There is a misperception that whatever is indigenous in African culture is ‘made in the village’ and then hybridised in the urban or industrial workplace. In this view, migrant labour has led to an attrition of an authentic culture. Deeper research has shown, however, that whatever might be identified as ‘African culture’ in southern Africa is as much a product of road and rail, the transport depot, the administrative and recruitment camp, the hostel, the tavern and the shanties as it is of any idealised rural setting. Such ‘cultures of mobility’ include well-established genres of musical poetry, folk narration and dance that express experience over migrancy’s long history. Such genres represent a building up of performative repertoires as responses to working men and women’s lives lived on the move. Centring on the sung poetry of Lesotho migrants, this chapter presents and analyses such repertoires not only as cultural archive, but as action; not simply something migrants know, but something they do.
Musical migrations
From the earliest history of migrant labour, returning workers brought with them the experiences and the conceptual and material artefacts of colonial life.1 Among these were ‘trade-store’ musical instruments such as the concertina, violin and guitar, popular both on farms and in towns in the Cape with troubadours of all races. Fascinated youngsters in the villages produced their own home-made versions. The importance of music to migrants is expressed in a well-known folk story about the concertina or ‘squash-box’. According to this account, Basotho men first adopted the German or Italian concertina as a means of producing the choral ground and responses to their own solo poetic singing on the trek to the workplace. On the long migrations by foot, often in rain or winter cold, the concertina was played close to the chest under the uniform woollen blanket worn by Basotho, pumping out warmth as well as musical accompaniment to the migrants’ long rhythmic strides and lyric vocal passages.
Prior to these importations, however, not only Sesotho but all Bantu language music had been primarily vocal, with an emphasis equally upon musical and poetic features: a sung literature, or ‘auriture’.2 We have little knowledge of how the authoritative genres of aural poetry, such as chiefly praises or the praises and songs of male and female initiates, were transformed by the experience of labour migrancy in the years before the opening of the diamond fields at Kimberley in 1867, which gave this system a central place in black southern African livelihoods and social consciousness.
Kimberley: New Sodom
The dangers of the road notwithstanding, beginning in 1867, Basotho men streamed on foot across the Basutoland border and through the Orange Free State, with which they were still locked in a bitter series of wars (1865–1868), to work on the diamond fields. Their mission was to acquire the tools of national survival – good rifles and horses. On the long marches to the diamond fields, there emerged new genres of Sesotho aural literature that reflected the impact of involuntary, but economically necessary migration, expressing as well a resistance to enforced wage labour and a divergence of interests between chiefs and their erstwhile followers. The evidence for this is the survival, in the corpus of migrants’ sung poetry, of direct references to Kimberley, a place to which Basotho largely ceased to migrate many decades ago, but which remains a symbol of the hardships and destructive evils and vices of mining location life:
Ke reng ho lona likempolara
Ke buoe ka mokhoa ona
Oa tseba ke buoa ka Gemele
Ke buoa ka Sotoma …
What do I say to you, gamblers [migrant singers]?
I speak in this manner:
You know I speak of Kimberley;
I speak of Sodom … (migrant mineworker Majara Majara, 1984).3
Figure 12.1
Migrants play the concertina as they walk the countryside.
Concertina from Lesotho
2014
Photograph by Fiona-Rankin-Smith
The economic and political self-aggrandisement of the ruling Bakwena aristocracy and the tax regime of colonial Basutoland created a dependent class of impoverished commoners, who over the generations developed labour migration as a way of life. On the more than 200-mile walk to the diamond fields, groups of young migrants used the resources of Sesotho song and spoken art to pass the time, boost their courage and seek a common understanding of the changes in Basotho life. In time, they created a partly narrative, partly lyrical genre of poetic song.
Adventurers’ songs
The songs the mineworkers composed and performed for and amongst themselves emerged from migrants’ awareness of their dependent position in both a changing system of local relationships and the political economy of South Africa. Employing the master metaphor of the train to the mines, the poet Makeka Likhojane sings:
... Hae fihla Belkhelim
Li fapana li na le kutse,
Kutse eena e apere matata
E nkile likhomo, le furu’a lesere
Lipolo li tloha ho Verwoerd
Tse tlang ho Tona Kholo.
Li tlilo fepa masole a Lesotho,
Leabua ke ha qala ho baka qomatsi ka 1970 …
… Arriving at Bethlehem [Orange Free State],
[Ours] crossed paths with a freight train,
A freight train wearing karosses [skin capes];
It carried cattle, feeding on fodder:
To the prime minister [of Lesotho].
They are sent to feed Lesotho’s soldiers.
Leabua, it’s when he declared the state of emergency 1970 … (Maseru, Lesotho, January 1984).
