The oral and written traditions of the Africans of South Africa have provided an understanding of their past and the way the past relates to the present. These traditions continue to shape the past by the present, and vice versa. From the time colonial forces first came to the region in 1487, oral and written traditions have been a bulwark against what became 350 years of colonial rule, characterized by the racist policies of apartheid. The Uncoiling Python: South African Storytellers and Resistance is the first in-depth study of how Africans used oral traditions as a means of survival against European domination. Africans resisted colonial rule from the beginning. They participated in open insurrections and other subversive activities in order to withstand the daily humiliations of colonial rule. Perhaps the most effective and least apparent expression of subversion was through indigenous storytelling and poetic traditions. Harold Scheub has collected the stories and poetry of the Xhosa, Zulu, Swati, and Ndebele peoples to present a fascinating analysis of how the apparently harmless tellers of tales and creators of poetry acted as front-line soldiers.

There are many collections of African oral traditions, but few as carefully organized as The Uncoiling Python. Harold Scheub, one of the world’s leading scholars of African oral traditions and folklore, explores the ways in which oral traditions have served to combat and subvert colonial domination in South Africa. From the time colonial forces first came to southern Africa in 1487, oral and written traditions have been a bulwark against what became 350 years of colonial rule, characterized by the racist policies of apartheid. The Uncoiling Python: South African Storytellers and Resistance is the first in-depth study of oral tradition as a means of survival. In open insurrections and other subversive activities Africans resisted the daily humiliations of colonial rule, but perhaps the most effective and least apparent expression of subversion was through indigenous storytelling and poetic traditions. Harold Scheub has collected the stories and poetry of the Xhosa, Zulu, Swati, and Ndebele peoples to present a fascinating analysis of how the apparently harmless tellers of tales and creators of poetry acted as front-line soldiers.

Engaging and enlightening, this guide explores African music's forms, musicians, instruments, and place in the life of the people. A discography classified by country, theme, group, and instrument is also included.

First English literary translation of Abdilatif Abadalla's influential Voice of Agony

A beautiful study of the incredible life of Nontsizi Mgqwetho For nearly a decade Nontsizi Mgqwetho contributed poetry to a Johannesburg newspaper, Umteteli wa Bantu, the first and only female poet to produce a substantial body of work in Xhosa. Apart from what is revealed in these writings, very little is known about her life. She explodes on the scene with her swaggering, urgent, confrontational woman's poetry on 23 October 1920, sends poems to the newspaper regularly throughout the three years from 1924 to 1926, withdraws for two years until two final poems appear in December 1928 and January 1929, then disappears into the shrouding silence she first burst from. Nothing more is heard from her, but the poetry she left immediately claims for her the status of one of the greatest literary artists ever to write in Xhosa, an anguished voice of an urban woman confronting male dominance, ineffective leadership, black apathy, white malice and indifference, economic exploitation and a tragic history of nineteenth-century territorial and cultural dispossession. The Nation's Bounty contains the original poems alongside English translations by Jeff Opland. It was the first of a number of new titles planned for release in the African Treasury Series, a premier collection of texts by South Africa's pioneers of African literature and written in indigenous languages. First published by Wits University Press in the 1940s, the series provided a voice for the voiceless and celebrated African culture, history and heritage. It continues to make a contribution by supporting current efforts to empower and develop the status of African languages in South Africa.

Trauma, Cultural Complexes, and Transformation: Folk Narratives and Present Realities contributes to our understanding of how culturally traumatic events affect present day realities, and suggests the potential for healing by combining theories on psychological trauma, cultural complexes, and transformations. It draws on insight from a range of disciplines, including Jungian psychology, literary criticism, folkloristics, neurosciences, quantum physics, and social studies. Evija Volfa Vestergaard maps folk narratives of human encounters with extra-human entities as communications of cultural traumas suffered by tellers who are embedded in particular historical and geographical settings, focusing on the little-explored globally emerging cultures of Latvia and South Africa, alongside the United States of America. These cultural narratives form a bridge to a discourse on the social, political, and economic issues faced by these countries and the world at large. Vestergaard outlines the parallels between dreams and visions of individuals essential in healing, and the mythological legend genre serving the same function for groups and cultures, demonstrating that the aim of these open-ended communications is not only to reveal hidden truth, but also to stir our imagination about potentialities. Healing of traumas demands a world of global relatedness based on nurturing kinship, and such a transformation begins with imagining. Trauma, Cultural Complexes, and Transformation represents essential reading for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, folklore, psychology, cultural studies and anthropology, as well as Jungian analysts and psychotherapists.