Once were Stories:

Background

In 1987, at the age of five, I left my parental home to go and live with Bina Winnie. She lived in village Buumba. Buumba is my maternal ancestral village in Chitongo, in the hinterland of Mazabuka in southern Zambia. Buumba was my home for five years, and Bina Winnie was my biological mother's elder sister. Because of her elder position to my mother, Bina Winnie, also known as ba Malita, according to buTonga, was my older mother. It was in those years, living with artistic ba Malita, that I entered primary school. More than entering the education system that has set me up for the journey here, I was initiated into the buTonga practice of Storytelling. ba Malita was a consummate artist who pottered, pounded corn and cooked while accompanying herself with pervasive tunes. She spontaneously broke into song and dance. During ceremonies, she led crowds into ritual music and dance. Her artistry stayed with her until it was her turn to enter the communion of ancestors. I revelled in ba Malita's free-spiritedness. She lived fully and kept the faith of the community a celebrated matriarch for many years.

Mythological Patterns

Imagine me sitting around a moonlight fire, surrounded by my kins, waiting to hear a tale from ba Malita at the end of the day. As a child, I knew that the lure of the night was listening to stories of lions and elephants supported by musical refrains. Stories of animals played an essential role in organising the community. The animals would take on human qualities of attentiveness, pleasure, and delight. These tales were folklore passed down from generation to generation, an important tradition and custom. Many mythological stories explained how the world came into existence. BaTonga, like most people of Africa, did not use written language until modern times. Instead, they possessed rich and complex oral traditions, passing myths, legends, and history from generation to generation in spoken and sung form.

BaTonga have professional storytellers—called Basikwaana—who preserved the oral tradition. Basikwaana use musical poetry and prose narratives, aphorisms, riddles, tongue twisters, praise names, and praise poetry and verbal formulas to tell stories of origin, community and humanity (buntu) (Bascom, 1964). Apart from generalised accounts of African mythology, baTonga tales began to appear in the early 1800s, and present-day scholars labour to record the continent's folklore, myths and legends before they are lost to time and cultural change (Bascom, 1964).

African mythologies were filled with supernatural beings or deities influencing human lives, while others were spirits of ancestors. BaTonga mythology is filled with spirits, invisible beings with powers for good or evil (Moonga, 2019). The ritual of Storytelling honours the deities. What might appear as a simple storytelling session carries symbolisms of celebrating ancestry. The spirits of dead ancestors remain around their living descendants to help and protect them – as long as these relatives perform certain rituals and pay them due respect (Knappert, 1995). The storytelling ritual follows a set pattern, call and response, narrative, chorus with climax, and the anticlimax. The design is venerated as appeasement to the ancestors and spirits. Such Storytelling is a community exercise in reenacting the collective memory of the clan. A clan among baTonga is a group bound by a devotion to a particular person, belief, or god (Colson, 2006). This is the culture ba Malita initiated me into in the five years I lived with them. I constantly return to that initiation to appreciate my buTonga possessing rich and complex oral traditions.

Situation Review of Storytelling

Storytelling is ubiquitous in every human community. The forms differ depending on many historical factors, such as forms of documentation. In some cultures, Storytelling has taken the form of writing, film, and art. While writing and film are amiable forms of Storytelling, spontaneously spoken stories are vital in that we cannot capture them in words on a piece of paper with ink or even on film.

In most traditional Africa, we are faced with a clash of cultures, evidently resulting from the continent's colonisation. We sit with the push for literary advancement on the one hand and the seduction of culture preservation on the other. The academic environment is interestingly advancing more liberal undertakings that encourage the pursuit of the diversity of voices. However, the more western inclined canon still bears the burden of demonising primal orientations for indigenous communities. Post-colonial academia expands the field of investigation to include indigenous knowledge systems as a valid form of knowledge production in the world's knowledge economy. Academic democratisation adds permanence to some of our folklore, authenticating the plasticity of artful Storytelling.

Extensively, amiable thinkers have articulated the force of stories and myths in enlivening individuals and communities (Moonga, 2019). Houston (1987), Campbell (1977), Campbell and Moyers (1988), Abram (1996), Moore (1992), and Berry (1988) have authoritatively written about the role of mythology in community building and ecological harmony. Writing about African cosmology, Oruka (1972), Idowu (1973), Afigbo (1997a, 1997b), and Okpewho (1983, 2009) bring to mind the role of mythology as traditional tales of a people, gods, nature, and the universe as they know them. The accounts portray the interrelationships of all beings. Societies pass mythological stories on from one generation to another. The telling of such stories is not limited to facts. Abram (1996), in the Spell of the Sensuous, captures it aptly when he writes:

Story Songs

Most stories I heard had refrains that the story hearers joined in. I imagine that the chorus had multiple functions to keep the listeners connected to Sikwaana (Single storyteller-Basikwaana is plural). Staying in tune as a whole story community emphasises that Storytelling is never the preserve of the storyteller. Stories are always a community activity. The following story I heard ba Malita tell is an example of shared Storytelling.

Significance of the Stories

I suggest that these stories are a representation of art, craft, and community. As I mentioned earlier, Storytelling is a way of building community. Stories allow people to gather. Joining in the story-song is participating in making the story come alive (Tuwe, 2016). Our chorusing in the story lifts our waking consciousness to an imaginal space where community happens (Moonga, 2019). Inspiration cultivates the imaginal realm. These stories bear beauty, truth and goodness. They are also attractive because they raise our consciousness to a domain where our highest values and ideals become essential.

The story's function is to potentially teach and inspire the community to reach for higher purposes. Because stories are non-judgmental, they do not seek to emphasise what is right or wrong, and they transcend tribalism and supremacy because privilege is shared. In buTonga Storytelling, the narrator never concludes by aligning the account to a moral. Whatever the perceived lessons in the story for the community, the participants make their interpretations in time. I believe that the story-centric approach is why stories continue to influence participants long after the voices have become silent. As an adult, I continue to draw inspiration, amusement and counsel from the tales I heard in my childhood. I catch myself often when a memory of a tale offers me perspective or counsel. A story is a call for the possible relationships that linger in the hearers' consciousness for life.

Perhaps in our quest to make the world better and our relationships healthier, we must tell stories. We can huddle around a story. I wonder how the practice of baTonga storytelling tradition would enrich music therapy. As demonstrated in the story, I have shared above, singing in stories galvanises the community. The singing lifts the collective consciousness to a level that transcends the limitations of daily struggle. In that shared realm, our lives can heal and expand.

As we celebrate black aesthetics, we could challenge ourselves to invoke that beauty's intangible expressions, exterminated through colonialism. Colonialism reduced our experiences to redactable and measurable contingencies. Colonial instruction and subsequent distancing of local life-affirming rituals diminished the story to morality and function. We became robotic in our relationships as the concrete was privileged against inspiration and aspiration. I will leave you with the second half of the poem called Just Questions.