Interview with Helen Nde: Mythological Africans, Deviance, and the Dark Side of Family in African Folklore

Introduction

CMR: Hello, welcome back to Eldritch Girl, and we have Helen Nde here today. We’ve been talking a lot about folklore and the dark side of family in the bonus episodes, and Helen’s going to talk to us specifically about the dark side of family and deviance in African folklore. So, Helen, would you like to introduce yourself?

HN: Thank you, and I’m so glad to be here. My name is Helen Nde, and I curate Mythological Africans. It’s a platform online where I talk about stuff that excites me. which is mainly African mythology and folklore. One of my favourite things to talk about recently. And it’s a pleasure to be here, really. It’s just a pleasure to be here and to be on the Eldritch Girl Podcast.

CMR: It’s really lovely to have you. What sort of relationships are we going to talk about today in some of the folktales that you’ve looked at?

HN: Sure. So. One of the things that really come through when you start looking at mythology and folklore from the African continent (and anywhere really) is, how family relationships work, and what they say about how people feel about how things should be, and their sense of how things go wrong. And I remember we started talking about this, you and I, when… after the talk I gave about deviance in African fiction.

CMR: Yes, Yes, it was a very good talk!

HN: And it was an exploration of how different communities, either in fiction or in folklore, deal with individuals who show up, but don’t show up in the expected ways.

 And one of the things that came through pretty strongly is that sometimes there is a lot of disruption that happens because these people, you know, are not adhering to the norms of the community, and sometimes this disruption is for the better. Sometimes it’s for the worse.

    One talk I gave also that you participated in was about the enfant terrible character, and you remember the story of the just, crazy, destructive kids who went on a rampage. So there is this sense that in some communities — and this shows up in their stories — the dynamics within families can take a bit of a dark turn, and often the trigger is an individual or a group of individuals who just show up in ways that are not expected.

And the stories then become the means by which the community makes sense of these individuals experiences, and the lessons that they learn from them. And this is a powerful way in which people around the world, not just on the African continent, make sense of things that are sometimes incomprehensible, make sense of things that are different, make sense of things that are strange.

    And ultimately the goal is to return to some kind of norm which you know sometimes doesn’t bode well for the characters in question, so it shows up in so many ways in the different relationships that will come up between husband and wife, between you know, parents and children, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, mothers and step children, which is the one that, you know, is quite well-known all around the world between siblings between in-laws and families. So it comes up in so many ways, and that dark side will really show up sometimes.

CMR: Yeah, definitely, I’m thinking like there’s quite a lot of parallels and things with some of the other folklore that we’ve looked at, because I’ve had a previous interview with Lucy, who did a short film on the relationship between a mother and daughter, and the way that that haunts you throughout your adult life, and that kind of thing, you know, those sorts of… how do you make sense of your loss and bereavement when you’ve had a very complicated relationship with [them], and that brought in a lot of Northern English folklore into that and a little bit of the superstition and that kind of thing. So yeah, this is interesting. I just love it.

HN: If you’re looking at, you know Northern English folklore, you’re looking at African folklore, or you’re looking at Asian folklore, folklore from out of the South America. So just anywhere in the world you find the same themes repeating themselves almost the same stories, the same struggles.

    That’s something that I find comforting. I find it reassuring that there is no experience that you have as a human being that is unique only to you, you know you might experience it in your own unique way, but someone out there has experienced what you’ve experienced before, and has dealt with it one way or another.

    And it’s one of my favourite things about curating Mythological Africans, because, you know, I come from Cameroon, which is a West African country. But in the course of some of the discussions I’ve had, we’ve had people from the Philippines, from Japan, from you know Russia from Poland, from you know the UK like yourself and from all over the world. You know Canada, South America, Mexico, and there is always a sense of oh, wow! That sounds like the story that I heard when I was a kid, or that I studied at school, and it’s exploring a similar theme. So in the darkness and in the light there is a commonality to the human experience. And I find that very reassuring.

Folklore and Gender Roles

CMR: Yeah, definitely, and also like ideas of gender roles and values and structures, they get kind of discussed a lot in terms of what community norms are and explored. So I wondered if we could look at some examples of that, so, folktales that talk about gender roles, either being subverted or supported, or how they work within the framework of their cultural background, and that kind of thing.

