How far do you go to make sure stories from other lands are authentic?

I tell stories every week at Lakeview Preschool here in Oakland.  Each week they “visit” a different country.  I try to have a story from that country when I go in on Wednesday.

A few weeks ago, they were visiting the southern part of Africa (yes, I know, Africa is a continent, not a country.  To their credit, they spend a week in each of the four quarters of the continent, not just one week on “Africa”).

Searching through books for a story from southern Africa, I found “Mulha” in the collection, The Maid of the North, Feminist Folk Tales From Around the World, edited by Ethel Johnson Phelps.  “A South African Tale” the book says.  “Perfect,” I thought.  “I haven’t bbeen telling enough stories lately with strong women characters and this one seems just right for 3 and 4-year-olds.”

Now, when I’m telling a folktale from another land, I try to:

• Compare a couple of different versions.
• Pick and choose from the different versions the parts which I like best.
• Know something about my source.  (More below.)
• Look up and verify any words I don’t know.
• Try to get the right pronunciation of all words.
• Learn a little extra about the country so that I’m not just telling the story straight out of the book I read.

Regarding sources:

• Is the source a native of the country or an outside observer?
• Is the observer just recording or are they judging, moralizing?
• Did the observer change anything or make something up?

Now I change stories all the time in the process of making them “mine.”  Sometimes I connect dots or supply missing motivation.  Sometimes I just find that a story works better for me a certain way.   Although some tellers I respect disagree, I think such changes are fine as long as I don’t claim that my way is the way the story “is told.”  But I like to know what’s authentic and what’s some other collector’s interpolation or invention before I work with a story.

So I tried to find another version of “Mulha” online.  Nothing.  The only listings Google gave me for the word “Mulha” were links either to Phelps’s book or to Fairy Tales of South Africa (1910, Sarah Bourhill and Beatrice Drake), the book she got the story from.

I Googled “Inzimu,” and “Imbula” which the story calls “male and female ogres.”  No listings for Inzimu,  only one listing for Imbula and it’s obviously someone’s name.

Well, I went ahead and told the story.  It was a good story.  For a little more background I read (to myself, not to the kids) an article on Wikipedia about Swaziland (mentioned in the  story) and another one on southern Africa.   I decided not to include the words which I couldn’t verify.  I just said “ogre” for the monster.  I introduced it as a story from the southern part of Africa.  The kids enjoyed it.

How far do you go?  Probably if I was going to put this story on a DVD, I’d try to research it further.  For telling to a small group of kids, I think the amount of research I did was okay.  But what do you think?  How authentic do you keep stories?  How far do you go in verifying what you read?