Storytelling Starters ~ Ibanang Story 3
Saturday, July 30th, 2016Good stories make good travellers. They can also contribute to the spread of storytelling. In both these respects, the story of Ibanang has proved of great personal worth for me. For instance, I’m sure it played a big part in bringing about the five-week storytelling trip to South Africa I was invited to make in 1992. This is how it came about.
Alan Kenyon was a wonder
ful man. When he began attending the Drill Hall workshops I used to run with my friend and colleague Karen Tovell, I learned that he was over here from South Africa on a sabbatical from his work as a teacher-trainer. Science was his subject and his project in the UK was to explore the potential of storytelling for the teaching of science. Alan and I got on well. But it’s perfectly possible that no more would have come of our Drill Hall meetings had an extraordinary coincidence not come to light.
Shortly after I’d first met Alan, I was due to start a new storytelling course in Lambeth. The course was to be held in an out-of-the-way centre where I hadn’t previously worked. It was very badly advertised by Lambeth Adult Education and I had a sense that, quite possibly, no-one at all would turn up. And no-one did – except for Alan. His coming along gave us a welcome chance to talk and, as I drove him back into town, it turned out we had a friend in common: Lynne, had become one of my very dearest friends. By now, she was back in South Africa where she’d grown up and I’d become godmother to her daughter.
So when Paul and I went to Cape Town to visit Lynne and her family in February 1990 – justa day after Nelson Mandela was released from prison – we naturally got in touch with Alan. By then, he had formed a storytelling group that used to meet every month at his house. I was invited along to a meeting and found myself among a wonderful group – ethnically very diverse (which was unusual for South Africa at that time) and full of interesting characters.
At that meeting, Alan asked me to retell the story of Ibanang. He’d remembered it from a Drill Hall workshop and had already told it back in Cape Town at one of the storytelling group’s meetings. (more…)