Teken Ons Stories: a storytelling workshop in the Agter Pakhuis
Alice Parkington | May 2026
Children growing up in rural, often overlooked, parts of the Northern and Western Cape will likely have heard stories about the jakkals en wolf (jackal and hyena) or the notorious master outlaw known either as Jan Thomas or Dirk Ligter. These stories that have been passed down many generations are an enduring intellectual tradition that can be traced back hundreds of years. They are a means of conveying morals and knowledge to young community members and reaffirming such ideals, as well as bonds, between older ones. In Brandvlei, Melkkraal, Byneskop and many other such towns and settlements, people classified as coloured under apartheid have endured centuries of oppression and dispossession and children there would likely not consider themselves privileged in many ways. However, one privilege they do have is that from a very young age, they become custodians of a rich oral tradition of storytelling that is a testament to the resilience of their communities.
The Archive of Traditional Narrative in Afrikaans (ATNA) is a collection of recorded interviews with community members in these remote parts of the Cape, ranging from the Karoo to the Cederberg. Folklorist Dr Jose Manuel de Prada-Samper has spent the last fifteen years building this collection through fieldwork interviews. De Prada-Samper’s research asserts that traditions of storytelling amongst Khoi and San people, recorded as early as the 1870s, are still alive and well in the Cape, proving that although settler-colonialism disrupted much of the culture and traditions of people living in the Cape before settlers arrived, their folk stories have survived and are still thriving in many communities in the present day. Through ATNA, de Prada-Samper is able to highlight this cultural continuity between earlier generations and present day people, but he is also able to disseminate their stories to a wider audience of the storytellers’ peers and outsiders through written publications he produces that contain collections of stories he has been told. The stories in ATNA provide insight into the ontology of past and present communities by showcasing important themes, values and ways of knowing that have been transmitted from one generation to another. Through these stories we gain insight into the intellectual legacies of people often overlooked in academia.
de Prada-Samper seeks to utilise ATNA for the benefit of the contributors to it. His priority is to make the entire archive accessible online, a process which Archive to Narrative has offered to assist with. Storing ATNA digitally will take some time to achieve as there are more than 150 video recorded interviews within it. Archive to Narrative will work alongside the Stanford University Library Services to make sure that de Prada-Samper’s research is preserved. Most of the stories recorded in ATNA are told by older members of rural communities that are hard to reach, a barrier to bringing the archive back to the people whilst it is still in the process of being made accessible online. In May 2026, Archive to Narrative in collaboration with de Prada-Samper, storyteller Helena Cuesta, artist Alexis Aronson and local storyteller and educator Patrick Hanekom held a workshop at the Elizabethfontein Primary School in the Agter Pakhuis region of the Cederberg, one of the areas where stories in ATNA were recorded. The aim of the workshop was to use stories from this area to facilitate a session where children at the school were told stories and then encouraged to create art based on them. The workshop aimed to facilitate local children engaging with the archive, but also generated pictures created by the children that we hope to use as illustrations for educational material that can be given back to this and other schools in the area. Using these materials, children can be educated and enculturated with content relevant to them and hopefully feel a sense of pride in their traditions.
The workshops were intended to happen across two sessions, one for younger and the other for older learners. We decided to tell each group two stories, in the hopes that this would encourage a more diverse range of illustrations. The younger learners were told a story about Dirk Ligter, the master outlaw known to many in the area, and another about the war between the flying and the walking animals. The older learners were told a story of Adam and the waternooi (watermaiden) and a story about a hyena and jackal arguing about a beehive. After the storytelling session, the children were given brief instructions on how to work with the art supplies provided. We chose to work with wax crayons and ink which would create a relief effect when painted over the crayon drawings. We then introduced small pots of bleach that the learners could dip fine paint brushes into and paint onto the black ink they had used on their crayon drawings. The bleach would react with the black ink to create a ‘magic marker’ effect that is known to elicit excitement and interest from young artists. It was clear that ideally the groups of learners in a session should be smaller than the 35 per session we had on the day, however this would be difficult to achieve during the school day without leaving some out which we were unwilling to do.
