ANCESTRAL CONNECTIONS

Legislation has good intentions, but ignores SA’s leading storytellers, writes Nothando Migogo Hlatshwayo
Apr 18, 2010 12:00 AM | By Nothando Migogo Hlatshwayo

Before the month is out, a new law is likely to be passed that will forever change the face of traditional storytelling as popularised by such figures as Gcina Mhlophe and Credo Vusamazulu Mutwa.

Mutwa’s Indaba, my Children and Mhlophe’s Stories of Africa , among others, seek to document what has long been Africa’s richest cultural reality: its oral tradition. Anyone will tell you that African stories are so rich in idiom and poetry that translating them perfectly is almost impossible. At the same time, the chance of these stories surviving in oral form becomes slimmer with every generation – what with the increasing influence of television, the Internet and other forms of entertainment which bring with them the encroachment of English and other languages on African storytelling.

So, if these stories are to survive, they must be written down – in the original language, before being translated into English and other tongues for the benefit of those who are not au fait with African languages.

In the prologue to Indaba, my Children, Mutwa writes: “True, the black man of Africa had no mighty scrolls on which to write the history of his land. True, the black tribes of Africa had no pyramids on which to carve the history of each and every crowned thief and tyrant who ruled them – on which to carve the history of every battle lost and won … There are men and women … with good memories and a great capacity to remember words and to repeat them exactly as they had heard them spoken … These tribal storytellers were called guardians of the Umlando or tribal history. And I, Vusamazulu the Outcast, am proud to be one of these, and here I shall tell these stories to you in the very words of the guardians who told them to me.”

The importance of documenting, protecting and preserving these stories is unquestionable. Just as important are the legal and administrative mechanisms employed to preserve and protect them. It is therefore surprising that our own government is intent on passing legislation that, despite its purported intent, has the effect of putting the likes of Mutwa and Mhlophe out of business.

The new Intellectual Property Laws Amendment Bill, which the Department of Trade and Industry aims to introduce to parliament as early as April, claims that one of its objectives is to empower communities to commercialise their indigenous knowledge, referred to as traditional works. This is both a welcome and an exciting prospect.

Strangely this bill will have the effect of making it illegal for Mutwa, Mhlophe or any others to share traditional stories in books without facing reams of red tape.

Firstly, the author would now need to secure the permission of the indigenous community which claims ownership of that story.

Secondly, the copyright of the published edition of the story will no longer belong to the author, but to a government trust fund.

So let us say an author decides to write a book telling a traditional Zulu children’s tale.

Which Zulu community would be entitled to lay claim to the story? The entire KwaZulu-Natal region? How about the Zulu people in the Eastern Cape? And what if the writer actually wrote the story as told by an Ndebele storyteller, which would then have slightly different nuances when compared to the original Zulu version? Does this strip the Zulu people of their claim? What if the Ndebele storyteller was from Bulawayo and not Nelspruit?

The simple answer is: no one knows the answers, because the bill does not bother to say how one identifies an indigenous community. Worse still, it doesn’t even provide a way of proving whether a community’s claim is genuine.

So, even though the desired result would be that the author pays royalties to the government trust fund – which will, it is envisaged, then be spent for the benefit of the community – the inconsistencies in the bill make it virtually impossible to achieve this. The fact that the bill fails to define an indigenous community makes its goal unattainable. In the future, however, those authors who have undertaken the noble task of writing down and sharing with us these invaluable stories, will be penalised for their efforts and eventually discouraged from publishing similar books. This will further widen the gap between us and our history and leave us all the poorer. We can’t afford for this bill be passed into law. For our children, and their children’s sake, I say no.

* Hlatshwayo is general manager at the Dramatic, Artistic and Literary Rights Organisation (Dalro)