Nursery Tales, Traditions and Histories of the Zulus

Record summary

Henry Callaway’s Nursery Tales, Traditions and Histories of the Zulus was published in the late 1860s from Zulu narratives gathered in the colonial and missionary environment of Natal. It includes creation accounts, animal tales, legends, traditions about ancestors, and explanations of ritual or social practice. The collection matters for comparison because it shows how oral performances were translated, classified, and written down by a missionary collector. The precise provenance of individual stories, the effects of translation, and Callaway’s editorial framing require close checking against the original volumes and later Zulu scholarship.