Folk Tales of South Africa, Part 2 — three more tales from "Kaffir Folk-Lore" (1886) by George McCall Theal, who collected them from 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
0:38 — The Story of Simbukumbukwana
8:12 — The Story of Demane and Demazana
13:11 — The Story of the Bird that Made Milk
In the first, a man who longs for a child is promised a son without arms or legs, and his cast-out daughter grows up alone in the valley — until her charm gives her little brother limbs in secret, and his own wishes raise a house, a fire and a herd on the hillside. In the second, the orphan twins Demane and Demazana hide from cannibals in a cave, and when the cannibal Zim steals Demane's voice and carries his sister off in a bag, Demane puts a swarm of bees in her place. In the third — the Barolong telling of the bird that made milk — poor Masilo catches the bird that undoes his digging every night, and it fills his pots with milk in a famine year, until his children let it fly away and follow it out into the storm.
Source: George McCall Theal, "Kaffir Folk-Lore" (Cape Town, 1886), tales collected among the Xhosa of the Eastern Cape; the third tale is the Barolong telling of the same story, written down beyond the Orange River. 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 Five Heads", "The Story of a Girl Who Disregarded the Custom of Ntonjane", "The Story of Sikulume", "The Story of Hlakanyana", "The Story of Ironside and His Sister", "The Story of the Cannibal's Wonderful Bird", "The Story of the Cannibal Mother and Her Children", "The Story of the Girl and the Mbulu" and "The Story of Mbulukazi" — and are named here so that nothing is silently missing. The first telling of "The Bird that Made Milk" remains excluded, as named in Part 1; the telling heard here is the Barolong version, read and included on its own substance.
Opening and closing theme: "Subterranean Earth" (instrumental), with the same theme between the stories. No music plays under the narration.
Narration: Silas.
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