Daughters of Africa

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, who compared the process of assembling the volume to "trying to catch a flowing river in a calabash".First published in 1992, in London by Jonathan Cape (having been commissioned by Candida Lacey, formerly of Pandora Press and later publisher of Myriad Editions), and in New York by Pantheon Books, Daughters of Africa is regarded as a pioneering work, covering a variety of genres – including fiction, essays, poetry, drama, memoirs and children's writing – and more than 1000 pages in extent. Arranged chronologically, beginning with traditional oral poetry, it includes work translated from African languages as well as from Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.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."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 – was published in 2019. Associated with the anthology is the Margaret Busby New Daughters of Africa Award for a woman student from Africa.