In our preparation for the workshop we had discussed at length the tension between wanting the workshop to be fun and engaging for young people, but also our desire to use the products of their artistic labour as illustrations. We were worried that we would receive many of the same types of drawing as learners would likely be tempted to draw the ‘main character’ of the story. We reached a consensus that whilst this would not be ideal, the priority of the workshop should be that the children enjoy listening to the stories and creating their artworks, so we would not try to convince them to draw what we wanted. We thought perhaps a way to explain what we wanted from them (in the spirit of being clear and informative about our intentions) was to tell the learners that we wanted their help in the form of their artistic skills and asked if they could listen to our stories and help us create illustrations for them. In doing so, we stressed the importance of their contribution and framed them as skilled participants in our work. Our hope was that this may encourage them to consider how the artworks would be used, and diversify their subject matter. Ultimately, this forethought was not particularly productive as learners tended to draw similar illustrations of ‘main characters’ and practically ignored our pleas for ‘many different types of animals and scenes from the stories’. Nevertheless, our priority had remained their enjoyment and so this was not disappointing for us as it meant the learners had drawn what they wanted to.
Overall, the most valuable part of the workshops was the masterclass in storytelling our research team and the learners received from Patrick Hanekom. Hanekom is known to the local children as he is also a conservation educator and has been to the school before to show them various (flying, walking but also slithering) animals. His ability to capture both the younger and older children’s attention was masterful. When reflecting on the session, Hanekom emphasised the importance of performing the stories and not simply remembering them, as it is his hope that hearing the stories told by him would inspire the young community members to pass them on to their own children and grandchildren one day. All wriggling in seats and turning to look at the camera set up behind them (which we had tried to position subtly to capture Hanekom’s performance) ceased once Hanekom put his storytelling voice on.
We considered the workshops to have been a success and afterwards we wondered excitedly if we could organise for more local storytellers to come to the school and engage the students, fostering deeper intergenerational relationships. We discussed how this workshop might also be replicated at other schools within the catchment area of ATNA so that we could continue telling stories that were area-specific but have a wider reach. In conducting these workshops, and hopefully more in the future, as well as producing storybooks for the learners, we hope to encourage a sense of pride in the storytelling tradition of the area. Not only have the stories managed to endure many decades (if not hundreds of years) of oppression, they continue to thrive and thus are a testament to the resilience of communities such as this. We hope some of the children returned home and mentioned the stories they were told to their parents and grandparents, maybe even prompting more storytelling.
Teken Ons Stories gallery of childrens artworks
Discussion with Patrick Hanekom
Jose Manuel De Prada | May 2026
On May 17, while preparing the following day’s art workshops with learners of Elizabethfontein School, in the Agter-Pakhuis, I discussed with Patrick Hanekom which of local traditional stories would be more suitable different age groups. One idea I had already proposed to him via WhatsApp was that he tell the younger learners ‘The war between the flying and the walking animals’, which his late father had told us with great mastery when we interviewed him in 2015. This story mentions a lot of creatures of all kinds: the Jackal, the Bee, the Elephant and several others, precisely what we needed for the kids to produce as varied a set of images as they could muster. The tale-type folklorist Sigrid Schmidt assigned to this narrative in her catalogue of Khoisan folktales is KH 600, which corresponds with the European type ATU 222 (see Adam and the Water Maiden, pp. 220-221).
Patrick found this was a good idea, but when he proceeded then to tell a summary of the story I was surprised to hear a narrative similar, but not quite identical, to the one his father had told eleven years before. In KH 600, as Petrus Hanekeom told it, the instigator of the “war”, which takes the form of a competitive ball game, is Jackal himself, who acts as a very dubious umpire. He wants the walking animals to win at all costs, but his intentions are derailed by the small and humble Bee, who eventually gives the victory to the flying creatures.
Yet the story we heard then from Patrick’s lips was a different one, which shares several elements with the one told by his father, but has a different plot. This story does not focus on Jackal, the trickster who causes the conflict, but on Bat, a character which does not feature in the other tale, and for whom the war between the creatures has dire consequences. The narratives does not have a KH type because Sigrid Schmidt did not record any version of it in Namibia during her fieldwork there in the last third of the 20th century, but we can assign to it, following Mrs. Schmidt’s system, the tale-type KH **600A, which corresponds to the European type ATU 222A, ‘The Bat in War between Birds and Quadrupeds’. Finding a previously undocumented type in the South African Afrikaans-language narrative tradition is always an exciting development that does not happen every day!