HN: Absolutely. So. What you find is that a lot of these stories will either reinforce gender roles as they need to be, in whichever community that the story comes out of, and you explore those gender roles, you enforce the values that exist around family structures, what people are expected to do, and that plays into the folktale’s role, as you know, a teaching tool. In many cases you people told these stories to remind each other of things to preserve something that happened in the community, so future generations could learn from it. And sometimes it was just pure entertainment, but entertainment with a purpose.

    And if we look at all these different family dynamics and the different turns in which they would go, you still find a lot of these gender roles, these values being reinforced. So. There are a variety of pills that explore the tensions that will come up between husbands and wives, for example. And the tendency for these stories is that you know the woman behaves in a way that is not out of the expectations of what she is supposed to be as a wife, and there are consequences for that.

 There is this collection of folktales which is basically an exploration into the erotic side of African folklore. And quite often the stories are those of women who are unfaithful.

    And You know the husband will either kill the lover or kill the woman, like, so those tend to be the outcomes. So you will find a case where, you know, a man deals faithlessly with a woman, and find himself in, you know, difficult circumstances gets caught, gets killed. So there is that dynamic that gets explored as well. If we look at the relationship between fathers and sons, for example, that can get really dark in a lot… in many, many stories that come out of the African continent because one in some communities there is the idea that okay, once a man reaches a certain age, he’s supposed to step aside and let the young generation come through.

    And if that man is not willing to do that, then a power struggle ensues between, you know, the sons and the fathers. So there are many folktales that explored this dynamic of the power struggle.

    The Mwindo epic is one of the big, you know long-running stories that come that have come out of a traditional African folklore, and that is essentially what it is all about. You had a king refused to hand over power, decided that he only wanted daughters because he didn’t want the son who would succeed him, and then, of course, his favourite wife gives birth to his son.

    And so the story starts with this chief, trying to murder his own son. You know that dark side comes through, and he doesn’t succeed because Mwindo his son is a magical being; not very easily killed.

    And so he tries to kill him, Mwindo, multiple times. He tries to drown him, tries to have him, you know, murdered with arrows, and none of those work.

    So Mwindo quickly grows up into a young man and decides well if he’s trying to kill me, then I have to kill him.

    So the rest of the story is window in hot pursuit of his father, you know, goes into the underworld, goes into the heavens just instance, after instance of Mwindo trying to catch and kill his father, and in some versions of the story it ends up with him, you know, catching and killing his father in some other versions. He catches up with his father, and, you know, forgives him, and, you know vanishes him there. There are different ways in which the story ends.

    But in the midst of all of that there are wars that are fought and lives that are lost, and alliances that are betrayed, you know it. It just explodes into this drama, you know, which has quite a bit of a dark site. But then there is also, you know, the story that comes out of one of my favourite stores in African folklore. It’s the Palm Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola.

And in this case he and his wife gives birth to a child.

And this child is just something else. He is one of those crazy, you know, magical child type characters who is just, you know, out for blood and doesn’t care. And in his case the child, whose name is Zurrjir, just wants to eat, and he eats everything in sight eats all that is available to the people. And if you’re looking at the culture where the ability to have food available for everyone is what underpins this community survival.

    A person who eats all the food, you know, it’s a massively disruptive character. But then the thing is, you can’t stop this child Zurrjir, you can’t stop this child. He would eat, and then if he tried to stop him, he would beat you up, and I’m going to read a little excerpt here because I love this story.

    I think it’s well worth delving into, so I’ll start right at where Zurrjir gets born, and maybe I’ll stop just before he gets killed, because that’s another dark aspect of this story. At the end of the day. This child, you know, has to be offed because he’s he just… He can’t be stopped. He can’t be stopped.

So a little excerpt from the Palm Wine Drinkard.

So, within the hour that he came down from the thumb, he grew up to the height of about 3 feet and some inches, and his voice by that time was as plain as if somebody strikes an anvil with a steel hammer.

    The first thing he did is ask his mother,

    “Do you know my name?”

His mother said no.

Then he turned his face to me and asked me the same question, and I said no.

    So he said his name was Zurrjir, which means a son who would change himself into another thing very soon.

    And when he told us his name, I was greatly terrified because of his terrible name.

    And while he was talking to us he was drinking the palm wine which I had tapped already.

And before 5 minutes he had drank up to 3 kegs out of the 4 kegs.

