The Tongue is Fire: South African Storytellers and Apartheid Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

The Tongue is Fire: South African Storytellers and Apartheid Book

Some stories are universal: a beautiful young girl is mistreated by her wicked stepmother and ugly stepsisters; a young man, guided by magical animals, embarks on a hero's quest to overthrow an evil king; a clever trickster fools his adversaries, garnering wealth and admiration in the process. In his study of South African storytelling, The Tongue Is Fire, Harold Scheub is a modern-day Brother Grimm, collecting Swati, Xhosa, Ndebele, and Zulu tales that have come down through centuries of a rich oral tradition. In addition to transcripts of the stories and poems, Professor Scheub includes biographies of the storytellers, the historical context of each tale, and interpretations of what these stories mean. Between 1968 and 1976 Professor Scheub wandered the length and breadth of South Africa finding these stories; that he did not publish them until this year is the result of a promise he made to wait until apartheid was ended. The Tongue Is Fire provides a fascinating glimpse into the history and cultures of South Africa as filtered through the imagination of its peoples.Read More

from£81.00 | RRP: £51.95
* Excludes Voucher Code Discount Also available Used from £35.61
  • Product Description

    In the years between the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the Soweto Uprising of 1976a period that was both the height of the apartheid system in South Africa and, in retrospect, the beginning of its endHarold 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 apartheids 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 traditionthe historians, the poets, the epic-performers, the myth-makersdocumenting 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.

    Inkululeku! Freedom! The word is beautiful, the word is precious. We have struggled against this political system from the beginning, we have nothing to be ashamed of. Our young people and our old have died striving for a better world. Our struggle will be successful, but it must never be forgotten. You must preserve our words, carry them to the wider world, but preserve them too for our posterity, that our children may never forget what we struggled for, what we lost, what we sought to gain. Freedom. Inkululeko.Mandla Madlala, Zulu storyteller

  • 0299150909
  • 9780299150907
  • Harold Scheub
  • 31 December 1996
  • University of Wisconsin Press
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 448
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. If you click through any of the links below and make a purchase we may earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you). Click here to learn more.

Would you like your name to appear with the review?

We will post your book review within a day or so as long as it meets our guidelines and terms and conditions. All reviews submitted become the licensed property of www.find-book.co.uk as written in our terms and conditions. None of your personal details will be passed on to any other third party.

All form fields are required.