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The Penguin Book of Southern African Stories
Collects folk tales and modern stories about death's origins, a murderer, alien invaders, violence, and daily life in Africa
- GenresAfricaShort Stories
Paperback
First published November 4, 1986
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 22, 2025
This collection of Southern African stories is an old one, and I have no doubt that any such collection published today would be very different. Stephen Gray (1941-2020) edited the collection during the Apartheid regime in South Africa, where — after an education in Cape Town, Cambridge and Iowa — he was Professor of English at the Rand Afrikaans University.
In his Introduction Gray tells us that the collection includes stories from South Africa, Lesotho, Botswana, Swaziland, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Malawi. The stories are deliberately not siloed into sections (i.e. South Africa, Black Indigenous, Zulu, new, anti-apartheid, Black protest literatures) and he has set aside the notion of Europe literature begetting Southern African literature by including ancient stories from the oral tradition.
The story I’ve chosen from this collection for #ShortStorySeptember is ‘The Road to Migowi’, which Gray says is a rare first-person biography dealing with the rural labour situation. The biographical Notes at the back of the book say that this story is by Ken Lipenga (b.1952), a writer and teacher of literature and language from Malawi. (His Wikipedia page updates this bio to include his career as a politician.) His collection titled Waiting for a Turn, was published in the Malawian Writers Series in 1981, and it deals with Malawian myths, legends and history in its pre-contact, colonial (Nyasaland) and independent phases.
‘The Road to Migowi’ concerns a bus driver meditating on the monotony of his journeys. He tries not to think about the life he once had with his parents and brother now lost to him by accident, alcohol abuse and the silence from his brother who went away to work in the mines. His previous job was the mindless recording of the colour of tea in a research station, and he had thought that a bus conductor’s job would be more interesting. But it’s not: the same irritating people travel on the road; and the poorly maintained road causes the same long delays and interruptions. This man symbolises all the workers denied a meaningful life by the inequities of the system in which they labour.
Noteworthy because there are only a few contributions written by women, and two of those are by Nobel Prize winners, are these stories...
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2025/09/22/t...
In his Introduction Gray tells us that the collection includes stories from South Africa, Lesotho, Botswana, Swaziland, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Malawi. The stories are deliberately not siloed into sections (i.e. South Africa, Black Indigenous, Zulu, new, anti-apartheid, Black protest literatures) and he has set aside the notion of Europe literature begetting Southern African literature by including ancient stories from the oral tradition.
The story I’ve chosen from this collection for #ShortStorySeptember is ‘The Road to Migowi’, which Gray says is a rare first-person biography dealing with the rural labour situation. The biographical Notes at the back of the book say that this story is by Ken Lipenga (b.1952), a writer and teacher of literature and language from Malawi. (His Wikipedia page updates this bio to include his career as a politician.) His collection titled Waiting for a Turn, was published in the Malawian Writers Series in 1981, and it deals with Malawian myths, legends and history in its pre-contact, colonial (Nyasaland) and independent phases.
‘The Road to Migowi’ concerns a bus driver meditating on the monotony of his journeys. He tries not to think about the life he once had with his parents and brother now lost to him by accident, alcohol abuse and the silence from his brother who went away to work in the mines. His previous job was the mindless recording of the colour of tea in a research station, and he had thought that a bus conductor’s job would be more interesting. But it’s not: the same irritating people travel on the road; and the poorly maintained road causes the same long delays and interruptions. This man symbolises all the workers denied a meaningful life by the inequities of the system in which they labour.
Noteworthy because there are only a few contributions written by women, and two of those are by Nobel Prize winners, are these stories...
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2025/09/22/t...
November 17, 2016
It's hard to rate a collection of short stories when the quality of the stories is somewhat erratic. That being said, most of the stories were interesting, some moreso than others. Worth a read if for no other reason than to look at an anthology that isn't composed solely of white male authors.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews