Daughters of Africa
1992 anthology edited by Margaret Busby / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present is a compilation of orature and literature by more than 200 women from Africa and the African diaspora, edited and introduced by Margaret Busby,[2] who compared the process of assembling the volume to "trying to catch a flowing river in a calabash".[3]
Editor | Margaret Busby |
---|---|
Country | UK |
Language | English |
Genre | Anthology |
Publication date | 1992 |
Pages | 1127 pp. |
Followed by | New Daughters of Africa |
First published in 1992,[4] in London by Jonathan Cape (having been commissioned by Candida Lacey,[5] formerly of Pandora Press and later publisher of Myriad Editions),[6] and in New York by Pantheon Books, Daughters of Africa is regarded as a pioneering work,[7][8] covering a variety of genres – including fiction, essays, poetry, drama, memoirs and children's writing – and more than 1000 pages in extent.[9] Arranged chronologically, beginning with traditional oral poetry,[10] it includes work translated from African languages as well as from Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.[11][12]
The anthology's title derives from an 1831 declaration by Maria W. Stewart (1803–1880), the first African-American woman to give public lectures, in which she said: "O, ye daughters of Africa, awake! awake! arise! no longer sleep nor slumber, but distinguish yourselves. Show forth to the world that ye are endowed with noble and exalted faculties."[13][lower-alpha 1]
A companion volume called New Daughters of Africa – with the subtitle "An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent", and featuring a further 200-plus contributors from around the world born between the 1790s and the 1990s[16] – was published in 2019.[17][18] Associated with the anthology is the Margaret Busby New Daughters of Africa Award for a woman student from Africa.[19][20]