CHAPMAN’S AFRICAN TALES

Africa is a continent rich in culture and tradition. A reflection of this are the numerous tales passed down from generation to generation, told around a warm campfire in the midst of a cold and dark stormy night, or a village elder relating stories to a gathering of young children while their mothers prepare their daily staple.
The African storyteller was the centre of this rich vibrant tradition, sometimes savage, sometimes kingly. In the midst of these tales’ witchcraft features prominently, for the Dark Continent has always been filled with mystery and wonder, with giant beasts roaming the interior from which white men seldom, if ever, returned. It was not until explorers, missionaries and hunters such as Livingstone, Stanley and James Chapman had traversed these wild untamed lands and returned to civilisation did any of these stories see the light of the printed page. And, with that, the enlightenment that the Africa they had experienced would not always remain the same. That the giants that populated this wondrous land might not forever be its rulers, that the lion’s roar might disappear altogether, and that the snakes, cockroaches and mosquitoes would take over and rule in their stead, biting and poisoning Africa’s traditional and natural way of life.
“During my time in the Kalahari, my travels through Botswana, Namibia and South Africa I have had the opportunity to converse with many elders, African prophets and witchdoctors. Some of the stories in Chapman’s African Tales are ancient, some not so. I have lived in rural communities where there was no electricity or running water, just the moan of a lion seeking a mate, the cough of a leopard as it slinked through deep bush seeking prey, puff adders curled up on hot sandy bush paths keeping warm in the depth of a cold winter’s night, and, the tokoloshe, yes, the tokoloshe, trying to rip apart roofing to gain entry and seek the blood of its victims curled up under a blanket below. Do these creatures exist? Yes, I have seen, smelt and heard them, these tools of the witchdoctor’s craft,” noted Shaun.
Among the tales garnered from the bush are stories of the author, modern tales with morals intertwined within. Tales where good always triumphs over evil. Though in reality it is not always so. Stories such as Nelson & the Bird; The Poor Fisherman; The Thin Little Girl; The Stone Princess; Nyanga and the Magic Stick; Tselane and the Cannibal; The Silent Princess and Obe the Monster.
I hope you have as much fun reading them as the author did in writing them, and learn, that however tenuously, in the end, good always does triumph over evil.