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Tales from Southern Africa by A. C. Jordan is a vivid bridge between living oral tradition and the printed page, introducing readers to the social worlds that shaped—and were shaped by—the storyteller. Drawing on communities where the popular assembly, ritual kingship, and ancestral veneration intertwined daily ethics with cosmology, Jordan situates folktales within the civic and religious fabric that sustained them. He traces how territorial polity, seasonal rites, and reciprocal obligations produced a collective aesthetic, where poets and narrators served as chroniclers, entertainers, and moral arbiters. The result is not merely a treasury of stories, but a cultural map: animal allegories and human narratives classified as *iintsomi*, *amabali*, and *imilando*; performance conventions (taboos, call-and-response, improvisation); and the communal authorship that made each telling unique.
At the same time, Jordan's framing history confronts the pressures that imperiled this art: missionary moral economies, military conquest, coerced labor, and the urban dislocations that severed audiences from their custodians. He shows how the printing press both preserved and altered the tradition—freezing what was once fluid, isolating the artist from the participatory forge of collective creation, and, under apartheid's legal and economic constraints, excluding many voices that once led the form, especially women. *Tales from Southern Africa* thus functions as a scholarly anthology and a cultural act of restitution, inviting readers to experience the tales' lyric power while understanding the social systems, historical ruptures, and aesthetic practices that give them their enduring resonance.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.