The Bat story is, of course, the version that Patrick told the younger learners at the onset of the art workshop on 18 May, and what follows is a retelling of it, in Afrikaans and English, prepared by storyteller and folklorist Marlene Winberg, with whom I am working to produce a children’s book with the stories Patrick told for the workshop. In my correspondence with her while starting this work, Marlene said that she had found the ‘Bat and the Animals’ story ‘to have an explicit existential thread. Who am I? Where do I belong’. This, I agree, is an essential aspect of this narrative as told by Patrick that day.
The war itself is in this telling not so important as the confusion about the nature of Bat, and the apparently unsolvable issue of to which of the two groups in conflict he belongs. In the European versions of the tale, Bat’s problems begin when the conflict is over and the flying and the walking creatures consider he has opportunistically been playing both sides. Yet in the Cederberg version Patrick performed that day for his young audience, Bat’s predicament appears to hinge on the fact that he truly gets along with both types of creatures and for him the notion of choosing sides is as unthinkable and impossible as the notion of his changing his own complex and ambiguous nature.
References
De Prada-Samper, José Manuel. 2022. Adam and the Water Maiden: Traditional Storytelling from the Olifants River Valley and the Cederberg. Cape Town & Clanwilliam: The Manyeka Arts Trust and the Clanwilliam Living Landscape Project.
Schmidt, Sigrid. 2013. A catalogue of Khoisan Folktales of southern Africa, 2 vols. Köln: Rudiger Koppe Verlag.
Uther, H.-J. 2004. The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography. 3 vols. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica.
Bat and the animals
There was a time, long ago, when the animals argued with one another.
There were two kinds of animals.
They made war against each other.
The flying animals had a king. His name was Eagle.
The walking animals also had a king. His name was Lion.
King Eagle ruled the sky.
King Lion ruled the land.
And everyone knew exactly where they belonged.
Well…
Almost everyone.
There was one little animal who was terribly confused.
His name was Bat.
Bat had wings.
‘Wings!’ cried Eagle. ‘Then he belongs with us!’
But Bat also had soft fur.
‘Fur!’ growled Lion. ‘Then he belongs with us!’
Bat sat down on a rock.
‘Who am I?’
‘Where do I belong?’
Bat liked to sit with Eagle and the flying animals.
He would listen to Sugarbird singing sweet songs.
He would chatter with Crow.
He would laugh with little Jan Groentjie in the trees.
He also liked to sit with Lion and the walking animals.
He would listen to Elephant’s wise stories.
He would walk beside Jackal.
He would share berries with Tortoise and Porcupine.
Wherever Bat went, he felt happy.
But wherever Bat went, somebody complained.
‘He belongs with us!’ squawked the birds.
‘No, he belongs with us!’ roared the animals.
The arguing grew louder and louder.
At last King Lion called a meeting.
Elephant came.
Jackal came.
Porcupine came.
Tortoise came too, although it took him quite a long time.
Then King Eagle called a meeting in the sky.
Crow came.
Sugarbird came.
Jan Groentjie came.
Soon everyone was talking at once.
‘We must make a plan!’
No-one knew where Bat belonged.
‘Bat must choose!’
‘He cannot belong to both!’
‘He must tell us where he belongs!’
Now Bat happened to hear all this.
He saw King Lion coming with his animals.
He saw King Eagle coming with his birds.
Bat could not decide where he belonged.
And because Bat was small,
and because the kings looked very serious indeed,
he became frightened.
Very frightened.
‘Oh dear,’ whispered Bat.
‘They are coming for me!’
Quick as a wink, he flew away.
He searched and searched,
until he found a dark little corner in a tree trunk.
And there he hid.
He stayed hidden all day.
When night came, he peeped out.
Was Lion there?
No.
Was Eagle there?
No.
So, Bat fluttered quietly into the darkness to find some food.
And that, the old people say,
is why Bat still sleeps in dark little corners during the day
and only comes out at night.
He is still not quite sure where he belongs.
And perhaps, even now, he is still hiding from King Lion and King Eagle.