- 476 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About This Book
In the years between the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the Soweto Uprising of 1976āa period that was both the height of the apartheid system in South Africa and, in retrospect, the beginning of its endāHarold 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 traditionāthe historians, the poets, the epic-performers, the myth-makersādocumenting 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.
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Table of contents
- Contents
- IIIustrutions
- Preface
- Note
- Introduction: Some Moments, Figures, and Themes in South African History
- PROLOGUE FOUNDERS OF THE INHERITANCE: āLET ME GO BACKā
- PART 1 CULTIVATING THE PAST: āTHIS IS GODāS PLACEā
- PART 2 AMBIGUOUS PROMISE: āIT KEEPS ON HAPPENING, IT KEEPS ON HAPPENINGā
- PART 3 THE THREATENED DREAM: āTHE LAND WAS SEIZEDā
- PART 4 UNCERTAIN HOPE: LIGHTING āAN UNCONTROLLABLE FIREā
- EPILOGUE SEIZERS OF THE INHERITANCE: āTHE STORY IS PAINFULā
- Notes
- Sources
- Index