We spend our years as a tale that is told

Taking its title from the Book of Psalms, this book investigates three related areas: oral storytelling, literacy and historical narrative. The author takes gender to be the decisive division in the storytelling genre, whereby men tend to tell "true" historical stories while women specialize in fictional narratives. With originality and humor, Isabel Hofmeyr examines how the male and female genres interact and plots the changes that have occurred in the oral history tradition. Part One sets out to reconstruct, through interviews and ethnographic material, the form that an active storytelling tradition may have taken in Valtyn, a chiefdom in the Transvaal close to Potgietersrus. Part Two presents a series of case studies examining such influences as literacy purveyed by missions and the impact of literate bureaucracies, both of which changed historical storytelling. It also looks at forced removals which account for the virtual disappearance of male historical storytelling today while female storytelling continues. Parts Three and Four use a set of stories relating to the seige of the cave of Gwasa in the northern Transvaal by the Boers in 1854 to examine orality and literacy in con