Folk Tales of South Africa, Part 1 — three tales from "Kaffir Folk-Lore" (1886) by the Rev. George McCall Theal, who collected them from Xhosa storytellers in the Eastern Cape and printed the tales in English as he heard them. Our telling follows Theal's text throughout. The word in his book's title is a period term that was already an insult and is a grave slur today; it appears nowhere in this episode, and the tales are billed, simply and accurately, as the folk tales of South Africa.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
THE STORIES
0:00 — The Story of Tangalimlibo
14:33 — The Story of the Wonderful Horns
18:10 — The Story of Lion and Little Jackal
In the first, a childless wife is given little pellets by a bird and bears a daughter, Tangalimlibo, whose suitor must carry her home without once looking back at the sound of the little bell at her waist. In the second, a poor man's son finds a pair of wonderful horns that pour out food and riches — and learns what a chief will do to take them. In the third, Little Jackal talks his way out of Lion's jaws again and again, until the day Lion ties a stone to the rope.
Source: George McCall Theal, "Kaffir Folk-Lore" (Cape Town, 1886), tales collected among the Xhosa of the Eastern Cape. Public domain: the text was published in 1886 and Theal died in 1919. Read in full before inclusion; tales whose substance is violence were left out of this episode by name — among them "The Story of the Bird that Made Milk" in its first telling, "The Story of the Hare", "The Glutton", "The Great Chief of the Animals", "The Runaway Children", "The Story of Kenkebe" and "The Story of the Long Snake" — and are named here so that nothing is silently missing.
Opening and closing theme: "Subterranean Earth" (instrumental), with the same theme between the stories.
Narration: Morgana.
