A Legendary
Funeral
Donna
Wyckoff-Wheeler
South Africa
It’s not often that a contemporary
legend crosses that flimsy boundary between fiction and fact right before one’s
eyes. One is even more likely to be
caught off guard when it happens on a peaceful, sunny, Sunday morning. But there he was, the Reverend Dr. Alan
Maker, standing in front of the 9:30 congregation of St. Columba’s Presbyterian
Church, Johannesburg, South Africa, on October 10, 2004,
announcing that he needed to put an end to some rumors he knew where already
beginning to circulate.
Yes, he had officiated at the funeral
of Taco Kuiper, a long-time member of St. Columba’s.
Yes, Mr. Kuiper had requested that
everyone in attendance be sure to sign the guest register so that his 9-year
old daughter Elizabeth (child of a late-life marriage, living in Zimbabwe with
her mother) would know, in later years, who had attended her father’s funeral.
No, Mr. Kuiper had not “paid” anyone to
“come to his funeral service.” Reverend
Maker emphasized this point several times.
What had happened, however, was
reminiscent of a well-known contemporary legend.
When friends and family gathered at the
home of Taco Kuiper after the church service for an informal wake, as Mr.
Kuiper had requested, there was a letter waiting for the trustees of a trust
fund Mr. Kuiper had set up some years earlier.
As a long-time friend of Taco’s, Reverend Maker had been named one of
the five trustees—as had Mr. Kuiper’s maid of 30 years. The letter was marked “not to be opened
until after my burial.”
Inside the letter were instructions
that every family represented by attendance at the funeral service for Mr.
Kuiper would share in a legacy of 1,000,000.00 rand. As there had been 92 families represented,
this meant that each of these families would receive
approximately
1,100.00 rand (about US $170.00 at current exchange rates). Hardly a fortune by American standards, but
not a negligible amount by South African income averages. Still, it’s the thought that counts.
So
just what was Mr. Kuiper thinking?!
Several variations on the funeral-money
legend suggest either the luck of being in the right place at the right time,
such as in the “handy restroom” version, or luck combined with respectful /
moral behavior, such as in the tale of a traveler who prays over a lonely
coffin he or she comes upon when stopping by a church in a foreign
country. Other versions build around a
wealthy curmudgeon’s “test” of love, loyalty, or respect. (See, http://www.snopes.com/luck/will.htm
for some of recent variations and other sources.)
Background information provided by the
Reverend Maker described Taco Kuiper as a somewhat lonely (divorced) man to
whom money was very important. If Mr.
Kuiper wanted to control something, it would be done through money, said
Reverend Maker. On the other hand, if
Mr. Kuiper wanted to make “a gesture,” that would be done through money as
well. Having 92 different families
represented at his funeral service certainly indicates a high level of respect
toward Mr. Kuiper by his community, so it seems unlikely that the trust fund
was intended as either a “test” or retaliation.
The money appears rather to have been one final gesture of thanks, and
the trustees carried out Mr. Kuiper’s instructions without delay.
On October 31, about two weeks after
the checks had been issued to each of the appropriate recipients, I had
opportunity to speak with the Reverend Maker again. He told me that several of the recipients had
considered the issuing of money in this circumstance “immoral” and they had
threatened to return the checks. On the other hand, he said, none of them had
done so—at least, not yet. Whether any
had sent the money on to other worthy causes is not known.
It will be interesting to see if
funeral-money legend variants begin circulating again, locally or widely. Even more interesting will be if any new
versions of the funeral money legend incorporate the “moral outrage” or “moral
dilemma” motifs that seem to have been part of the Kuiper funeral money story.
But at least, this time, if someone
tells you that “it happened in South
Africa,” they just might be referring to the
real thing.
***
Notification to Members of a Proposed
Change in the Constitution
8 October 2004
It has become increasingly evident that
the terms of council officers, as outlined in the revised Constitution (October
8, 2002), require restructuring to allow greater consistency in the running of
the society. The offices of UK and USA Treasurer have become redundant
due to consolidation of accounts and require replacement with a single
International Treasurer position. Terms
of office also require both lengthening and staggering of appointment to
maximize the efficiency of council and encourage greater participation by the
membership in council offices.
Accordingly, at the General Meeting of ISCLR held in July in
Aberystwyth, the following changes to clause 5.2 and 5.4 of the Constitution
were proposed and voted upon.
