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Senkatana is a tragic play adapted from Sotho folk narrative. The play is regarded as a classic of Sesotho literature. Seen as one of the greatest essayists and dramatists writing in Southern Sotho, Senkatana was Mofokeng’s first book, published in 1952 in the African (then Bantu) Treasury Series, an imprint of Witwatersrand University Press.
The workers who migrate from Lesotho to the mines and cities of neighboring South Africa have developed a rich genre of sung oral poetry—word music—that focuses on the experiences of migrant life. This music provides a culturally reflexive and consciously artistic account of what it is to be a migrant or part of a migrant's life. It reveals the relationship between these Basotho workers and the local and South African powers that be, the "cannibals" who live off of the workers' labor. David Coplan presents a moving collection of material that for the first time reveals the expressive genius of these tenacious but disenfranchised people. Coplan discusses every aspect of the Basotho musical literature, taking into account historical conditions, political dynamics, and social forces as well as the styles, artistry, and occasions of performance. He engages the postmodern challenge to decolonize our representation of the ethnographic subject and demonstrates how performance formulates local knowledge and communicates its shared understandings. Complete with transcriptions of full male and female performances, this book develops a theoretical and methodological framework crucial to anyone seeking to understand the relationship between orality and literacy in the context of performance. This work is an important contribution to South African studies, to ethnomusicology and anthropology, and to performance studies in general.
In 1992, a gang leader was shot dead by an ANC member in Kroonstad. The murder weapon was then hidden on Antjie Krog’s stoep. In Begging to Be Black, Krog begins by exploring her position in this controversial case. From there the book ranges widely in scope, both in time - reaching back to the days of Basotho king Moshoeshoe - and in space - as we follow Krog’s experiences as a research fellow in Berlin, far from the Africa that produced her. Begging to Be Black is a book of journeys - moral, historical, philosophical and geographical. These form strands that Krog interweaves and sets in conversation with each other, as she explores questions of change and becoming, coherency and connectedness, before drawing them closer together as the book approaches its powerful end. Experimental and courageous, Begging to Be Black is a welcome addition to Krog’s own oeuvre and to South African literary non-fiction.
The most comprehensive reference work on African literature to date, this book covers all the key historical and cultural issues in the field. The Encyclopedia contains over 600 entries covering criticism and theory, African literature's development as a field of scholarship, and studies of established and lesser-known writers and their texts. While the greatest proportion of literary work in Africa has been a product of the twentieth century, the Encyclopedia also covers the literature back to the earliest eras of story-telling and oral transmission, making this a unique and valuable resource for those studying social sciences as well as humanities. This work includes cross-references, suggestions for further reading, and a comprehensive index.
In 2022 Wits University Press marked its centenary, making it the oldest, most established university press in sub-Saharan Africa. While in part modelled on scholarly publishers from the global North, it has had to contend with the constraints of working under global South conditions: marginalisation within the university, budgetary limitations, small local markets, unequal access to international sales channels, and the privileging of English language publishing over indigenous languages. This volume explores what the Press has achieved, and what its modes of reinvention might look like. In widening and deepening our understanding of the Press as an example of a global South scholarly publisher, this volume asks how publishing can contribute to a broader understanding of Southern knowledge production. Featuring contributions from scholars, publishers and authors this multi-voiced volume showcases the history of the Press’s publishing activities over 100 years: from documenting its evolution through book covers and giving credence to some of the leading black intellectuals and writers of the early 20th century and the success of those works in spite of their authors’ racial marginalisation, to the role of women, both in publishing and in the spaces afforded to women’s writing on the Press’s list. The collection concludes with essays by contemporary authors who detail not only their experiences of working with Southern publishers, but also the politics and influences governing their decisions to choose the Press over a Northern publisher. Publishing from the South shows the strategies deployed by the Press to professionalise Southern knowledge making, and in the process demonstrating how university presses in the global South support the scholarly missions of their universities for both local and global audiences.
The Kingdom of Lesotho is a mountainous enclave in southern Africa, and like mountain zones throughout the world it is isolated, steeped in tradition, and home to few outsiders. The people, known as Basotho, are respected in the area as the only tribe never to be defeated by European colonizers. Greg Alder arrives in Tsoeneng in 2003 as the village's first foreign resident since 1966. Back then, the Canadian priest who had been living there was robbed and murdered in his quarters. Set up as a Peace Corps teacher at the village's secondary school, Alder finds himself incompetent in so many unexpected ways. How do you keep warm in this place where it snows but there is no electricity? How do you feed yourself where there are no grocery stores let alone restaurants? Tsoeneng is a world apart from his home in America, but Alder persists in adapting. He learns to grow food, he learns to speak the strange local language, and he makes enough friends such that he is eventually invited to participate in initiation rites. Yet even as he seems accepted into the Tsoeneng fold, he sees how much of an outsider he will always remain-and perhaps want to remain. The Mountain School is insightful and candid, at times accepting and at times rebellious. It is the ultimate tale of the transplant.
"Sol Plaatje's Mhudi is the first full-length novel in English to have been written by a black South African and is widely regarded as one of South Africa's most important literary works. Set in the 1830s, it tells the tale of Mhudi and Ra-Thaga, a romantic story set against a violent backdrop of war between Barolong and Matebele, complicated by the intrusions of Boer trekkers with whom the Barolong form an alliance. It is notable, among other things, for the way Plaatje uses the past to explore the roots of the oppression and injustice suffered by his people a century later, when the book was written"--Page 4 of cover
