On the Shelf at CCBC Libraries
The Girl Who Married a Lion by
Gathered here is a beguiling selection of folktales from Zimbabwe and Botswana as retold by the best-selling author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. This treasury contains most of the stories previously collected in Children of Wax and seven new tales from the Setswana-speaking people of Botswana. A girl discovers that her young husband might actually be a lion in disguise, but not before they have two sons who might actually be cubs . . . When a child made of wax follows his curiosity outside into the heat of daylight and melts, his siblings shape him into a bird with feathers made of leaves that enable him to fly into the light . . . Talking hyenas, milk-giving birds, clever cannibals who nonetheless get their comeuppance, and mysterious forces that reside in the landscape—these wonderful fables bring us the wealth, the variety, and the particular magic of traditional African lore.
Call Number: GR358.62.N34 M23 2004
A Dictionary of African Mythology by Call Number: BL2400 .S24 2000
Yoruba Trickster Tales by Call Number: GR351.32.Y56O86 1997
Sundiata an Epic of Old Mali by Call Number: DT532.2 .N513 2009
Databases
- ProQuest Central This link opens in a new windowArticles on any subject. This is a good place to start.
- Humanities International Complete This link opens in a new windowArticles and ebooks about humanities topics like arts, history, language, law, literature, philosophy, and politics.
- World History In Context This link opens in a new window
Articles, essays, and primary sources on the history of the world.
Online from CCBC Libraries
The World and the Word by
A master storyteller of the Xhosa people of South Africa, Nongenile Masithathu Zenani gives us an unprecedented view of an oral society from within. Twenty-four of her complex and beautiful tales about birth, puberty, marriage, and work, as told to the renowned collector of African oral tradition, Harold Scheub, are gathered here. Accompanying the stories are Zenani's detailed commentaries and analyses and Scheub's striking photographs of her in performance. The combination of these historical and cultural observations with a richly symbolic collection of tales from a single traditional storyteller make The World and the Word a remarkable document. "The storyteller's materials are simple," Zenani told Scheub, "the world, and the word." She presents to us the entire world of the Xhosa people, how they first came to be, the origins of their customs, how they order their world and deal with transgressors, how they manage all of life's transitions from birth to death. She depicts both the world as it exists and as it is shaped in the words of the storyteller. Inheriting tales from the Xhosa tradition, Zenani has transformed them into imaginative new stories marked by her own artistry. Scheub's introduction to The World and the Word discusses Xhosa oral tradition and Zenani's particular characteristics as an artist within that tradition; Zenani's personal history and her work as both a storyteller and a healer; and Scheub's friendship with her and his role in recording her legacy.
Publication Date: 1992
The Drunken King, or, the Origin of the State by
"... de Heusch has achieved a significant advance over Lévi-Strauss's formulations.... [A] landmark contribution to anthropological theory, historical methodology, structural analysis, and African studies." --Choice A major work that modifies and extends Lévi-Straussian myth analysis in profound and exciting ways. Roy Willis's masterful translation makes technical terms accessible to the general reader.
Publication Date: 1982
