Obituaries: Maxine Kreger Driggers May 12, 1932-April 20, 1983

Abstract

visitors to Africa. First in this series will be a volume by Harold Womersley, Legends and History of the Luba, edited by Tom Reefe (author of The Rainbow and the Kings). Of this volume, Jan Vansina has commented: "I read Womersley's Legends and History of the Luba with great interest. This MS, the distillation of 47 years of inquiry by the author, records the collective memory of the Luba about the past of their kingdom, and includes some eyewitness accounts of the last great ceremonies (such as a royal funeral) before they died out. Authors who have studied the people they write about for 47 years are rare, and the past of the Luba is significant indeed. The roots of their civilisation and kingdoms plunge into the first millenium while their civilisation affected all of the southeastern savanna of Central Africa. This MS will be a signal contribution in other ways as well. On the whole the literature about the Luba is still rather meagre, especially in history. Apart from the founding myth we have no accounts-before this-of other "tales of memory" for later times. The book does not duplicate T. Reefe's Rainbow, a scholarly history of the kingdom, because Reefe did not include an account of the Luba point of view. No author was better placed than Womersley, who still knew the men of wisdom of yore to record these historical accounts. But the MS is of greater importance as well. We now have many studies of customs and histories of people in Central Africa but very few accounts of sufficient length, giving the flavor of the sources for historians, which also are the interpretations of local peoples. And yet, specialists pontify about myths and variants while only a tiny percentage of the myths available are known in the words of those who told them and in their setting of historical (or mythical) places and landscapes. This MS does recapture the flavor of the Luba tale and its "proofs," the places linked to them, the customs linked to them, etc. Such MS can give the student of history a much better feeling for the evaluation of the reconstructions by his colleagues. Needless to say that the MS, as an expression of a local point of view will be of equal interest to specialists in folklore and oral art, although the latter no doubt would have liked more Luba texts. But such texts would make it impossible to publish this in Crossroads Press. They will look upon it as literature in translation, by one who used that language for all of his adult life."