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. Following Busby's Introduction – which opens with the Gwendolyn Brooks poem "To Black Women" – the book is arranged chronologically, beginning with traditional oral poetry, and it includes work translated from African languages as well as from Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
