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The Tongue Is Fire: South African Storytellers and Apartheid by Harold ScheubReview by: Duncan BrownThe International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1 (1999), pp. 169-171Published by: Boston University African Studies CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/220832 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 169

THE TONGUE IS FIRE: SOUTH AFRICAN STORYTELLERS AND APART- HEID. By Harold Scheub. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. Pp. xxvii, 448, 27 illustrations. $55.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Harold Scheub is one of the leading scholars on oral literature in South Africa, and his new book is an important contribution to this growing field of study. The book offers a variety of oral stories, poems, and genealogies for the most part by Xhosa and Zulu performers whom Scheub recorded between 1968 and 1976. These stories and poems are an invaluable addition to the corpus of South African literature, and Scheub is to be congratulated for his work in bringing them to a wider audience. The book is divided into five sections, each beginning with a critical Introduction by Scheub. There is also a Preface, in which Scheub offers some insights into the question of oral literature and history, and an Introduction that offers a brief historical overview of events in South Africa. Scheub is careful to provide information about the nature of each performance "event" so as to assist the reader in lifting the texts imaginatively off the page.

He argues that the aim of the book is to give "voice to the observers and commentators, the storytellers and poets and historians who are seldom heard from outside of their immediate environs" (p. xv). He claims that he has "purposely kept out of the way" (p. xvii), so as to allow the poets and storytellers themselves to be heard. Herein lies my first question about this book. Scheub gives only half a page of discussion (the brief Note on p. xxvii) to his own role as transcriber and translator of the stories. Hence, while he wishes as editor to "keep out of the way," he has in fact simply obscured or concealed his own role as mediator. Scheub has dealt elsewhere with the question of how to put oral per- formances into printed and translated forms and I do not wish to question the bona fides of his project here. However, if one wishes to allow voices to speak "on their own terms," one needs to offer some detailed and coherent discussion of how these oral texts have come to appear in their present form on the page: what understandings of the translation and transcription process were involved? in what way were the voices allowed to call into question the editor's own assumptions and concerns? how were they allowed to retain a sense of their own "difference" or 6"strangeness"? on what bases were decisions about appropriate print forms made? and so on. The assumption that the editor is somehow a neutral conduit is simply untenable in terms of current theoretical developments in oral and literary studies, and oral scholars need to be both rigorous and explicit in articulating methodologies of transcription and translation, particularly if they wish to allow the performers something of their distinctiveness and "authenticity" of voice.

A second question about the book for me involves the notion of oral story- telling and history. Scheub's discussion reveals some sensitivity to the process of narrating history, especially the need to keep in balance the distinctiveness of the past and the exigencies of the present. Scheub attributes the sensitivity of this historical model to the oral historians themselves:

The purpose of history, [Tyabashe] insisted, was not simply to reconstruct the past, but to place that past into a contemporary context. To do that, to order the past in terms of the present, and to order the present in terms of the past, took the skills of a storyteller. It was not simply a narrative of the

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170 BOOK REVIEWS

past that interested Tyabashe, but the devising of a narrative that contained strands of the past interwoven with threads of the present: the rich combi- nation was the fabric of society (pp. xviii-xix).

Yet there is a problem with Scheub's argument, for having opened up the complex question of the construction of historical narratives, he wishes to close it (though he would probably not perceive his move as one towards closure) by gesture towards some essential meaning or truth: "Let Tyabashe have the last word.... The historian who is not a poet can only deal with surface chronologies, he insisted; the historian who is a poet takes us to essential history, to the meaning of human experience" (p. xxi). This idea that the storyteller provides access to historical truth is further developed in the Introduction to Part One: Cultivating the Past, in which Scheub reiterates the point that the storyteller "find[s] truth in the conjunction of the real and the imaginative" (p. 55). The sense of the poet or storyteller as providing the "true history" is both attractive and beguiling, but it simply returns us to Romantic views of the artist as inspired voice-views that have been severely critiqued by modem theory and that sit rather awkwardly with the complexity of Scheub's and Tyabashe's historical model, outlined earlier. Scheub argues in the Preface that his own critical approach in this book has largely been shaped by the ideas and approaches of the poets and storytellers themselves (p. xviii). However, the notion of historical narration might be one in which literary-critical paradigms might usefully be set in dialogue with the inter- pretive schemas of the Xhosa oral historians, to the mutual adaptation and benefit of both. A further problem regarding the narration of history is raised by Scheub's own Introduction: he offers an extremely simplified history of South Africa-very much a "history from outside"-which may be useful for an American readership, but which sits rather awkwardly with the complexity of the oral storytellers' visions, as well as with his own sense of the past-present dialectic of the historiographical/historiovocal project.

