This Was the Old Chief's Country Volume One of Doris Lessing's Collected African Stories Year First Published: 1973 First Published by: Michael Joseph Category: Short Stories This Edition: British first edition

From the book cover:

All Doris Lessing's short novels and stories are now collected into two volumes, This Was The Old Chef's Country and The Sun Between Their Feet. This volume contains all the stories from the original book entitled This Was The Old Chief's Country and three of the short novels from Five, the book which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1954.

'I believe,' writes Doris Lessing, "that the chief gift from Africa to writers, white and black, is the continent itself, its presence which for some people is like a old fever, latent always in their blood; or it like an old wounded throbbing in the bones as the air changes. That is not a place to visit unless one chooses to be an exile ever afterwards from an inexplicable majestic silence lying just over the border of memory or of thought. Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.'

The Old Chief Mshlanga
A Sunrise on the Veld
No Witchcraft for Sale
The Second Hut
The Nuisance
The De Wets Come to Kloof Grange
Little Tembi
Old John's Place
'Leopard' George
Winter in July
A Home for the Highland Cattle
Eldorado
The Antheap

Includes the Preface for the 1964 Collection and a new Preface for the 1973 Collection. All of these stories appeared in African Stories, 1963.

Also see:

• The Sun Between Their Feet: Volume Two of Doris Lessing's Collected African Stories