Telling tales leads
Storytellers at a festival of books emphasise that the oral tradition plays an important role in the process of learning to read
The theme of this year’s Nozincwadi Storytelling and Book Festival is “From the Bones of Memory”. It is an evocative theme for the 10th edition of the festival. When one considers the festival’s international reach, something that founder Gcina Mhlophe says evolved organically since she hosted the event on her birthday in 2008, it is easy to consider how uniquely the theme can be interpreted by storytellers because of their varied diasporic experiences.
Speaking to storytellers working with the oral forms, one quickly realises that the Western education system imposes a hierarchy of importance of one storytelling form over another.
For Mhlophe, the festival, which started as a literacy campaign and has morphed into a combination of the literary and oral forms, emphasis is placed on both, because “I live and breathe the written word and oral tradition”.
For someone like Philippa KabaliKagwa, the oral and the written forms are equally important, because they bring different skills to the table and using both of them is important.
“A lot of parents say they don’t know how to tell stories or they have forgotten how to do that,” says Kabali-Kagwa. “But I think school, a lot of times, silences that. There’s a great focus on Western stories and there’s a great focus on reading.
“But what they don’t realise is that the oral tradition of storytelling is very helpful towards reading because of what it does. It’s my imagination as a storyteller connecting with your imagination as a reader. If in the story I say ‘There was once a very, very tall tree and under the tree was a hut’, that tall tree you imagine might not be the same tree that I imagine, but you imagine a tall tree and you imagine a hut and you imagine what the people do and you hear what the people do.
“If I say he had big, black hair and a voice like thunder, you imagine that. What happens then is that you begin to create these pictures, and when you read a story you read it with expression because you have heard language.”
Although the oral forms have to live side by side with technology, Kabali-Kagwa believes they are not under threat as such, because storytelling is an integral part of what makes us human.
“A lot of people don’t use the form nowadays,” she says. “I don’t think a cellphone beats being in the presence of someone who is telling you a story. But there is space for all