The Kaffir, Zulu, and Hottentot Traditions

Record summary

Nineteenth-century South African ethnographic and folklore collections preserve stories about ancestral shades, revenants, witches, night encounters and beings associated with particular landscapes. This lead should be pursued through named compilations rather than treated as one report, since terminology such as Kaffir and Hottentot reflects colonial classification and is now objectionable. The material matters for comparing narrative motifs with European ghost-story forms and for tracing how oral traditions entered print. Transmission, translation, editorial selection and retrospective classification are all uncertain and require source-by-source checking.