Clause
5.2 of the Constitution currently reads:
Members of the council shall be elected
at the general meeting and shall hold office until the next general
meeting. The exceptions will be the
editors of Contemporary Legend and FOAFtale News, who will be appointed by
council.
The motion, as proposed and seconded by
the council, was that clause 5.2 the society’s Constitution be revised as
follows:
Members of the council shall be elected
at the general meeting. Officers of the
society will normally serve terms of four years, with the exception of the
President and Second Vice President, who will serve terms of two years. The editors of Contemporary Legend and FOAFtale
News, will be appointed by council and serve terms of a length determined
by council.
Clause
5.4 of the Constitution currently reads:
The
officers of the society shall be:
1:
President
2.
First Vice-president
3.
Second Vice President
4.
Treasurer - UK
5.
Treasurer - USA
6.
Subscription secretary
7.
Member -At-Large
8.
Member -At-Large
9.
Member-At-Large
10.
Member-At-Large
11.
Editor of Contemporary Legend
12.
Editor of FOAFtale News
The
motion, as proposed and seconded by the council, was that clause 5.4 of the
society’s Constitution be revised as follows:
The
officers of the society, their terms of office and their election shall be:
1.
President - two years - elected on even years
2.
First Vice President - four years - elected on odd years
3.
Second Vice President (Past President) - two years - elected on even years
4.
Treasurer - International - four years - elected on odd years
5.
Subscription/Membership Secretary - four years - elected on even years
6.
Member-at- Large - four years - elected on odd years
7.
Member-at-Large - four years - elected on odd years
8.
Member-at-Large - four years - elected on even years
9.
Member-at-Large - four years - elected on even years
10.
Editor of Contemporary Legend - by
appointment
11.
Editor of FOAFtale News - by
appointment
Where there is more than one nomination
for a position on council, a written ballot of those present and eligible to
vote will be undertaken at the annual general meeting.
Upon a vote at the General Meeting,
these motions were carried.
In keeping with clause 6.3 of the
Constitution, if there are no dissenters to this amendment, the changes noted
above will go forward and be implemented on February 1, 2005.
***
Dr. David
Buchan Student Essay Prize for Contemporary Legend Research: 2004-5 Competition
The
International Society for Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR) is pleased to
announce that it is to award an annual student essay prize to honour the memory
of Dr. David Buchan (1939-1994), leading international ballad scholar and a
staunch supporter and perceptive writer in the area of contemporary legend
research.
Terms of the Award:
The prize will be awarded for the best
student essay or presentation at an ISCLR conference that combines research and
analysis on some aspect of contemporary legend or contemporary legend
research. Previously published essays
will not be considered for the award.
The deadline for submission is the 1st
of May in the year the award is to be made, and the essay should have been
written within the previous academic year or the current academic year.
Applications are invited from registered
(post)graduate students, although undergraduate essays will also be accepted
for consideration on the advice of faculty members. Either students or their teachers may submit
essays. Instructors are asked to
encourage students with eligible essays to enter the competition.
The award will be made by the president of
ISCLR upon the recommendation of the Selection Committee appointed by the
president, and the winner normally will be announced at the annual meeting of
the society.
The winner will receive $250 (US) and a
year’s membership to ISCLR. The winning
essay will normally be submitted for publication in the society’s journal, Contemporary
Legend.
It is the exclusive right of ISCLR to
change the terms of the award for future competitions.
Eligibility:
Applicants will be accepted from registered
(post)graduate students, although undergraduate essays will also be accepted
for consideration on the advice of faculty members.
Applicants can make only one application
for each competition. Students may receive the award more than once in their
graduate career.
Members of the Selection Committee are
ineligible to apply during their tenure.
Application
Process:
Please ensure that you do not
include your name on the essay. Instead,
include a cover sheet listing the title of the essay, your name, address,
telephone number, school and program attending, and your year in the program.
Essays must be submitted in English.
Essays must be typed, double-spaced, and on
white paper.
Adjudication:
The Selection
Committee adjudicates all applications anonymously.
The Governing Council of ISCLR reserves the
right not to award the prize in a given year.
Award Holder’s
Responsibilities:
The editor of Contemporary Legend
shall have first refusal to publish the winning essay, and a version suitable
for publication should be submitted to Contemporary Legend no later than
six months after the presentation of the award.
Submit
applications or further questions to:
Professor Paul
Smith
Coordinator,
David Buchan Student Essay Prize
Department of
Folklore
Memorial University of Newfoundland
St. John’s, NL
Canada
A1B 3X8
Email:
fpsmith@mun.ca.
