The Uncoiling Python

The Uncoiling Python
Author: Harold Scheub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2010-08-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0821419226

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.

African Music

African Music
Author: Francis Bebey
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 1999-08-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 161374661X

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.

There was No Lightning

There was No Lightning
Author: Harold Scheub
Publisher: UW-Madison Libraries Parallel Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2010
Genre: Apartheid
ISBN: 9781934795200

Nation's Bounty

Nation's Bounty
Author: Jeff Opland
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 526
Release: 2007-06-01
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1776143183

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

Trauma, Cultural Complexes, and Transformation
Author: Evija Volfa Vestergaard
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2018-06-28
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 131529463X

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.

African Heritage Challenges

African Heritage Challenges
Author: Britt Baillie
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2020-11-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9811543666

The richness of Africa’s heritage at times stands in stark contrast to the economic, health, political and societal challenges faced. Development is essential but in what forms? For whom? Following whose agendas? At what costs? This book explores how heritage can promote, secure, or undermine sustainable development with special focus on sub-Saharan Africa, and in turn, how this affects conceptions of heritage. The chapters in this volume identify shared challenges, good practices and failures, and use specific case studies to provide detailed insights into varied forms of heritage and heritage defining processes on the continent. By critically analysing the often romanticised discourses of ‘heritage’, ‘community engagement’, and ‘sustainable development’ the volume suggests ways of harnessing aspects of heritage to tackle some of the socio-economic and political pressures facing heritage practices on the continent, including the legacies of colonialism.

The Nation's Bounty

The Nation's Bounty
Author: Nontsizi Mgqwetho
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 508
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1868144518

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.

African Traditional Religion in South Africa

African Traditional Religion in South Africa
Author: David Chidester
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 476
Release: 1997-08-07
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0313032254

In a changing South Africa, recovering the meaning and power of African tradition is a matter of crucial importance. This work participates in that recovery by providing a comprehensive guide to research on the indigenous religious heritage of this dynamic country. Detailed reviews of over 600 books, articles, and theses are offered along with introductory essays and detailed annotations that define the field of study. This work plus two forthcoming volumes, Christianity in South Africa: An Annotated Bibliography and Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism in South Africa: An Annotated Bibliography will become the standard reference work on South African religions. Scholars and students in Religious Studies, Social Anthropology, History, and African Studies will find this set particularly useful. This work organizes and annotates all the relevant literature on Khoisan, Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho-Tswana, Swazi, Tsonga, and Venda traditions. The annotations are concise yet detailed essays written in an engaging and accessible style and supported by an exhaustive index, which comprise a full and complex profile of African traditional religion in South Africa.

The Nostradamus Prophecies

The Nostradamus Prophecies
Author: Mario Reading
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2010-11-23
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429925868

An ancient secret...A deadly conspiracy. For reader's of Raymond Khoury's The Last Templar, or the works of Dan Brown, this high-octane commercial thriller tells of a hunt for the lost prophecies of Nostradamus and the two men who will do anything to discover their secrets. Nostradamus wrote a thousand prophecies. Only 942 have survived. What happened to the missing quatrains? What secrets did they contain to make it necessary for them to remain hidden? And why did Nostradamus leave his daughter a sealed container in his will? These questions drive two men with very different desires. Adam Sabir is a writer desperate to revive his flagging career; Achor Bale is a member of an ancient secret society that has dedicated itself to the protection and support of the "Three Antichrists" foretold in Nostradamus's verses—Napoleon, Adolf Hitler, and the "one still to come"...The pair embark on a terrifying chase through the ancient Romany encampments of France in a quest to locate the missing verses.