num_pages: 200
description: "I am telling my stories in English for many months now, and it is a time for me to see my whole life. I see that things are always changing. I was born in 1930, so I remember many things which were happening in the old days in Lesotho and which happen no more. I lived in Benoni Location for more than ten years, and I saw the Boer policemen taking black people and beating them like dogs. They even took me once, and kept me in one of their jails for a while." ―Mpho 'M'atsepo NthunyaA compelling and unique autobiography by an African woman with little formal education, less privilege, and almost no experience of books or writing. Mpho's is a voice almost never heard in literature or history, a voice from within the struggle of "ordinary" African women to negotiate a world which incorporates ancient pastoral ways and the congestion, brutality, and racist violence of city life. It is also the voice of a born storyteller who has a subject worthy of her gifts―a story for all the world to hear.
language: English
title: Singing Away the Hunger: The Autobiography of an African Woman
titlecomplete: Singing Away the Hunger: The Autobiography of an African Woman
genres: Anthropology, Biography, South Africa, Lesotho, Memoir, Nonfiction, Womens, Autobiography, 20th Century, Africa
ratings_count: 225
publisher: Indiana University Press