Kenyan Folktales: Storytelling that is Alive

I don’t know about anybody else, but I thoroughly enjoyed the lecture we experienced on Tuesday. Dr. K’Olewe was friendly, engaging, and interactive, and it was clear he was passionate about his culture and the tales that rise out of that culture. He was able to tell nine different stories in a short amount of time and connect them to the points he was trying to make about the storytelling tradition in Kenya.

What Dr.K'Olewe said his favorite tale was

So what made these stories so entertaining? What set them apart from other tales?

I think part of the reason the stories were so entertaining is because I’d never heard them before. This makes them quite unlike the stories we’ve read in class, all of which I have encountered in some form or another, and some of which I am very familiar with. When I was reading these stories, I was pretty sure how they were going to end. Sometimes the ending differed from my expectation which was surprising and refreshing, but that occurred rarely. But because I’d never heard of the Kenyan stories before, I waited with anticipation to know how all of them ended. I had no idea what the ending was going to be or how the beginning and the end would tie together into a message. This factor combined with the heart the tales were told with made hearing them fun and captivating.

Another difference between the Kenyan fairy tales we listened to and the stories we read in class is the characters. We’ve read stories with wolves, pigs, frogs, swans, etc. But those animals don’t live in Kenya, so there are no Kenyan folk tales about them. Instead, Dr.K’Olewe told us stories about tortoises, sharks, monkeys, crocodiles, ostriches, parrots, and lizards - these are the animals Kenyans interact with. The stories also included elements of Kenyan culture which made them different than the stories we have read in class. One example of this was the way men drink straws in the big pot and they sit in order of how many wives they have, an idea that is very foreign to the more Western cultures of the other tales. He also talked about the importance of being hospitable towards guests in the same flood stories, which is another elements of his culture that is not shared in the cultures we’ve read stories from.

Dr.K’Olewe also spoke about the importance of audience participation in these tales. The stories were interactive; he asked us to say “come story come” before he told each tale. Several of the stories also involved singing and chanting (where the audience plays the characters). This speaks to how the folktales work to build a sense of community in Kenya, and Dr.K’Olewe’s skill at telling the stories shows how commonplace these practices are in Kenya. He said that he and his family gathered together to tell stories every night - he was trained as a storyteller from birth. The stories we read in class do not have this ability to be interactive; they include no audience chanting or singing.

Furthermore, like the stories we read, K’Olewe’s tales are created to teach lessons, but unlike the written tale, they can be created instantly, arising out of need. For example, the tortoise and the parrot tale might have been originally told as a way to explain why the tortoise's back looks the way it does. In this way, Kenyan storytelling is especially poignant at conveying culture and elements of the Kenyan identity; Dr. K’Olewe talked about how members of the community can relate to the story because of shared experiences, and stories can be changed to suit the needs of each individual community.

This is because the stories we have read in class are literature but not oral literature. The stories Dr.K’Olewe shared were all orature tales. Written literature must remain the same. Because it is written down, it cannot be altered or adapted. But unlike the stories we have read in class, orature stories are alive. They are told instead of read, and thus, they can be changed and altered to suit the needs/wants of the storyteller and the situation. The video I found below helps to emphasize this point; it includes different African storytellers explaining why oral storytelling is important to them and their culture and the need to keep the oral tradition alive.

This video can be found here: https://www.reuters.com/video/2018/12/18/kenyan-festival-keeps-oral-storytelling?videoId=493433502