African Folktales at Internet Archive: Tales from Southern Africa

Reading through Samantha Naidu's Transcribing Tales, Creating Cultural Identities: An Analysis Of Selected Written English Texts Of Xhosa Folktales (see yesterday's post about Phyllis Savory), I learned some more about the remarkable life and career of Archibald Campbell Jordan (A. C. Jordan), a Xhosa writer and scholar who was a pioneer in South African cultural and literary studies; you can find out more at Wikipedia. 

So, I knew that was this was the book at Internet Archive that I wanted to share today: A. C. Jordan's Tales from Southern Africa. Thanks to digital lending, this important book is just a click away:

There is a foreword by Z. Pallo Jordan, Jordan's son (more about Jordan's life and career as an ANC politician at Wikipedia), along with an introduction by Harold Scheub, a scholar of South African folklore (I'll be sharing some of Scheub's books in future posts), with beautiful illustrations by Dumile Feni, a South African artist and activist (read more at Wikipedia). Look at this extraordinary illustration of a fight scene, for example: wow!

Jordan was born in Cape Colony (South Africa) in 1906. In 1961 when he was in the United States doing academic research, the South African government revoked his passport, and he spent the rest of his life in exile in the United States until his death in 1968; this book of South African folktales was published after his death in 1973. 

Unlike other African story collections which emphasize animal tales, Jordan's emphasis here is on stories about people, including several stories that feature strong female protagonists. Jordan also includes a few animal stories at the end of the book, but that is not the emphasis of the book; just the opposite. There is nothing escapist here, nothing infantalizing; Jordan's project is very different from Savory's project in that sense. As Annie Gagiano says in her review of the book, "Jordan's Tales have no ring of nostalgia. If they commemorate and celebrate a proud and complex African civilization to dispel the blind condescension of European racists, they do also point forward to what a combination of peoples in this land must rediscover and regain in their own rites of passages towards mutual recognition. These Tales from Southern Africa exhibit the hard-won achievements of communities beset by threats from outside as well as from within, constantly driven to redefine humanness."

So, Jordan's Tales await you now, just a click away thanks to digital lending from the Internet Archive. I am also very glad that this exemplary book is the one that closes out Week 3 of these African folklore book recommendations; I'll be back tomorrow with a round-up of all the books from Week 3. :-)

Tales from Southern Africa

by A. C. Jordan