Passing a goods train on the way to the mines, the poet reflects that the freight, dressed in the cattle-hide robes of nobility, rather than the wool blankets of migrants, is a vehicle of social dominance. As the quintessential social currency of Basotho pastoral life, cattle are not only the symbol, but also the calculus of reciprocity in patron– client relationships; the migrants see themselves as having more in common with the cattle than with chiefly clients or citizens. They are a cargo who, in the migrants’ own phrase, are ‘driven like oxen’ to the mines, rather than followers sharing in the redistributive beneficence of an autonomous modern state.4
These songs are known in Sesotho as lifea tsa litsamea-naha (singular and generic: sefela sa setsamaea-naha), ‘songs of the adventurers’. Like all African auriture, they contain an inherent potential for social critique. As folklore, sefela ‘draws its life from its powers of adaptation to circumstances and changing environment, and its ability to reshape itself to fill a new need, like the shape changing wizards in the old tales’.5 Migrants’ auriture provides commentary on changing structural relations in general and on the personal reality and effects of migrancy in particular. But it is also an aesthetic construction of its creators’ historical and social experience. As a medium of expressive action, sefela appropriates and elaborates the complex symbolism of Basotho historical culture, establishing moral bonds with the past and future.6 The songs relate concepts of power to theories of the person, shaping motive and action by images and ideals of goodness in people, relations and conditions of life. As Thomas Beidelman observes, ‘To imagine another kind of world is always a judgment about this one.’7 Because culture is an essential constituent of the self, the operation of local knowledge in performance contexts depends upon the emotions attached to reflections about the nature of persons and social relations.8 Sentiment is therefore a primary constituent of performance in migrants’ songs as a social practice in which affect is essential to effect:
Ke re ho lona likempolara
Ke motho oa mahlaba ke ntse ke kula.
Ke motho oa litorong kea babaila’
Ke motho oa moea, ke lakatsa hlope
Ke utloa ke rata ho ribela letsatsi lena lohle
Paka motseare oa mantsiboea
Ha letsatsi le hlahlamela lithaba
Pelo eaka e utloile bohloko
Ke utloa ke rata ho fenetha motho:
Le laele rangoane ke mpe ke mo fenethe
I say to you, gamblers,
I am a person in pain, I am still sick.
I am a person of corns, I walk slowly.
I am a person of the spirit, I desire the white-bead dance,9
I feel I want to run all all this day.
In the late afternoon,
When the sun was setting,
My heart was painful,
I felt I wanted to slaughter someone:
You can even order me to kill my father’s younger brother … (Majara Majara, nom de voix ‘Ngoana Rakhali’, 1984).
The singer who desires to ‘shake the nation’ with a song about his own experience must possess an intuitive seismograph, sensing the fault lines of sentiment between social reality and aspiration.10 But like social reality itself, the structure of feeling is often ambivalent and multifaceted. Our feet ache, but the spirit(s) demands an endless dance. Our hearts flood with pain, bringing to the surface the urge to murder a close relative, who is also a rival claimant to our father’s wealth and position. You tell me, my fellow travellers, what am I saying?
Figure 12.2
David Coplan
Molefi Motsoahae sings sefela outside an informal tavern in Thibella, Maseru, Lesotho
July 1984
Collection of the author
Social history as auriture
Some readers will want to know how these poetic songs reflect workers’ ‘consciousness’. So it is crucial to emphasise that we are interacting with aural art forms, not time-structured narratives, not unmediated expressions of what migrants think or know. They are culturally theorised artistic performances, above all, something that migrant composers do. Most important to both performers and audiences is the eloquent (bokheleke) mobilisation of language, demonstrated through imagistic composition and metaphoric forms of episodic narrative. African aural poets pack established master metaphors, legends and folk narratives with temporal occurrences, or more properly reoccurrences and contrasts; accretions of instances, which both confirm and renew the explanatory power of their shared representations. Songs are composed through the prosodically governed positioning of recurrent themes and images in a process whereby metaphors bridge time, space and experiential domains and are brought into relations of meaning with one another. For the performers, it is not that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Rather, those who remember history are most fully aware and, by their performances, ensure that it will be, inevitably, repeated.11
These performative metaphors attain social authority by transporting the salience of their previous applications into new contexts each time they are reapplied. In this form, history gives meaning to the present as much as the present reconstitutes the nature of the past. Further, the successive reapplications of established metaphors resonate with one another and gain force from new metaphors juxtaposed against them. Master metaphors, at once historical and experiential, endure, wax or wane depending upon their capacity to interpret the actual in terms of a more durable social and moral meaning. This is ‘history as drama, evaluation, and judgment: history with the metaphysics included’.12 Hence aural texts cannot be taken at face value or picked clean for ‘referential’ content. The Mosotho linguist and analyst of Sesotho praise poetry, SM Mofokeng, has written that ‘he [the historian] certainly will find an insight into the attitude which he cannot disregard but which he often cannot get from the written records’.13 Performance is thus the constitutive context of discourse, militating against the separation of history from the aesthetic of its representation. As Leroy Vail and Landeg White observe of the Paiva song of Mozambican sugar workers: ‘It was the exactness of the song’s central metaphor in linking past values to present experience that established it as the history that, as one performer testified, “even our children will have to know” ’.14 Perhaps the packing of history into African master metaphors and its unpacking in Western narrative are complementary processes; their study is made more fruitful the more they are pursued in parallel through the analysis of documentary sources.