    I was thinking in my mind how we could leave the child in the farm and run to town, because everybody had seen the left-hand thumb of my wife, which had only swelled out.

    But she did not conceive in the right part of her body as other women do.

    As I was thinking so this child took the last keg of palm wine, which he ran through the left side of his head.

    And then he was going into town.

    And he knew where to go, though no one showed him the road that led to town.

    And we stood in one place looking at him as he was going, and then we followed him. After some time.

But before we reached the town we did not see him on the road.

To our surprise the child entered the right house, the house we were living in. He saluted everybody as if he had known them before and asked for food, and they gave him the food, and he ate.

He entered the kitchen and ate all the food that he met there as well.

    But when a man saw him eating the rest of the food in the kitchen which he had been, which had been prepared for the night.

He told him to leave the kitchen, and he did not leave, but started to fight the man instead.

And this wonderful child flogged the man so that he could not steal well before he left the kitchen.

And it just goes on and on. He will eat everything in sight, and anybody who tries to stop him will get a flogging. It spreads to the village, and it just it keeps escalating and escalating, and there’s nothing they can do to stop this child until they finally, how they get rid of him is that they abandon him with what you might think of as the fairies. So there are these 3 creatures, Song, Dance, and Drums. So Singing sings and never stops, Drumming drums and never stops, and Dancing dances, and never stops. And they finally bring this child to these creatures, and he starts singing and dancing, and you know, going with the drums, and they just quietly back away… [laughter] Like, ok, we’re going to leave you here now! Which, in many fairy tales that you’ll see around the world, it’s kind of a death sentence, because you just … you keep dancing on until you drop. That’s something that has shown up in some folktales in other parts of the world.

So. But before they even get to this point, there were many attempts to kill this child, you know to take away this power that he had because he just he couldn’t be stopped.

So that’s a quick example of how these family dynamics will show up between father and son, but then there is the mother and daughter dynamic as well, which tends to be centred around – not so much power struggles but around competition.     

So the woman, the older woman, realizes that she is aging, and she’s using losing the advantage of youth and beauty. And the daughter, who is, you know, becoming a woman, has this thing, and somehow you know it becomes a power struggle. So there’s a story from Congo where this a woman basically drowns her daughter because her daughter was beautiful, and had all the suitors in the village.

    And then luckily the child is seized by the water spirits, and you know, shows up to help her brother, and you know it escalates until the end, and the mum gets killed.

There is also a story, and I believe this is from the Fulani people, and the Fulani are a group of people who occupy most of West Africa, spread across many of the countries, and it’s the story of a woman. She’s of the devouring mother, you know, Goddess Archetype, and she basically she was created, Her name is and Ndjeddo Dewal, and she was sent by the Fulani creator being called Guéno, to punish the Fulani people for their sins. So she she’s one of those you know darker type figures.

    And she’s powerful, and, you know, able to do just about anything she wants, and she is very, very ugly. She marries an equally magnificent being. But then she gives birth to 7 of the most beautiful girls in the world, and that becomes her way of getting access to power, because she sets her daughters up so that when their suitors will come seeking to marry them, they would, you know, go into the bridal sheet.

    And when they start having intercourse with the girls, through some system of tubes, the mother will start sucking blood out of these suitors. And she will always go too far, and then the young men will die.

But then the girls will, you know, regenerate their powers. They’ll get their hymens back, and more men will come. So basically through her daughters, this woman was… you know.

    And that speaks to that dynamic that can exist sometimes between mothers and daughters, right? The idea that a woman is living vicariously through her children, that overbearing, devouring, you know “you can’t escape me” type of energy that will come through sometimes.

    So you’ll see this a lot in in folktales which you know it’s obviously a cautionary tale to say, hey, this is not the way to be, and the tendencies that these figures, these maternal figures, will get, you know, defeated eventually in the case of Ndjeddo Dewal, she’s defeated by like, I can’t pronounce his name well, because I get the emphasis wrong sometimes.  She is defeated by Bâgoumawel.

    I think I’m saying that right?

    And this is an enfant terrible type character. So a smart child who is able to outwit the old woman and bring about her destruction.

If we want to look at mothers and step-children, that’s the standard. You know story that you’ll see across all cultures. There is a story, and I believe this is from – I think it’s Kikuyu people in Kenya, where a woman has her own child, and she has a child from her husband’s previous marriage, and because she doesn’t want to give this child food, she basically sets his child up to get killed, and she hides the child’s body in the storage like the granary.

