Published: The man who cursed the wind / Die man wat die wind vervloek het

Dr José Manuel De Prada-Samper’s The man who cursed the wind / Die man wat die wind vervloek het, published by African Sun Press in collaboration with UCT’s Centre for African Studies, is a collection of 61 oral narratives recorded in the Karoo region of South Africa. De Prada-Samper first reported to the APC on this work following his 2011–2012 fieldtrips on which it is based.

The book is a sample of the extensive collection of narratives recorded by José M. de Prada-Samper as part of a project that began March 2011 when he serendipitously re-encountered a tradition that just a hundred years before D. F. Bleek had considered “dead, killed by a life of service among strangers and the breaking up of families”.

Although the human suffering conveyed in this sentence is accurate, the tidings of the demise of the storytelling tradition of the dry Karoo communities turned out to be quite premature.

The book came out of the press this past October, and recently De Prada-Samper, in the company of Louisa Hutten of the Department of Archaeology at UCT, revisited the places where the stories were recorded to give copies of the book to the storytellers contributing to it, as well as to local libraries and museums.

The book, which is in both Afrikaans and English, was well received everywhere, and more stories were recorded during the trip, both from the contributors to the collection and from other storytellers.