A storyteller’s search for a reading culture

_______________

OPINION

By Edna Namara

Long ago in my village in Rukiga district, my childhood peers and I used to gather around a fire at dusk to listen to stories told by Shwenkuru – the storyteller. With flames dancing in our eyes and crickets chirping in the darkness around us, we were entranced by the old man’s magical tales.

I remember one story about a bitter dispute that broke out between a lion who owned a bull and a hyena who owned a cow. When the hyena’s cow produced calves, the lion became jealous and claimed that he owned them. The hyena asked others – first a buffalo and then a wolf – to mediate, but they fled when the lion bared his teeth at them and clawed the ground. That left a small hare as a possible middleman, but this diminutive fellow added a twist to the controversy: He said he had no time to listen to the case because he had to care for his father, who had given birth.

“How can you say your father gave birth?” the lion snarled. “Do men give birth, you lying cheat?” The hare softly replied, “If men don’t give birth, how did your bull give birth?” Nearby, a squirrel and a fox exchanged knowing looks, and birds started chirping, and a monkey nodded its head from a tree. Realising he was cornered, the lion gave up the fight and wandered off to sulk.

My friends and I were delighted. We relived the story long after the embers of the fire had died and we had gone home. We saw it mostly as an enjoyable pastime, but on some level, we also absorbed a lesson: Wisdom is more important than physical strength. Schwenkuru’s other stories, many of them rooted in our cultural heritage, had similar effects, instilling in us a shared code that stressed the importance of character, using one’s head and community spirit.

Alas, the fireside lessons have been abandoned, not only in our village but in others where other elders viewed storytelling – and through it moral teaching – their responsibility. Schwenkuru eventually died, undoubtedly disappointed since he was now largely ignored.

My friends and I, meanwhile, had started going to school, where we felt endless pressure to pile up successes that our teachers said would ensure us “better futures” – a lesson teachers enforced with canes whenever our attention lapsed.

But chalk, desks, canes and bells that arbitrarily carve up time couldn’t replace the fireplace and human warmth of days past. We felt bereft of the sense of community we once enjoyed.

Later, when I returned from secondary school for the holidays, I found a vacuum. I would meet my former story gang on village pathways, but they would go their way and I mine. The code that had connected us to our ancestors and to each other was lost.

I remember Shwenkuru and his stories to this day. I believe there is no life without stories – no better connection between yesterday, today and tomorrow that unites kinsmen.  As I reached adulthood, I aspired to be a storyteller too.

Recently, I joined forces with a group of writers to produce a book that explores Ugandan cultures. Our stories, all factual, described wise patriarchs, powerful matriarchs, and age-old clans that unite people as nothing before or since. They also celebrated Ugandan adaptability, exemplified by freedom fighters who resisted colonial rule, professional translators and street-smart urban youth who bridge our linguistic divides, healers who seek to preserve traditional knowledge in the face of attacks from missionaries and modern medics, and citizen journalists who have used everything from the taxi system to the Internet to spread news to the public.

And just as Shwenkuru’s stories sometimes scared members of my childhood circle, my adult associates boldly shined a light on our many challenges – from spiritual struggles to economic woes, from declining economic conditions to the slow death of villages and whole ways of life.

We gave our book a paradoxical name: “Remembering the Future.” What does that mean? Perhaps that clues to our future can be found in our past. Like it or not, we are shaped by our past and can neither understand ourselves nor choose what we want to become unless we learn from it. In remembering, we build the future.

Unfortunately, Shwenkuru’s brand of oral storytelling doesn’t fit so well in today’s world, though. People have busy schedules, and many decisions rest not just at the village level but in discourse among varied people in a larger and widely dispersed population. Storytelling now resides largely on the printed page. But can it reach people in a society widely known to lack a reading culture?

I must admit I am not sure. I see today’s children isolated in their absorption with gadgets and fluent mostly in the quick one-liners of social media. In such a society, can culture survive? Will our children know their lineage and roots? And if they don’t, are we condemned to becoming a people who are educated but inept at living harmoniously – able to exercise our brains but not our humanity?

I recently found hope in a visit to a group of schools in Rukiga. My immediate goal was to share with students a “Remembering the Future” story I wrote that compares marriage in my grandmother’s time to today. In earlier days, kiga girls would get married almost immediately after meeting their husbands, with little or no courtship, yet their marriages usually lasted their whole lives. In contrast, modern weddings often come after long periods of courtship, but marriages end quickly.

Brides of my grandmother’s day often are seen today as forlorn figures, forced into arranged marriages – literally sold, by some interpretations, in exchange for contributions from the grooms’ families. An older woman I described in my story didn’t dwell on “bride price,” though. She recalls being nervous and sad on her wedding day, singing a sorrowful song as she left the family into which she was born.

But her new family showered her with love, carrying her like a queen up and down steep hills in a woven stretcher to her marital home, where she was greeted by her new family with outstretched arms and a joyful song.

The welcome calmed her nerves, enabling her to set out with her husband to build lives together. In old age, she looked back on a marriage that blossomed into a life-long love, and she expressed pride that she and her husband had fulfilled their obligations to each other and to their community.

I was afraid that today’s students would dismiss the story on the modern presumption that whatever is new is better than what is old, but they listened avidly and were eager to share their reactions. Some took the story much as I took Shwenkuru’s tale of the hare and the lion – as a fable from a mythic time that held lessons for today.

At Bukinda Secondary School, students acknowledged that marriage can evoke bittersweet feelings about leaving a cherished past for an uncertain future. In Kihanga Secondary School, a girl found it remarkable that a marriage between people who barely knew each other endured until death.

Another asserted that a couple could not possibly live together till death if their wedding came so hastily. But a fellow student said it can take years for people to get to know each other – even after their wedding. “Do you actually think you can know someone so well?” she asked, noting that individuals even fail to understand themselves. What’s required, she said, is a positive “mindset” – a commitment to face marriage with its challenges.

In Brainstorm Academy, the book sparked a discussion about stories themselves and the nature of generation-spanning discourse. After reading the bride’s story, a student suggested that older generations today aren’t doing enough to share wisdom with youth. Parents, he suggested, think sex education should be part of the curriculum, while teachers say they are required to teach the formally established curriculum, which doesn’t include sex education.

The result is a “blame game,” with adults faulting each other rather than actually teaching students something that will shape their futures in important ways. When I asked him what he meant, he replied bluntly: “I will teach my children what I know, but if there is nothing I am taught, I will teach them nothing.”

In a later discussion, the subject of bride price arose. A student from St Joseph’s School suggested the term was coined by foreigners to describe an indigenous custom that they neither understood nor embraced.

It’s not about money or wealth, he said. Marriage requires hard work, so a man must prove that he is ready for married life by presenting items produced from his sweat, he explained. “If I went for a wife and I am told to take her for ‘free,’ without paying any token of appreciation,” he said, “I would run away and never return.” A girl from Kashambya High School echoed that idea, suggesting that people naturally sweat for what they love, so the bride price is an expression of deep love.

Of course, these are complex issues – ones that vex even many adults. Perhaps bride price originally reflected the importance of making commitments, but has been adulterated by money (another topic addressed in “Remembering the Future”). The students’ thoughtful comments showed me that children today are smart and independent, able to ponder eternal truths even when times change.

I was gratified to see that today’s youth are still sensitive to issues related to culture and eager to dig deeper into their roots, even as the global village threatens to swallow their own cultures. The children returned my sense of gratitude. More than one vowed to become writers themselves. Some even dug into their seemingly empty pockets to buy personal copies of the book.

Shwenkuru would be pleased.

The writer is a freelance writer based in Kampala.