But then the child’s half sibling. You know figures out what has happened, and the story is just this other child’s efforts to communicate to their father that oh, this is what has happened, you know, and eventually the woman gets caught, and there is punishment. So that dynamic being explored, the step-mother/step-child dynamic that you’ll see in many folktales, there is sibling rivalries. One of my favourite stories, which I heard growing up is about these: brother and sister, who go out to collect flowers and to impress their feather, and the girl finds flowers that are more beautiful than her brothers and her brother, in a city of rage murdered her right. But she that’s where she murders her, abandons a body in the forest. It decays down to bones and a hunter goes by where she died and steps on her bones, and she started singing her story. And you know the story evolves, and eventually the brother is found out, and in some versions of the story he gets killed. In some versions of the story he is patterned because the chief goes, he you already lost one child. There’s no reason for us to you know, Kill another child.

    So there is stories about families and the in-laws. And this, you know, demonstrates that that that dynamic that can occur sometimes. If your in-laws are too much in your marriage, then you can mess things up. But then, if your in-laws, if your family is not involved, if, you know, you are an entity onto yourself, then you lose out on the benefits of being part of a community. So it explores the currents of that, too, and of course, a cautionary tales, you know, between parents and children. Parents, this is how you should treat your children.

The story we looked at in the enfant terrible talk is an example of that where the problem was that the parents told the children to be loyal to each other, no matter what.

    So they had this one child who was just on a destructive rampage, and his sister, you know, felt like she had to be loyal to him regardless.

   But then there is also cautionary tales towards children, you know, saying you have to listen to your parents, and this shows up in so many tales.

    A classic one being the one where a girl decides to marry a man, and her parents are like, we don’t think this is a good idea, and she ignores that advice, and then she gets carried away, and then she’s almost killed. So there are all these stories, all of them, you know, steeped in the dark dynamics that will come up sometimes in families, conveying different messages, all ultimately saying, hey, this is how we expect you to behave. This is the these are the values we uphold. These are the general rules we endorse, and if you deviate from these, these are the consequences that can come out of it.

CMR: I love that. I was just thinking while you were talking like I’ve heard … I don’t think I’ve heard the singing bones story. But I have heard a similar one where I was just thinking of the Scottish version of that. She’s murdered by her sister, and she’s drowned because her sister is jealous of her because of a lover that her sister wants, that she has. So she drowns her, and then she’s found, her body is found and pulled out of the water, and   her bones are turned into a musical instrument. And the musical instrument is taken to the court, because obviously we’re in a sort of the Princess kind of, you know, that sort of context, and that it’s played for her father, the King, and it plays and sings the story of her murder, and accuses the sister of killing her. And so the whole story comes out, while the musical instrument it is played, and sometimes it’s a harp, and sometimes it’s a violin, and the strings are her hair, and you know her finger bones are the tuning pegs, and that kind of thing, you know, like it’s this really weird instrument, and that just made me think of that. I think that’s you know the idea of the murdered person needing to tell the story that the bones will actually tell the story like supernaturally, I think that’s so [cool]. That just made me think of that story, and it’s a ballad as well. Yeah, I love that.

HN: But that whole idea of bones, you know, having an element of the truth in them. I’ve always found that really fascinating, especially when you look at some of the traditions that on the lie these stories in many communities in African countries, as well as in other countries, the diviners will use bones, you know, as one of the implements that they through. For example, you know, to figure out what the truth is, so that that has always been so fascinating to me. The idea that, you know, you have so many stories that speak of bones and skulls. There are stories where you know the skull of a surviving hero continues to speak the truth continues to prophesy.

    And you have many communities on the African continent where the skulls of ancestors are preserved and venerated, and they are the ones who speak to the community and provide truth and guidance to the community.

So it’s those parallels between stories and cultures and ideas. I always find them interesting, because that’s how you know the culture and the stories that come out of the culture really know together, you know, they feed into each other.

CMR: Yeah, we have a head story from Wales! [The story of Bran the Blessed’s talking head]. Yeah, I love the crossovers, and like the kind of the universal things of the human body, and the human body after death; and how family members relate to one another, and the community relates to the dead and the memories of the dead, and that kind of… yeah.