***
Calls for Papers
23rd Perspectives on Contemporary Legend
International Society for Contemporary Legend Research
Athens, Georgia, USA
May 25 - 29, 2005
The International Society for Contemporary Legend Research is pleased to announce that the 2005 Perspectives on Contemporary Legend Twenty-third International Conference is to be held at the University of Georgia in the lovely Southern college town of Athens, Georgia. Athens lies in the foothills just south of the Appalachian chain. Home of both the State Botanical Garden and R.E.M., of both the Georgia Museum of Art and the Northeast Georgia Folk Music Festival, Athens offers a range of natural and cultural pleasures. Plus, May is the beginning of peach season.
Proposals for papers on all aspects of "contemporary," "urban," or "modern" legend research are sought, as are those on any legend or legend-like tradition that circulate actively at present or have circulated at an earlier historical period. Previous discussions have ranged in focus from the ancient to the modern (including Internet-lore) and have covered diverse cultures worldwide (including our own academic world).
The 2005 meeting will be organized as a series of seminars at which the majority of those who attend will present papers and/or contribute to discussion sessions. Concurrent sessions will be avoided so that all participants can hear all the papers. Proposals for special panels of papers, discussion sessions, and other related events are encouraged.
Athens is approximately 80 miles northeast of Atlanta. A shuttle van ($30 one way) goes directly from the Atlanta Hartsfield Airport to the Athens hotels on a fixed schedule 7 times per day. For information or to make reservations on the AAA Airport Express, see www.aaaairportexpress.com or phone 1-800-354-7874 or 404-767-2000. Athens also has an airport, served by USAir on very small planes coming in from Charlotte, NC. Sometimes the timing and price work out better than for Atlanta; it's worth checking.
Rooms are reserved at the Holiday Inn ($72-$93; the $72 rooms are around a motor court, with outside doors, like a motel), next to the campus, and at the Holiday Inn Express ($79, breakfast included), newer and one block further away. Students: You may register four people per room. When making reservations, ask for the UGA ISCLR group rate. Confirmation deadline is May 4, 2005.
To participate in the conference, please forward a title and abstract, along with the appropriate conference fee, to the organizers by 1st February 2005.
For further information or travel
advice, contact: Elissa R. Henken, Department of English, Park Hall, University
of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA, E-mail:
ehenken@uga.edu
***
July
26-31, 2005, in Tartu, Estonia.
Mare
Kõiva,
Estonian Literature Museum
The central topic of the Tartu Congress
will be Narrative Theories and Modern
Practices. The program will include
plenary sessions, workshops, thematic panel sessions and forums. The
publications and periodicals issued since the 13th congress will be
displayed. Poster presentations will introduce research centres and
disciplines.
Various fields of research have been
concerned with the study of narratives and performance in the past dozens of
years. This has brought along searches and experiments in folklore studies and
linguistics, ethnology and psychology, social anthropology and medical science,
geography and fine arts.
During the last ten years the focus has
been on communication in the Internet, and the relationship of media and oral
narrative tradition. Oral history, identification of self and ethnicity through
narratives, links between fiction and reality, moral issues, the second life of
narratives in printed publications and archives have inspired scholars to study
new and traditional folk narratives.
We welcome all scholars who are working
in the field of folk narratives. The themes of the congress sessions are:
Theoretical Schools in Narrative
Studies
Narrative Genres: Continuity and
Changes
Public and Private
Networks and Networking
Cross-Cultural Communication
Mapping and Preservation
For further information, and also if
you wish to set up a panel, forum or round-table discussion, please contact the
local organising committee by mail, e-mail or fax:
Some preliminary sections you can see
from web page.
Due date for registration is October 1,
2004, and due date for abstracts is April 15, 2005. The congress is organised
by the Estonian Literature
Museum, the University
of Tartu, Estonian Centre for Cultural
History and Folkloristics in cooperation with the Tallinn Pedagogical
University, the Academic
Folklore Society and the Estonian Institute of Folklore.
ISFNR 14,
Vanemuise 42, EE 51003 Tartu, Estonia, fax: +3727-377-706, e-mail:
isfnr@folklore.ee.
***
Special Issue
on Film and Folklore
Western
Folklore, the academic journal of the California Folklore Society, is
soliciting submissions for a special issue of the journal that will focus on
the relationship between Film and Folklore.
