Why am I passionate about this?
I’m a historian of Southern Africa who is fascinated by questions of visibility and invisibility. I love probing beneath the surface of the past. For example, why is this person famous and renowned, but that person isn’t? To me, recognition and reputation are interesting to scrutinize as social categories in their own right, rather than as factual statements. I’ve written two books focusing on the history of religious expression in Southern Africa, and my most recent book is a biography of the forgotten South African writer and politician Regina Gelana Twala.
Joel's book list on literary women you’ve never heard of
Why did Joel love this book?
This anthology of African women writers has been my personal lodestar in writing about Regina Twala, a forgotten African writer.
Busby (a pioneering editor and publisher of Ghanaian heritage) was one of the first to recognize that the canon of African writers was much bigger than famous men like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.
Her work taught me about a longstanding rich female literary tradition on the African continent – some of her earliest examples of women writers date to Ancient Egypt!
Busby recognizes that we can’t always look to the written page for evidence of this, given that many women writers were denied opportunities to publish their work.
So she broadens the focus of her anthology by paying attention to both “words and writing,” thinking about female writers of novels, poetry, plays, non-fiction, and journalism.
A must read.
1 author picked New Daughters of Africa as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Three decades after her pioneering anthology, Daughters of Africa, Margaret Busby curates an extraordinary collection of contemporary writing by 200 women writers of African descent, including Zadie Smith, Bernardine Evaristo and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
A glorious portrayal of the richness and range of African women's voices, this major international book brings together their achievements across a wealth of genres. From Antigua to Zimbabwe and Angola to the USA, overlooked artists of the past join key figures, popular contemporaries and emerging writers in paying tribute to the heritage that unites them, the strong links that endure from generation to generation, and…