HN: That’s so interesting. I like that, it’s the best part of building into myths and folklore, though because you have these great stories, these heavy themes that are just meaty, and make you pause and really think about the human condition.

And then you find out that it’s all connected, you know. We really are all connected with the stories with our life experiences, with how we respond to these life experiences. It remains one of my favourite things about doing the work I do.

Folklore and Deviance from Community Norms

CMR: absolutely and what about deviance and that sort of thing. We haven’t touched on that yet. and so deviance is often the cause of tensions within families, as you’ve said in your amazing talk that is also on YouTube and I’m going to put the link up in the transcript, so that all your previous talks are linked as well that you’ve done with Romancing the Gothic, so people can listen to those.

    Yeah, can you talk to us about a little bit about that? Deviance in terms of mental illness, queerness, disability, supernatural deviance, that sort of thing, and how that impacts positively and negatively on the relationships within the families?

HN: Right, right. So how deviance comes in, and just to set the stage, like you said, deviance of course the standard interpretation is as deviating from the norm.

    But in this context we’re looking at individuals who do not fit into the norms of specific societies, whether because they come out differently abled or disabled in one way. And when we talk about differently abled, I’m thinking mainly in terms of neurodiversity, different ways in which they perceive the world. Or they’re queer.  And in many African countries these characteristics get coded as supernatural. So you’re not really from here, and that can be a good or bad thing, and it being a good or bad thing, can be a cause of tension in the community.

    In the case of neurodiversity, for example, a lot of the enfant terrible stories are just stories of, you know, gifted children, genius, children who are able to see passed the norms, the standards that are expected of them, and to see the cracks in these standards.

    And by the way, they live, by the way they respond to situations, you know, show the adults, show where, you know, things are not quite coming together. And, as you know if we, if you live in a community where you know the community, harmony depends on you as a child playing a specific role, the moment you stop playing that role, you introduce tension into the equation, and then there is effort made now to correct you, to push in the right direction.

But then, if that direction is one that is no longer tenable for the community, it can erupt into all kinds of stress and tension, and I explore that quite a bit in the enfant terrible talk which I really encourage people to check out, because the enfant terribles are one of my favourite characters in mythology and folklore, and they are wonderful. They actually are wonderful.

    So you have that. But then there is also mental illness, right, which is on that spectrum. Are you just seeing the world differently? And is this, you know? Are you able to live and function and take care of yourself? Or is this difference in perception getting in the way of you being able to live and function and take care of yourself?   

    And sometimes it doesn’t.

    But then, if you get coded as Other, as supernatural in some way, that can introduce a lot of stress and tension in your family, too.

    Whether you’re a parent or a child, or you know, whatever, their sibling, it can cause, you know, people to react to you differently, to have expectations of you that maybe sometimes you just can’t meet.

    So this causes a lot of stress in community structures and things like that, and will erupt sometimes into violence and the darkness that we’ve been talking about.

    Queerness too is an interesting area in a traditional African mythology and folklore, because if you look at many traditional African cultures, some of them were quite homophobic, so you know, not presenting as heterosexual was cause for stresses and difficulty in your community. But many communities will look at queer people, as just people who walk paths that are different from people, and they would give this a spiritual dimension.

    And this, of course, and many of the stories that we we see coming through in folklore will not really speak as much to this spiritual dimension of queerness, because I imagine the people telling – wait, to back up a little bit. Many folklore collections, many stories were written down by European explorers, by missionaries, and I imagine the indigenous people were not too keen, you know, to tell some of these stories, especially if they saw the reactions of these historian or Europeans to some practices.

    So you, you don’t see so many of these queer stories that won’t necessarily explore the spiritual side of things, or if they exist, they are in highly metaphorically coded languages; that if you know, if you’re not from within the culture, and you understand certain nuances and metaphor, you will completely miss them for what they are. One collection, though, by Leo Frobenius, which I mentioned before, and he is one of the explorers who basically said it doesn’t make sense that there are no stories at all about eroticism and sexuality, because it’s all around me. So what are these stories? And he set out to collect stories that are specifically on the erotic end of the spectrum.

    So then, in these stories you see a lot of the queer dynamics will come out and one of them which stands out in particular is a story from the Kabyle people, and I think they are mostly found in Algeria. So it’s the northern part of the African continent. It’s the story of Simoa Ben Abid, and he this character who is this flamboyantly queer, right, he is bisexual, and he’s a cross-dresser.     