Submissions on the following or related topics are particularly welcome:
Folklore
representation in film and television; including myth,
Märchen,
legend, folksong and ballad, belief and custom, etc.
Film
and television texts as folkloristic forms; including issues of variant texts,
dissemination of beliefs/narratives, film/television as storytelling, etc.
Audience ethnographies/fan studies
Ethnographic (documentary) films
Children’s
media and its relationship to folklore
Deadline
for 200-word abstracts is January 30, 2005 and completed papers (5000 – 6000
words) submitted by May 1, 2005. Please send attachments in Microsoft Word to
Mikel J. Koven, Special Editor, mik@aber.ac.uk, or Sabina Magliocco, Editor,
sabina.maglioco@csun.edu, or hard copy
to: Sabina Magliocco, Editor, Western Folklore;
Department of Anthropology, California State University – Northridge; 18111
Nordhoff St., Northridge, CA 91330-8244.
Submissions should
conform to the Social Sciences format, Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition.
***
Help Wanted, We’re Looking for a New Editor for FOAFtale News
After five years of editing FTN,
I have decided to hand this particular baton over to someone new. The problem
is anyone I ask tends to immediately start looking at their shoes whenever I
mention it. So, it was decided to put a general call out to all of you to see
if you knew anyone who is up to the challenge of editing this newsletter.
So, FTN is looking for a new
editor for its quarterly(ish) newsletter. This job entails the pulling together
of the submitted articles (which would be submitted to you), compiling annually
the ‘Cite Unseen’ column and the Perspectives on Contemporary Legend Conference
abstracts, copy editing these submissions, and formatting them in the FTN
template (or we could change the template). The printing and webpage accounts
would stay with me here at UWA, and so all you would be expected to do would be
to compile the issue and then send it to me as an email attachment for
printing. Easy-Peasy!
You are not expected to just jump in
and start producing the newsletter, and we anticipate a good year’s
transference of editorship. We expect this to be a gradual take over.
If you are interested in taking over
the editorship, or if you perhaps know of someone who is interested, please
send me an email stating such an interest and I’ll submit it to the ISCLR
Executive Board for approval. My email is mik@aber.ac.uk. This post will remain
open until filled.
Next Issue:
Deadline for submissions
January 31, 2005.
Next issue out
March 2005
FoafTale News (FTN) is the
newsletter of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research. We study "modern" and
"urban" legends, and also any legend circulating actively. To join, send a cheque made out to "ISCLR"
for US$30.00 or UK£20 to Mikel J. Koven, Department of Theatre, Film and TV,
Parry-Williams Building, Penglais Campus, UWA, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, SY23
2AJ, UK. Institutional rates available upon request. Members also receive Contemporary Legend,
a refereed academic journal. Some back
issues of FTN are available on-line at http://users.aber.ac.uk/mikstaff/,
while others can be requested from the Editor.
FoafTale News is indexed in the MLA Bibliography.
This newsletter is called FoafTale News for the jocular term
current among legend scholars for over twenty years. The term "foaf" was introduced by
Rodney Dale (in his 1978 book, The Tumour in the Whale) for an
oft-attributed but anonymous source of contemporary legends: a "friend of
a friend." Dale pointed out that
contemporary legends always seemed to be about someone just two or three steps
from the teller — a boyfriend’s cousin,
a co‑worker’s aunt, or a neighbor of the teller’s mechanic. "Foaf" became a popular term at the
Sheffield legend conferences in the
1980s. It was only a short step to the
pun "foaftale," a step taken by a yet-anonymous wag.
FoafTale News welcomes contributions,
including those documenting legends” travels on electronic media and in the
press. All research notes and
articles are copyright by the individual authors who reserve all rights. For permission to reprint, contact them at
the addresses given in the headnote of the article. Send queries, notices, and
research reports to a maximum of 3000 words to the Editor; clippings,
offprints, and citations are also encouraged.
The opinions expressed in FoafTale News are those of the authors
and do not in any necessary way represent those of the editor, the contributing
compilers, the International Society for the Study of Contemporary Legends, its
Council, or its members.
Editor: Mikel
J. Koven, Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, Parry-Williams,
Building, Penglais Campus, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, United Kingdom,
SY23 2AJ
Email:
foaftale-news@aber.ac.uk
FTN Web page :
http://users.aber.ac.uk/mikstaff/
ISCLR Web page: www.panam.edu/faculty/mglazer/isclr/isclr.htm
ISSN 1026-1001