These reservations notwithstanding, Scheub's Introductions to the five parts of the book offer some cogent and compelling insights. He is especially inter- esting on Xhosa genealogies and their complex relationship with the poetic and narrative traditions. I was struck by the extraordinary detail of Chief Ndumiso Bhotomane's "Origins of the Xhosa," and the powers of memory and historical sense this account revealed. I could not help wondering, though, what non-South African readers would make of this (it comprises sixteen pages of dense genealogy)-even as a South African who works in the field of oral literature, I was often struck by the sheer "difference" of this text. Perhaps some acknowledg- ment of the difficulty of such texts for non-Xhosa readers is necessary.

In the Introduction to Part Two: Ambiguous Promise, Scheub directs atten- tion to the generic and formal complexity of the Xhosa storyteller's craft, par- ticularly the way in which a story often makes its meanings through exploiting the audience's assumptions and expectations of genre: breaking from one genre into another, or rupturing formal conventions so as to create new genres and new meanings. The Introduction to Part Three, which deals in some detail with the question of oral poetry and history, is also extremely illuminating, offering some careful textual analysis in support of its argument.

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BOOK REVIEWS 171

The stories and poems themselves are fascinating, revealing great verbal skill and highly developed social, spiritual, and historical understandings. While much has been written about the patriarchal nature of African societies, the women storytellers represented in this collection are shown to be important and respected members of their communities. Certain of the narratives also give central attention to women. In this regard, Nongenile Masithathu Zenani's autobiographical account of her own wedding deserves mention, as does her narrative of the heroic and mystical actions of Mityi, who becomes a political ruler in her own right. These kinds of narratives may serve further to undermine simple assumptions about the silence and subjection of women in "traditional" African life.

I found especially memorable the narratives of Part Four: Uncertain Hope: Lighting "An Uncontrollable Fire," which represent striking conjunctures of the mythological and historical. The first two narratives offer contrasting accounts of the Xhosa cattle killing of 1857 and the role of Nongqawuse, whose prophetic vision led to the slaughter of livestock and the scattering of grain reserves. The final four narratives treat the figure of Chakijana. In a striking collocation of nar- rative perspectives, Scheub includes accounts of the mythological and historical Chakijana (i.e., both the trickster of folklore and the Zulu guerrilla fighter) by the same narrator, Sondoda Ngcobo, who insists that the narratives "inform" each other, as well as two oral accounts of Chakijana by white narrators, one openly hostile to him (Frederick William Calverley) and the other revealing the bureau- cratic "distance" of the apartheid administrator (P.W. van Niekerk). These two narratives are among the most powerful I have encountered in South African history. In particular, the apparent lack of emotion in Calverley's narration of his father's decapitation of Bambatha's body heightens our sense of the grotesque nature of the act: the father carries the head in a horse's nosebag to Nkandla for identification by Bambatha's imprisoned relatives, and then returns-on the instructions of his superior-to stitch the head back onto the body and bury it.

While I have some reservations about Scheub's methodology and certain of his theoretical contentions, this book nevertheless seems of immense value both for its critical insights and for the oral texts it makes available.

DUNCAN BROWN

University of Natal, Durban

SLAVERY AND COLONIAL RULE IN FRENCH WEST AFRICA. By Martin A. Klein. African Studies 94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xxi, 354; 9 illustrations. $54.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

This book is must reading for anyone concerned with slavery studies, African studies, African Diaspora studies, and Islam. Klein's research, spanning some twenty-five years, draws extensively from the archival record while engaging the secondary literature when and where appropriate. At issue are questions sur-

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