Children in Nama and Damara tales of magic

Folklore, August, 2005 by Sigrid Schmidt

Abstract

This essay focuses on the narrative traditions of the Nama-speaking peoples in Namibia, South Africa. It describes tales in which children are the main protagonists and discusses the character of African tales of magic. It shows that in these tales the "laws" of tale-telling that are known from studies of Western tales by Axel Olrik and Max Luthi, for example, are stronger than a desire to depict reality. The African tales about children are compared with Western ones about children, particularly in relation to the ATU 327 complex. The paper suggests that both these European tales and African tales of magic should be treated as a special subgenre.

Introduction

In spite of an increasing number of studies on African folklore, our knowledge of African folktales is still limited. Valuable results have been achieved in relation to certain aspects of this field of scholarship due to the application of structural, performance-orientated or literary theories, for example, to the material in question (cf. the summary by Geider 2003, 104-20). Particularly informative are the studies made by the group of French scholars who combine linguistics, ethnography and comparison and aim at understanding the underlying worldview of the tales (Paulme 1976; Calame-Griaule 1987; Gorog-Karady 1988). The general tendency of African tale studies is to demonstrate how far the life and thinking of the narrator and his/her cultural group are reflected in their tales. European folklorists, on the other hand, have shown that European tales of magic, in particular, do not represent the actual world, for these tales, in addition to the marvellous elements that they contain, are also highly stylised in their structure. It is debatable, therefore, to what extent general conclusions about the world of the narrators might be drawn from them. In this paper I intend to investigate the relationship between the actual world and the world of the folktale by using ethnological and folkloristic studies, in order to illuminate the character of African tales of magic in general. [1]

As this is a vast subject area, I shall focus on attitudes to, and the role of, children in the tales of the Nama and Damara peoples of Southern Africa. [2] I have carried out fieldwork in many areas of Namibia since 1960. These two ethnic groups, who share the same language, together with their cousins, the Bushmen (San), form the Khoisan peoples, the original inhabitants of Southern Africa. These people were nomadic hunters and herders prior to the coming of white people into Namibia during the nineteenth century, but archaeological evidence shows that the Khoisan peoples had been in contact with their Kintu-speaking (Bantu-speaking) neighbours for at least fifteen hundred years (Denbow 1984). The folklore of these two hundred thousand Nama-speakers reflects this cultural and ethnic diversity. To a core of regional folklore, pan-African stories and international tales of Asian and European origin have been interwoven over the centuries to form the heritage of the tradition bearers. The number and variety of the tales that have been written down from the Nama and Damara peoples since 1779 is indeed impressive (cf. Schmidt 1989). Tales are usually told to children by the older members of the family but any adult interested in listening to, or telling tales, may participate in the tale-telling session. Tales of magic are mainly told by women but occasionally also by men. In contrast to other African culture groups, the Nama and Damara tales have no formulaic introductions or endings that are spoken or sung by the performer and the audience in common, nor does the audience join in the singing of the verses intended to be sung within the text.

While describing the role of children in narratives I want to elucidate the inner character of African tales of magic (Zaubermarchen). Many Western readers deny that there are any such tales of indigenous African provenance. They assert that African tales are too realistic, that myth, legend, folktale and joke have not been distinguished. Max Luthi, for instance, regards African tales as being close to the marchen. He asserts that daydreams, feverish dreams, ecstasy, shamanistic rapture, belief in magic and magic rites, belong to the roots of the marchen, but the marchen itself with its "weightlessness" is a late development in folklore and not yet to be found among "primitive" peoples (Naturvolker) (Luthi 1962, 66-7; 1964, 35-6). The main misunderstanding in relation to African tales of magic arises from the meaning and use of the term "marchen." It is used, on the one hand, as a name for folktales in general; consequently, it frequently happens that all the tales in a collection of oral lore appear under the term marchen. On the other hand, the term is reserved for Zaubermarchen or "Tales of Magic," tale-types 300-749 in Antti Aarne's and Stith Thompson's The Types of the Folktale (1961) and in the recently-published Hans-Jorg Uther's The Types of the International Folktales (2004). In fact, in some collections like Marchen aus Neuseeland (Jakubassa 1992) and Marchen aus Australien (Loffler 1981), I have not found a single item that would fit into the category of Zaubermarchen.