Africa Slumbering Giant? is a collection of short adventure stories from Africa with titles such as ‘The Forgotten King’ and ‘Lady of the Cape’.
Rather like a folk-lore collector, Michael McNeile researched genuine stories of life in Africa, both legendary and historical. He aimed to preserve the memory of these tales and to show the rich variety of life on the continent of Africa. For him it was a labour of love; he wrote not just to amuse his readers, but also to inform and inspire them to understand the world around them.
A forgotten king, a lady of the Cape and a boy who wouldn’t tell are among the figures who populate Michael McNeile’s Africa, Slumbering Giant? Published in 1959, this collection of short adventures draws on history and legend, with a storyteller’s ear for an encounter worth retelling. The title’s question mark gives the book a second life for readers today.
Written as European colonial rule was beginning to unravel across much of Africa, it invites us to ask what a writer of the period meant by a “slumbering” continent, and whose stories might give us a very different picture.
The book offers two kinds of discovery. There are the individual tales McNeile gathered, and there is the picture of Africa that emerges from his choice of what to tell. Reading it alongside African writers’ accounts of the same era can bring out differences in whose actions drive the story and what counts as a turning point. The title alone makes a good conversation starter.
Published by McAlan in 1959. First Edition.
Good condition. Navy Boards. Binding intact.