    The difficult thing about Simoa’s story is that it ends up playing into a lot of the negative stereotypes that exist about queer people, and that’s perhaps all of the culture out of which it comes, because you know, most of the Northern African continent became dominated by Islam, and you know there are aspects of Islam that are not particularly friendly to queer people.

    So. But the start of his story, you know, set him as just another person in the community. And then he goes off on this rampage. And that’s another story I want to read because I think Simoa’s story is fascinating.

All right. So the story of Simoa Ben Abid.   

And it is said that Simoa, the son of Abid, at 18 years of age, was more handsome than any other man.

    Up to that age he remained at home.

    He was quite inexperienced, and had no inkling of the inexhaustible potency of his sexual parts.

    But when Simoa was 18 years old, he said, now I’m going to set out on my travels. And so Simoa Ben Abid took his leave and departed from his village.

    Simoa set out on his travels on the first evening  when he was prepping to lie down to sleep at the wayside he heard the sound of music.

    The music was coming from a town very close by. When Simoa realized this, He did not lie down, but went into the town. Simoa arrived in the town, which was celebrating a festival. People were dancing and Simoa went to join the dancers.

    And all of the others stopped dancing and stepped aside.

No one in the town had ever before seen so comely a man dance so exquisitely.

    The girls giggled and nudged one another with their elbows, and the young men whispered to each other, if only we could sleep with him.

    The old women said to themselves, if only we were not so old.

    And Samoa went on dancing, and everybody shouted, “Do not stop, Keep on dancing.”

    “Then bring me an anklet for my foot,” Simoa said, “Bring me bracelets for my arms. Bring me a head ornament for my forehead. Bring me a chest ornament for my chest. Bring me women’s garments made of silk. If you clothe me in all these things, I will dance for you, such as you’ve never seen.”

    The people brought him women’s garments made of silk.

    They brought him ornaments for his chest, his forehead, his arms, his ankles.

    Simoa Ben Abid put on these clothes. He chose the most beautiful ornaments.

    The young woman gazed at him.

    The old women came close up to him, and nudged him with their elbows. Simoa Ben Abid was more comely than any of the women who had lived in that town.

    He called out: “I am ready now. You must play by my own tune. You must sing my own song. Sing:  Simoa Ben Abid is running away. May God bless Simoa Ben Abid for that.”

The fiddlers fiddled, the drummers struck the tambourines, and the people stood around in a ring, singing.

    “Simoa Ben Abid is running away. May God bless Simoa Ben Abid for that. Simoa Ben Abid is running away. May God bless Simoa Ben Abid for that.” 

And Simoa danced. He danced to the right. He danced to the left.

    The women called out to him in a shrill voice: the young girls tapped their feet on the ground and pressed their hands together.

    The young wives pressed their legs together and their hands against their breasts.

    The old women waggled their buttocks, and everybody watched Simoa Ben Abid dance.

    Simoa danced. He leapt into the air. He went leaping through the streets and out into the bush. And he gathered up his dress and said to himself, “My running away has everyone’s blessing?  God grant that I run fast enough to enable me to keep all of this fine jewellery.”

    The people ran after Simoa and they lost sight of him in the bush. And the people said to one another, “If we cannot catch up with him while we are on the open road, while we are still quite fresh, we cannot possibly do so in the bush.”

The people gave up their pursuit and went back into the town.

CMR: That’s amazing.

HN: I think it just goes on and on. And he in this in this, in this form that he takes.

    You know, he basically goes into a family and just pokes a finger into the dark family dynamics. You know, in how he deals with the husband, with the wife, with their daughters, and it just escalates into this messiness like you would never believe. And that’s where I try to be careful, because then you know it, it… In my opinion, the story, you know, takes that turn where it’s, saying, oh, this is this is how you should be, this is how you shouldn’t be, you know, and using a queer person as a scapegoat in that case, and I have, you know, reservations about poking into all of that. But the start, you know with him being this figure that people admire, that people desired, that’s something that you know you don’t often see in folklore, that you know, is running around, and that perhaps has to do more with just the way people approached queerness in traditional African societies.

So it’s evidence that it wasn’t a strange thing. But there was some delicacy, and, you know, discretion in how people approached it in many communities. So yeah.

