shopping cart
Save up to 30% on our Staff Picks
Call us:  800-878-7323 HELP
McAfee SECURE helps keep you safe from identity theft, credit card fraud, spyware, spam, viruses and online scams.
Original Essays | October 18, 2009

Victoria Hislop: IMG From Leprosy to Lorca — Strange Inspiration



My first novel, The Island, was inspired by a chance visit to a tiny island leper colony off the coast of Greece on our summer holiday. It was a... Continue »
  1. $10.49 Sale Trade Paper add to wish list

    The Return

    Victoria Hislop

On Order

Backorder
$44.50
New Trade Paper
Currently out of stock.
Add to Wishlist
available for shipping or prepaid pickup only
Qty Store Section
- Local Warehouse Mythology- Folklore and Storytelling

The Tongue is Fire: South Africa Storytellers and Apartheid

by Harold Scheub

The Tongue is Fire: South Africa Storytellers and Apartheid Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

     In the years between the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the Soweto Uprising of 1976—a period that was both the height of the apartheid system in South Africa and, in retrospect, the beginning of its end—Harold Scheub went to Africa to collect stories.

     With tape-recorder and camera in hand, Scheub registered the testaments of Swati, Xhosa, Ndebele, and Zulu storytellers, farming people who lived in the remote reaches of rural South Africa. While young people fought in the streets of Soweto and South African writers made the world aware of apartheid’s evils, the rural storytellers resisted apartheid in their own way, using myth and metaphor to preserve their traditions and confront their oppressors. For more than 20 years, Scheub kept the promise he made to the storytellers to publish his translations of their stories only when freedom came to South Africa. The Tongue Is Fire  presents these voices of South African oral tradition—the historians, the poets, the epic-performers, the myth-makers—documenting their enduring faith in the power of the word to sustain tradition in the face of determined efforts to distort or eliminate it. These texts are a tribute to the storytellers who have always, in periods of crisis, exercised their art to inspire their own people.

Description:

Includes bibliographical references (p. 421-428) and index.

About the Author

Harold Scheub is professor of African languages and literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. To record oral traditions he has walked more than 6000 miles through South Africa, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, and Lesotho. He is the editor of Nongenile Masithathu Zenani’s The World and the Word: Tales and Observations from Xhosa Oral Tradition, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press, and the author of The African Storyteller.

Product Details

ISBN:
9780299150945
Subtitle:
South African Storytellers and Apartheid
Author:
Scheub, Harold
Author:
Scheub, Harold E.
Publisher:
University of Wisconsin Press
Location:
Madison :
Subject:
Social life and customs
Subject:
Folklore & Mythology
Subject:
Folklore
Subject:
Folklore & Mythology - Folklore
Subject:
South Africa
Subject:
Storytelling
Subject:
Apartheid
Subject:
Oral tradition
Subject:
South Africa Social life and customs.
Subject:
Folklore -- Political aspects -- South Africa.
Subject:
Africa - South - South Africa
Subject:
Africa - South - Republic of South Africa
Subject:
Apartheid -- South Africa.
Series Volume:
96-05
Publication Date:
October 1996
Binding:
Paperback
Language:
English
Illustrations:
Yes
Pages:
476
Dimensions:
8.97x6.04x1.12 in. 1.53 lbs.

Other books you might like

  1. $3.95 Used Trade Paper add to wish list

    The Golden Compass

    Philip Pullman
  2. $1.50 Used Trade Paper add to wish list

    Jungle Book

    Rudyard Kipling
  3. $3.95 Used Trade Paper add to wish list

    Running Out of Time

    Margaret Peterson Haddix
  4. $3.00 Used Trade Paper add to wish list

    Mystery Stories

    Helen Cresswell
  5. $7.95 Used Mass Market add to wish list

    Biko Revised Edition

    Donald Woods
  6. $9.50 Used Trade Paper add to wish list

    Disgrace

    J M Coetzee

Related Aisles

  • back to top

Powell's City of Books is an independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon, that fills a whole city block with more than a million new, used, and out of print books. Shop those shelves — plus literally millions more books, DVDs, and eBooks — here at Powells.com.