These beautiful and timeless stories from the African Bush were gathered more than a century ago and have touched thousands of readers ever since. The South African-born author, Sir Laurens van der Post, revered them and helped to make them known throughout the world. For this special new edition, Gregory McNamee has adapted the original nineteenth-century English translations to create modern versions of the stories for readers without a prior knowledge of the Bushman ways of life. The stories in this book carry universal observations and truths and, with their historical and ethnographic roots in the African Bushman culture, they are fascinating and educational for readers and listeners of all ages. They bear powerful testimony to a desert people living at one with Nature.

A comprehensive and fascinating account of all the major groups of southern African hunter-gatherers.

J.D. Lewis-Williams, one of the leading South African archaeologists and ethnographers, uses ethnographic, archival, and archaeological lines of research to understand San-Bushman mythological stories. From this, he establishes a more nuanced theory of the role of myths in cultures worldwide.

Wilhelm Bleek was fascinated by African languages and set out to make sense of a complex and alien Bushman tongue. At first Lucy Lloyd worked as his assistant, but soon proved to be so gifted a linguist and empathetic a listener that she created a monumental record of Bushman culture. Their informants were a colorful cast. The teenager, /A!kunta, taught Bleek and Lloyd their first Bushman words and sentences. The wise old man and masterful storyteller, //Kabbo, opened their eyes to a richly imaginative world of myth and legend. The young man, Dia!kwain, explained traditional beliefs about sorcery, while his friend #Kasin spoke of Bushman medicines and poisons. The treasures of Bushman culture were most fully revealed in conversations with a middle-aged man known as /Han=kass'o, who told of dances, songs and the meaning of images on rocks. The human histories and relationships involved in this unique collaboration across cultures are explored in full for the first time in this remarkable narrative.

ISSN: 2397-9607 Issue 46 In Issue 46 of the Baba Indaba Children's Stories, Baba Indaba narrates two legends from the bushmen of the Namib Desert. The stories are ?How the Coming of a Snake Announces a Death in the Family? and ?The Resurrection of the Ostrich.? Both legends are a mix of Bushmen folklore and customs and show how intertwined everyday life in the Namib is with the bush-lore by which the bushmen live. This issue also has a "Where in the World - Look it Up" section, where young readers are challenged to look up a place on a map somewhere in the world. The place, town or city is relevant to the story, on map. HINT - use Google maps. Baba Indaba is a fictitious Zulu storyteller who narrates children's stories from around the world. Baba Indaba translates as "Father of Stories". It is believed that folklore and tales are believed to have originated in India and made their way overland along the Silk and Spice routes and through Central Asia before arriving in Europe. Even so, this does not cover all folklore from all four corners of the world. Indeed folklore, legends and myths from Africa, Australia, Polynesia, and some from Asia too, are altogether quite different and seem to have originated on the whole from separate reservoirs of lore, legend and culture.

The Bleek and Lloyd Collection consists of the notebooks in which William Bleek and Lucy Lloyd transcribed and translated the narratives, cultural information and personal histories told to them in the 1870s by a number of /Xam informants. It represents a rare and rich record of an indigenous language and culture that no longer exists, and has exerted a fascination for anthropologists and poets alike. Yet how does one begin reading texts that are at once so compromised and so unique? Bushman Letters is an important book for it examines not only the /Xam archive, but also the critical tradition that has grown up around it and the hermeneutic principles that inform that tradition. Wessels critiques these principles and offers alternative modes of reading. He shows the problems with the approaches employed by previous critics and, in the course of his own detailed and poetic readings of a number of narratives, suggests what their interpretations have left out. The book must be described as metacritical: it is criticism about the critical tradition that has grown up around the /Xam archive and in the fields of folklore and mythology more widely. Bushman Letters addresses a curiously neglected area in the burgeoning literature on the Bleek and Lloyd Collection: the texts themselves. In doing so, the book makes a substantial contribution to the study of oral narratives in general and to the theoretical discourse that informs such studies.

The Bushman' is a perennial but changing image. The transformation of that image is important. It symbolizes the perception of Bushman or San society, of the ideas and values of ethnographers who have worked with Bushman peoples, and those of other anthropologists who use this work. Anthropology and the Bushman covers early travellers and settlers, classic nineteenth and twentieth-century ethnographers, North American and Japanese ecological traditions, the approaches of African ethnographers, and recent work on advocacy and social development. It reveals the impact of Bushman studies on anthropology and on the public. The book highlights how Bushman or San ethnography has contributed to anthropological controversy, for example in the debates on the degree of incorporation of San society within the wider political economy, and on the validity of the case for 'indigenous rights' as a special kind of human rights. Examining the changing image of the Bushman, Barnard provides a new contribution to an established anthropology debate.

Folktales are timeless and, although they are a product of a particular culture, they have universal relevance because they give insight into the human condition. In Folktales from Africa, award-winning South African author Dianne Stewart has retold stories from the length and breadth of the African continent. Beautifully illustrated by Marjorie van Heerden, this collection of twenty stories is certain to entertain and delight the reader, as well as give insight into the countries from which the tales have been sourced.