Africa at the Internet Archive: Indaba, My Children

Continuing this week with books of stories from southern Africa, I want to share a storytelling project by the Zulu writer and spiritualist Credo Vusa'mazulu Mutwa: Indaba, My Children.

This book weaves together mythological material in the context of a larger narrative, so it's something like a novel, but not a typical novel by any means. The stories told here are also not traditional Bantu legends and not traditional history, but instead something that comes from Mutwa's visions and secrets into which he was initiated. 

The book was first published in 1966, when Mutwa was in his 45; he was born in 1921. You can read more about his life story at Wikipedia and at South African History Online. Mutwa died very recently, in March 2020, at the age of 98; you can read an obituary and remembrance in The Conversation: South Africa’s towering healer, prophet and artist Credo Mutwa. You can see some photographs of his art and learn more about that dimension of his work here: Spiritual Art of Credo Vusamazulu Mutwa (which includes a fascinating comparison between Mutwa and William Blake).

You can see Mutwa here in a recent video at age 97, about a year before his death:

Mutwa has his fans and his detractors; some people consider Mutwa a visionary prophet, while others regard him as a sort of mytho-conspiracy theorist. And here's the great thing about this book being at the Internet Archive: you can explore the book for yourself and see what you learn from it. Plus, if you are curious to learn more, you will also find another collection of his writings there: My People, My Africa, first published in 1964, and published for the first time in the United States in 1969. 

That book contains material that also appears in Indaba along with materials from another book: Africa Is My Witness, and it took is just a click away at Internet Archive. 

Indaba, My Children

by Credo Vusa'mazulu Mutwa