Emeritus Professor Harold E. Scheub, the former Evjue-Bascom Professor of Humanities in the Department of African Languages and Literature (now the Department of African Cultural Studies) of the University of Wisconsin Madison, passed away on October 16. He was 88.
Scheub, who taught at UW-Madison for 43 years, was an unforgettable orator who used his unique gifts to bring the culture and stories of Africa to life for generations of UW students. Former UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley famously referred to Scheub as “a legend in the history of this university.”
“Professor Scheub inspired multiple generations of students with his voice and endless passion for storytelling,” says Eric Wilcots, interim dean of the College of Letters & Science. “He brought to life the spirit and wonder of the vast African culture and made it instantly meaningful to all of us. His belief in the universal power of storytelling was inspiring.”
Scheub, who served as a jet mechanic during the Korean War, first fell in love with Africa after spending two years teaching in Uganda in the years leading up to that country’s independence. As part of his graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, he returned to South Africa, where he spent four years walking 1,500 miles up and down the country’s eastern coast, toting the fifty pounds worth of recording and video equipment he used to record the poetry, tales and myths of the Xhosa, Zulu, Ndebele, Swati and Sotho peoples in South Africa. Those stories would form the basis of Scheub’s signature African Storyteller course, a class he first began teaching in the 1970s. More than 18,000 students experienced it over the course of his career.
"The Storyteller course made him famous locally, but the course was great because of the deeper Harold that lay behind it,” says Jim Delehanty, former associate director of the UW-Madison African Studies Program. “The emphasis of the course was always on what was human, not merely what was African. This surprised and mightily impressed and gratified generation after generation of UW-Madison students who came in expecting special pleading on Africa’s behalf but left, to their surprise and great satisfaction, with a better understanding of their own lives and of the human condition.”
Scheub’s legacy lives on in a digital archive of his Storyteller lectures created by UW Libraries, including a video commemorating his career. The class, now taught in an online format, remains vastly popular among students. Matthew H. Brown, the assistant professor who took it over after Scheub’s retirement in 2013, says Scheub’s voice remains a key part of the experience. Copies of the collection were also provided to the University of Cape Town library in South Africa.
“So retirement and even death have not stopped him from leaving a mark on the lives of many students,” says Brown. “Many generations of Badgers will continue to think long and hard about the social exigencies that motivate storytellers and the various strategies they use to address them. His words and his deep insights into humanity will ring in many heads for many years to come.”
Scheub served as department chair three times during his career, and won several teaching, research and service awards. In 2011, he founded the Professor Harold Scheub Great People Scholarship Fund to support UW- Madison students with financial needs. During the 2000s, he served as the opening speaker for UW-Madison's summer SOAR sessions, welcoming new students to campus.
Scheub was known for his distinctive and memorable teaching style. He routinely held forth to rooms of more than 500 students, but he also demanded promptness and rapt attention from them—those who arrived late to his classes were forced to listen through the locked door. Meg Skinner, one of Scheub’s former students who became his lifelong friend, noted that he never used teaching assistants, and corrected essays by hand, himself.
“Often, his comments exceeded the length of the essays,” she recalls.
Skinner also remembers her mentor and friend as an outspoken advocate for a wide range of causes (ending the Vietnam War, the fight against Apartheid and support for civil, including LGBTQ, rights) and an avid Badger football and basketball fan. His storytelling, she says, extended well beyond the bounds of African lore.
“He was once on a plane hijacked to Cuba, and returned with a story to tell,” she says.
Scheub’s passion and dedication inspired other students to carry on his tradition. Katrina Thompson, now chair of the Department of African Cultural Studies, took classes with Scheub when she was a graduate student. She joined the department the year he retired.
“I learned a great deal from him and will always remember his stories,” she says.
Morgan Weibel, another former Scheub student from rural Wisconsin, also followed Scheub into teaching—she took Scheub’s class in 2009 and is now a high school teacher.
“I’ve kept every exam, every handout and every note I took from Harold Scheub while scribbling furiously in Bascom Hall,” Weibel says. “He changed the way I thought about the world. He knew, in his wisdom, that “all stories are the same.” It wasn’t he that made this connection. The connection was already in existence. He simply pointed out our shared humanity. All of our human experiences: birth, death, greed, fear, goodness and beauty are shared. Harold Scheub’s story is all of ours and in that way, it never ends.”