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Who killed Jacottet? Drawing on teh gret tradition of the "locked room" detective story, Tim Couzens sets out, eighty years after the event, to solve the crime.
Fact and fiction meet at the boundaries, the betwixt and between where transformations occur. This is the area of ambiguity where fiction and fact become endowed with meaning, and this is the area—where ambiguity, irony, and metaphor join forces—that Harold Scheub exposes in all its nuanced and evocative complexity in The Poem in the Story. In a career devoted to exploring the art of the African storyteller, Scheub has conducted some of the most interesting and provocative investigations into nonverbal aspects of storytelling, the complex relationship between artist and audience, and, most dramatically, the role played by poetry in storytelling. This book is his most daring effort yet, a...
From the beginning of the nineteenth century through to 1960, Protestant missionaries were the most important intermediaries between South Africa’s ruling white minority and its black majority. The Equality of Believers reconfigures the narrative of race in South Africa by exploring the pivotal role played by these missionaries and their teachings in shaping that nation’s history. The missionaries articulated a universalist and egalitarian ideology derived from New Testament teachings that rebuked the racial hierarchies endemic to South African society. Yet white settlers, the churches closely tied to them, and even many missionaries evaded or subverted these ideas. In the early years of...
This compendium brings together, in one volume for the first time, Obumselu’s highly celebrated work on African literature. With the dialectic of cultures as the presiding preoccupation of his work, and appraising the place of African literature in the universal scheme of cultural interchange his critical speciality, Obumselu espoused a scholarship with a necessarily indispensable comparative dimension, as the articles anthologised in this volume as African literature reveal. The expertise with which he explores the oeuvres of many Western writers because of the light they shed on the creative endeavours of African writers is offset only by the rigour with which he explores the transformat...
It's a familiar story: a beautiful woman is abducted and her husband journeys to recover her. This story’s best-known incarnation is also a central Greek myth—the abduction of Helen that led to the Trojan War. Stealing Helen surveys a vast range of folktales and texts exhibiting the story pattern of the abducted beautiful wife and makes a detailed comparison with the Helen of Troy myth. Lowell Edmunds shows that certain Sanskrit, Welsh, and Old Irish texts suggest there was an Indo-European story of the abducted wife before the Helen myth of the Iliad became known. Investigating Helen’s status in ancient Greek sources, Edmunds argues that if Helen was just one trope of the abducted wif...
Lesotho’s history has long been defined by its enclave status within South Africa, but it is a hard-fought and hard-won status that helps unite Basotho through the shared history of struggle against colonial rule in the region. Since the end of apartheid in 1994, Lesotho’s status as a separate entity has been called into question though the fierce national pride built through centuries of resistance to outside rule has mitigated against any serious discussions of incorporating Lesotho into South Africa. Still, the political instability and lack of a flourishing domestic economy have made life difficult for the majority of Basotho and could call into question the viability and legitimacy ...
The Swiss missionaries played a primary role in explaining Africa to the literate world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book emphasises how these European intellectuals, brought to the deep rural areas of southern Africa by their vocation, formulated and ordered knowledge about the continent. Central to this group was Junod who became a pioneering collector in the fields of entomology and botany. He would later examine African society with the methodology, theories and confidence of the natural sciences. On the way he came to depend on the skills of African observers and collectors. Out of this work emerged, in three stages between 1898 and 1927, an influential cla...
In this landmark volume, a rich array of voices make the case that religion is not partitioned off from the secular in the Global South the way it is in the Global North. Authors work at the intersections of freedom and Nationalism, peace and reconciliation, and gender, ecology, and ethnography to contend that religion is in fact deeply integrated into the lives of those in the Global South, even though "secularism"--a political philosophy that requires the state to treat all religions equally--predominates in many of the regions. World Christianity and Interfaith Relations is part of the multi volume series World Christianity and Public Religion. The series seeks to become a platform for intercultural and intergenerational dialogue, and to facilitate opportunities for interaction between scholars across the Global South and those in other parts of the world by engaging emerging voices from a variety of indigenous Christianities around the world. The focus is not only on particular histories and practices, but also on their theological articulations and impact on the broader societies in which they work.
This work briefly records the lives and achievements of 502 men and women who contributed, or are still contributing, to the natural history of the Free State and Lesotho, between 1829 and 2013.