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Then three, a constant visitor is very often the one who turns against you, your friend... ...the one you like is the one who arrests you. Then four, a woman does not keep any secrets. You may have killed an animal in the bush, if a woman had seen it then she will reveal that secret. She will say, ″He killed an animal.″ (Kabuswe C. Nabwalya, explaining a brief mulumbe, at Nabwalya) In the 1988-89 academic year at the University of Zambia, I made two trips to Nabwalya in the Luangwa Valley. Th...

Umusha afwa nefyebo mu kanwa [A slave dies with words in his mouth](Stanley Kalumba 1989) Accepted African oral literature scholarship, under normal circumstances, harbors a built-in mechanism to silence the African voices. By concomitantly reducing African oral performance to writing, and their performers to the role of ″informant,″ the collectors/editors, with the best of intentions, promote themselves to the status of the heroic midwife of an exercise in literary parturition for the intern...

Ubushiku bwaluba umukote, ne cimbwi cinye mfwi.[The day an old person gets lost[in the bush], you will find white hairs in the hyena’s dung.] The discursive style of this study leans toward a combination of description, reflexive commentary, published scholarly data, consultation with colleagues and cautious analysis. In this chapter I will combine the description of how I arranged the session with my personal travel to and brief stay in the village of Chief Puta. I will also provide some of ...

Katongo Soolo: Who is lisping out words? Don't you realize it is the teeth which make people speak properly? Audience member: What do you want to speak with? And you even have teeth, those are your health. KS: Mukwai, unless the tongue is touching the teeth you can't... Audience: Yes, we have all grown old, all the teeth are gone. (Performance by Mr. Katongo Soolo at Malole, 1989) The focus of this chapter is three performance-recording sessions in two locations in the home region of the Bemb...

Lukhero's essay forcefully raises the question of the extent to which ethnographers, and in particular indigenous ethnographers, can gain access to the sentiments of the people they study without being captured by them. This empirical question is perhaps not as important as the disciplinary query: should the committed ethnographer solicit capture or try to avoid it?J.A. Barnes, 1999/2000, cited in Schumaker, p. 259 At around the time I was finishing a monograph on the fictional oral narrative...

Storytelling plays an important part in the vibrant cultural life of Zambia and in many other communities across Africa. This innovative book provides a collection and analysis of oral narrative traditions as practiced by five Bembaspeaking ethnic groups in Zambia. The integration of newly digitalised audio and video recordings into the text enables the reader to encounter the storytellers themselves and hear their narratives. Robert Cancel's thorough critical interpretation, combined with these newly digitalised audio and video materials, makes Storytelling in Northern Zambia a much needed addition to the slender corpus of African folklore studies that deal with storytelling performance. Cancel threads his way between the complex demands of African fieldwork studies, folklore theory, narrative modes, reflexive description and simple documentation and succeeds in bringing to the reader a set of performers and their performances that are vivid, varied and instructive. He illustrates this living narrative tradition with a wide range of examples, and highlights the social status of narrators and the complex local identities that are at play. Cancel's study tells us not only about storytelling but sheds light on the study of oral literatures throughout Africa and beyond. Its innovative format, meanwhile, explores new directions in the integration of primary source material into scholarly texts. For Margaret and Avelino Cancel, Helen and Jack Finnigan, Paul Nsama, Anna Chilombo, Viv Shone, Stanley Kalumba, Booker Kapapula, Paul Chisakula, William Musonda and Rabbon Chola Ancestors all.

A fieldworker cannot but take events out of context and people out of their lives. The injustice of shaping other people’s lives around a research budget and university calendar is only vaguely implied in this short discussion. Zambians are not monolingual, nor do they have to fit into the neat categories that the researcher needs to think with, in order to turn noise into signal. Whether one is rural or urban, localist or cosmopolitan, one is always creating meaning. This involves the endogi...

The collection of oral traditions is a process that usually combines simple electronic recording of living events with the more complicated elements of establishing relationships with the performers and their audience, negotiating the time, place and compensation for their efforts, and observing and noting information not readily obtained by videocamera or tape recorder. The process is rendered more difficult when the researcher is working with people, or in an area, that he or she does not k...