Harold Scheub
400 entries
This collection of hundreds of fascinating, mysterious, and revealing tales captures the immense sweep and diversity of African mythology.
Stories are arranged alphabetically, and touch on virtually every aspect of religious belief: gods and goddesses, epic heroes and divine tricksters, along with epics of the world's origins, the struggle between the human and the divine, and much more. Entries cover the entire continent, from the mouth of the Nile to the shores of the Cape of Good Hope, including North African as well as sub-Saharan cultures.
Here, for example, is the tale of Abu Zayd (from the Bani Hilal of Tunisia), an epic hero who battles a jinni; and here too is a myth of how the moon and the toad created the first man and woman, from the Soko of Congo. Each story is retold, and information is provided about the respective belief system, the main characters, and related stories or variants. This magnificent collection not only provides hundreds of fascinating myths, but also recaptures their cultural contexts, in which story and storyteller, tradition and performance, all merge.
Harold Scheub is Professor of African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has spent ten years researching and teaching in Africa, and is the author of a number of books, including The Tongue is Fire, Secret Fire, and Story.
