Introduction

In many parts of Uganda, the bulk of oral literature texts for children remain uncollected. Over the last decade local publishers, often in conjunction with Uganda's Ministry of Education, have worked to publish some folktales and use them as instructional materials in primary schools. For example, Fountain published the "Our Heritage" series of tales from different regions of Uganda as storybooks for young readers.1 For the most part, writers who were familiar with the oral culture retold the tales in English but no effort was made to provide the original texts in the local languages as well. Such efforts to publish stories for children drawn out of their oral tradition thus underlie their cultural and national value.

In order to contextualize my own work of collecting oral materials for children, I will first survey the historiography of collecting in Uganda and then situate the texts I collected in a broader geographical, historical, and socio-cultural setting. I will begin by focusing briefly on the work of Ugandan collectors and relate it to that of European missionaries who worked in Uganda over the twentieth century.

Collecting in Uganda: An Overview

Early efforts by Ugandans who sought to preserve oral culture can be traced to the beginning of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of information on their works, most of which are out of print. The little that we know is based on texts that were reproduced in English translations by Europeans. For example, in 1902 a Luganda tale originally narrated by Tefiro Kisosonkole was translated by Reverend Ernest Millar and published under the title, "On the Slaughter-Place of Namugongo, Uganda"2 No information is available on the original version. The first seminal work was perhaps Engero za Bagando, a collection of some fifty-four folktales published by the Katikiro (Prime Minister) of Buganda, Sir Apollo Kaggwa, in 1927. Some of the tales in this book were translated into English by the Reverend Rosetta Gage Baskerville, a missionary who worked in Uganda at the beginning of the twentieth century.

While Kisosonkole and Kaggwa' s tales were only Luganda versions, Hosea Akiki Nyabongo's collections, Africa Answers Back published in 1936 and Winds and Lights: African Fairy Tales which followed in 1939, were both English translations only.3 Winds and...