating oral narratives

Translating literary works from one language into another has become an acceptable practice. Various motivations are usually put forward as to why this is advisable. Translating oral narratives has its own problems. This contribution outlines some of these problems and discusses ways in which some of these problems have been handled by translators in the past. There has been and still is a lively debate in the USA regarding this issue. The translation of Native American oral narratives has attracted many scholars and there are many different views regarding the ideal way to undertake this task. Notable scholars in this field are Dennis Tedlock and Dell Hymes. Their strategies will be discussed as well as criticism thereof. This aspect has not received much attention in South Africa. The work of Harold Scheub (on Xhosa) and Makgamatha (on Northern Sotho) will be discussed. Some guidelines regarding translation in general and oral narratives in particular will be provided.

The World and the Word: Tales and Observations from the XHOSA Oral Tradition. By Nongenile Masithathu Zenani. Edited, with an introduction, by Harold Scheub. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. 499 pp. Hardbound, $39.95.

The World and the Word: Tales and Observations from the XHOSA Oral Tradition. By Nongenile Masithathu Zenani. Edited, with an introduction, by Harold Scheub. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. 499 pp. Hardbound, $39.95.

The world and the word: tales and observations from the Xhosa oral tradition

A master storyteller of the Xhosa people of South Africa, Nongenile Masithathu Zenani gives us an unprecedented view of an oral society from within. 24 of her 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 with Scheub's striking photographs of her in performance. text gives a combination of historical and cultural observations with a symbolic collection of tales from a single traditional storyteller. author presents to us the entire world of the 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 storyteller. Inheriting tales from the Xhosa tradition, Zenani has transformed them into imaginative new stories marked by her artistry. Scheub's introduction to The World and the Word discusses Xhosa oral tradition and Zenani's particular characteristics as an artist within that tradition; Zhenani's personal history and her work as both a storyteller and a healer; and Scheub's friendship with her and his role in recording her legacy.

Use of expansible images in the Northern-Sotho nonwane production

Harold Scheub's analysis of the folk-tale reveals that the action of the tale remains constant, but the dynamic creativity of the narrator is emphasized. His structural analysis is, therefore, not only based on the text, but also on the context in which the tale is told. In this article I apply this theory to the Northern-Sotho nonwane. In this theory the nonwane is approached not as a recorded text but as a performance, a production, and the social value of the tale is therefore taken into consideration.

Literature, Nonliterature, and Oral Tradition

OR THE GENERAL STUDENT of literature and literary criticism (if my own case can be taken as typical), an entry into the subject of oral literature is most conveniently made through Eric A. Havelock's study, Preliteracy of the Greeks. By and large, literary scholars are still in bondage to the prejudice of modern culture against illiteracy. Great works of literary art cannot, in the common opinion, be composed or transmitted without a system of literacy very much like the one we all know. If, however, that opinion could be made to accept Havelock's conclusion that Greek literary culture was in fact an oral culture until the last third of the fifth century, that writing was used only to transcribe texts that had been composed and transmitted through the rules of oral art and memorization, then the literary scholar will have been given an overwhelming incentive to discover what those rules might have been. In Havelock's opinion the rules were essentially rhythmic. This important point is amply illustrated from another culture by Harold Scheub's article, Body and Image in Oral Narrative Performance, in which nonverbal, bodily rhythms are shown to contribute to the sensuous experience of oral narrative by both audiences and performers, an aesthetic experience which in turn creates significant relationships among elements of the narrative that do not exist on the verbal level alone. Because Havelock, like most literary scholars, works from the rhythmic relicts of written texts, his use of evidence goes, first, toward discovering whether such texts were or were not products of a literate culture, and only secondarily toward an attempt to present the kind of full analysis of rhythmic systems that are perceptible to scholars possessing film and tape recordings of many oral performances. In Dell Hymes's article on Discovering Oral Performance and Measured Verse in American Indian Narrative, we have a provocative study illustrating how the investigator's awareness of the importance of rhythmic structures in oral narrative can lead him to discover still others, even from performances that have not been taped or filmed. The role of mousike in oral cultures will, I suspect, continue for literary scholars to be primarily one of demarking oral from nonoral composition. But this is not putting the matter in quite the right way. What for the literary scholar is more interesting than a text's orality is its relationship to the culture it occurs in. The more we can learn, for example from studies like M. Ngal's essay on Literary Creation in Oral Civilizations, about the role of the performer in relation to his or her tradition, the better idea we will have of how to talk about the nature and function of traditional narrative. Oral