Voice from Africa

This work is Africa speaking to Africa and to the world. This anthology is not just about a grumpy, grousing South Africa, but about the whole of Africa: flamboyant West Africa, where men thrust elbows into each other’s ribs and laugh broadly over their jokes; East Africa, with its strong Arab influence; traditional Africa, with the funny wisdom that lurks in the antics of animals and the ways of Ju-ju men and witch-doctors. Here are the dreams about the great things that we yet will do; the long dictionary words and the colourful regalia with which we swathe our dark bodies: that is us.

Here, Africans are creating out of English a language of their own: a language that thinks in actions, using words that dart back and forth on quick-moving feet, virile, earthy, garrulous. Peggy Rutherfoord has delved deep into the literary store of our black Africa to compile this anthology, which shows us in the many moods that are ours. Somewhere or another on the continent there is a new civilization beginning to appear, a new African culture – there are traces of it here.