From Publishers Weekly
The first in a four-volume series, this collection features works by distinguished, as well as lesser-known, African women writers. The editors' selection of excerpts ranges from the 19th century to the 21st, documenting the varied backgrounds of African women's oral and written traditions. The comprehensive anthology comprises communal songs, folktales, letters, journals, poems, fiction, political speeches and more. Standouts include "Leaving the Farm" by novelist, short story writer and political essayist Olive Schriener, the anonymous "Song of the Afflicted," and Elizabeth Dube's reflection on how her family suffered five murders in the space of a few weeks during conflicts in Zimbabwe during the 1980s. An introductory note accompanies every text to explain its cultural and historical context. This is an important work, of interest to women's studies scholars and those fascinated by the countries these writers hail from: Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
This splendid resource brings together more than 120 selections by women in six countries of southern Africa, in English and in translation from more than 20 different languages, ranging from wedding songs and work songs to letters, prison diaries, poetry, memoirs, and recent testimony before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The famous are here (Doris Lessing, Sindiwe Magona, and more), but most of the voices are new, and they open up worlds too long excluded from the history books. The authoritative, readable introductory notes to each selection provide essential background and biography, but whether the context is the German genocide of the Herero people during WW I or today's AIDS epidemic in Botswana, the focus always is on how it affects the daily lives of people at home. One of the most moving pieces is about the "Widows of the Reserves," their husbands torn away as migrant laborers, the women alone with work and family. The first in a projected series of four regional African collections, this is a must for women's studies and African history and literature collections. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"(A) rich resource for scholars and general readers alike." - Library Journal

Review
"(A) rich resource for scholars and general readers alike." - Library Journal

Book Description
The first of four volumes in the Women Writing Africa Project, this landmark collection presents two centuries of texts by African women and reveals a powerful cultural legacy. Ranging from communal songs and folk tales to letters, diaries, poems, -fiction, -interviews, court records, and other documents, the texts offer a vivid picture of African women_s lives. Their work and families, their experiences of the cruelty of colonialism and war, and their struggles for civil rights are described in voices young and old, of diverse racial and ethnic identities. The volume includes Urieta Kazahendike, an early convert to Christianity, and Queen Regent Labotsibeni of Swaziland, as well as writers and activists such as Bessie Head, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Sindiwe Magona, and -Winnie Mandela.

FROM THE PUBLISHER