Kaffir Folk-lore

Kaffir Folk lore is a collection of southern African folk tales gathered and edited by George McCall Theal, the Canadian born South African historian who lived from 1837 to 1919 and who produced an enormous body of historical and ethnographic writing on southern Africa across a long working career as a teacher, missionary collaborator, and government official in the Cape Colony and South Africa.

The term Kaffir was widely used by nineteenth century European writers and administrators in southern Africa to refer broadly to the various Bantu speaking peoples of the eastern Cape and Natal regions, particularly the Xhosa, Zulu, and related groups. The term is now widely recognised as deeply offensive in South African usage and is not used in any current academic or public context. The historical use of the term in books like Theal’s reflects the racial assumptions and the linguistic conventions of the nineteenth century European colonial period rather than any current usage.

Theal’s collection brings together folk narratives, riddles, proverbs, and other oral materials that he had collected directly from southern African informants or that he had gathered from the work of the various missionaries who had been working with the Bantu speaking peoples and recording their oral traditions across the previous decades. The tales include creation narratives, animal stories, human adventure stories, accounts of various traditional cultural practices, and the kind of riddle and proverb material that the European folklorists of the period were systematically collecting from oral traditions across the world.

The collection belongs to the substantial body of nineteenth century European ethnographic and folkloric work that recorded the oral traditions of African and other non European peoples. The methodological standards of the field were still developing during the period when Theal was working, and the modern academic discipline of folklore studies and African oral literature has substantially refined the methods that Theal and his contemporaries used. The materials Theal preserved remain valuable as one of the earliest substantial English language records of southern African oral tradition, even where the methodological assumptions and the particular interpretations he offered have been substantially revised by later scholarship.

The book is of interest now primarily to specialists in southern African oral literature, in the history of European ethnographic and folkloric work, and in the colonial period sources for southern African cultural history.