CMR: yeah, that’s really yeah, that’s really interesting. Like it. I like just the idea that the guys are just going. Oh, I wish I could sleep with him, he dances so well, and that’s just like …

HN: I mean you have the whole town really be going, oh, this is such a novelty, this is so different.

CMR: Yeah, I like that beginning. And then it just goes into the…

[Laughter]

CMR: Left field. Just off a cliff.

HN: It was a time when I was working through this book. Leo Frobenius’s collection of erotic African folktales, and quite often I would, you know, I started screening the stories, so reading them before the sessions, because some of them were just. Oh, my gosh! No no no nononono. [Laughter]

But then it’s still it’s still information. It gives you a sense of, you know, who was telling the story, and why they were telling the stories and what values they have, and you know, gives information about why certain attitudes are the way they are today. Of course we don’t have to repeat these stories given how we can endanger people’s lives and reinforce things that we don’t need to reinforce. But what really comes true for me, thinking about all these stories.

    It’s just the idea that you know, however you want to look at it, you have families, and you have these dynamics that don’t always show the best side of things. But then you have these stories that show how people navigated them, you know, to the best of their ability, and they know how, and it gives information ultimately about how things have been, but also about how things could be, which I think is the ultimate function of storytelling. You know, this opportunity to reflect and figure out what the best way for it might be.

CMR: Yes, that’s sort of – this is where we’ve come from, and this is where we can go, and that like, how do you break a cycle? How do you move forwards from something where you know, where can you go next? And yeah, yeah, and it’s really important to remember stories from the past, and to remember that you know how far you’ve come as a community, and as even as an individual, and what they mean to you as a person, but also like what that means to you as a community, as a culture, as a society, and then to look at how you want to be, and like how that all fits into that tapestry. Yeah, yeah, that’s… yeah. It is really like folktales are really important for that, I think.

The Runaway Princess: Out Now!

CMR: And I think that’s almost all we’ve got time for. Thank you so much. It’s a perfect place to end, though. On a little hope. But thank you so much, that’s so interesting, and I would just like to give you some space to wrap it up just to plug anything that you would like, so let us know anything you’ve got going on for 2023, or anything that is ongoing that you’d like to let us know about.

HN: Sure. Sure. So the big thing I have going on right now is a collection of folktales that I am working on, and these are retellings of folktales from different parts of the African continent about girls and women, and I am retelling all of them, either in prose or in verse, and the focus is on just what’s going on in these women’s heads as they are going through what they are going through. If you know anything about folktales they tend to just tell the story, and they don’t really go into that reflective, you know, side of okay, why am I making these decisions? So that’s what I try to do with this collection. It’s called The Runaway Princess and Other Stories.

Buy Direct from Mythological Africans

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I’m wrapping up, you know, writing actually, I have quite a bit of writing to do today. But I’m planning to release the book in January of 2023, so you can find out more about the project on the Mythological Africans website, mythologicalafricans.com. So that’s the big project I have going on, but otherwise, go on mythologicalafricans.com, that’s the one-stop shop for everything else I have going on.

I do talks about African literature and folklore, and just exploring, you know, the interesting themes that will show up, and their relevance for what we have going on now as humans, and what future possibilities might be.

There is a YouTube Channel as well where I do deep dive. So I do Twitter polls, and the Mythological African followers on Twitter will tell me what they want to hear about, and I will, do, you know, a 30 min or 45 min episode on the topic. So we are quite a few episodes deep. So it would definitely be helpful to catch up there if you want to check it out.

    And yes, so mythologicalafricans.com, you can subscribe to the Newsletter, if you want to keep abreast of everything we have going on.

I put out a newsletter every month giving an outline of what’s coming up, and what has passed, and the talks like you talked about on the Mythological Africans page as well. You get — You can watch past talks that I have given on different topics. So… but yeah, the main thing is the book, The Runaway Princess and Other Stories which I’m pretty excited about, and there is merchandise in case you want that.

CMR: Oh, I’m going to put all the links up in the transcript, so I think the book may well have come out by the time this episode is aired. So I will pop some promo images in the Transcript and buy links as well. So people can just go direct and grab it. so hopefully. hopefully, it will be out so that’ll be really exciting. Thank you so much for coming.

HN: It’s always great to look at these stories from different perspectives, and I discover something new every time. So it really is my pleasure to be here.