As a rule, sub-Saharan African cultures do not compartmentalise spheres of social action and the interpenetration of politics, religion and art is regarded as normative, as well as demonstrable. Performance genres are regarded as legitimate, even necessary modes of social action in political contexts. They exist as internal representations and analyses of power, empowered as art forms to both record and shape social forces.15 Another Western tendency to compartmentalisation must be overcome: the conceptual separation of verbal, sonic and rhythmic elements of expression, a separation so uncharacteristic of African performance.16 So I must remind readers, as sefela performers cautioned me time and again, that these narrations are sung, not spoken art, and that lyrical decisions, in the uninterrupted flow of composition-in-performance, are made first on the basis of rhythmic and sonic compatibility.17 In the wake of colonial and capitalist intervention in local political economies, popular forms often arise that subvert authoritative genres that no longer express actual power relations and social formations as people experience them. More broadly, attempts like those of the migrants to create forms that are qualitatively new yet invested with the authority of established cultural practices, a kind of cultural self-preservation through transformation, are widely characteristic of colonised people both in Africa and elsewhere. The use of performance by labour migrants to create an integrated, positive self-concept in the face of displacement and alienation represents simply the continued application of a cultural morality in the context of dependency in a ‘world system’. So in interpreting performance both within and beyond indigenous exegesis, the investigator must demonstrate the link between individual and collective understandings.
Travelling songscapes 1: The herd boy
What then, are some key themes expressed through these elaborations of ‘master metaphors’? The ‘poetic autobiographies’ composed in migrants’ songs do not, as might be expected, follow a chronological structure. Scenes recalled from boyhood can follow those evoking later departure for the mines, for example, or images drawn from the verbal painting of landscapes that have no temporal location. That said, the figure of performer as herd boy (for male migrants) appears widely in sung narratives, frequently in passages of high emotional valence. Ho lisa, ‘herding’, a verb that signifies watchfulness, caretaking and leadership, is a core institution in southern Africa. Herding is regarded as a fundamental experience in the process of male socialisation, inculcating comradeship and self-reliance, stoicism and aggressiveness, responsibility and independence. The task both shapes and symbolises what Basotho tend to regard as their male national character.
Though among Basotho migrants the claim ‘We opened the mines’ is a satisfactory answer to ‘We built a mighty empire’ from the Zulu, Basotho themselves never mention migrancy as a defining or necessary experience in the construction of their identity as a people. On the remote upland pastures and cattle posts, they must provide themselves with food and fire; older boys school the younger in rugged self-reliance. And their sport is the ancient martial art of stickfighting, beginning with dry corn stalks, but graduating to the heavy, hardwood molamu. In sefela, we encounter images and narrations of herding at once realistic and metaphorical. It is the raising of personal experience to the level of a more general significance that perhaps accounts for the placement of episodes of herding near the conclusion of many lifela.
Here, from one of the great singer composers, Makeka Likhojane (nom de voix ‘Ngoana Mokhalo’):
Le utloe ka tloha heso lapeng,
Ke khanna likhomo, Ngoana Mokhalo,
Ke ea koana Maluting,
Ke ilo li lisa; ke ne ke lisa likhomo tsa malome …
Tsona li tsa tsoha li lahlehile,
Athe lehloa le nele Kolone,
Bosiu ke lutse, oa hatsetsa litorobela,
Lipholo tsa tsoha li thobile bosiu.
Moea o hlaba lipholo liloteng mona;
Ke ne ke re ba ne ba li utsoitse;
Masholu a ne a li nkile.
Ke tlolaka ka holim’a sehlaba,
Ke tlolaka ke sa li bone.
Ha ke fihla ha Rankomo,
Ha habo Morena Mongali,
Ke tseba manamane ka sakaneng,
’Khomo tseso li khethetsoe Sesotho.
Listen, I left my place at home,
I drive cattle [I], Child of Mokhalo,
I go yonder to the Maluti,
I went to herd them; I was herding my uncle’s cattle …
[Some of] those on rising were found missing,
Since snow had fallen in the Cape,
At night as I sat freezing, the stout-hearted ones,
The oxen on rising, they stole off in the night.
The wind pierced the oxen, here through the hump;
I was thinking they had stolen them; [that]
Thieves they had taken them.
I was chasing over the highlands,
Chasing though I failed to sight them.
As I arrived at Rankomo’s,
At the home of Chief Mongali,
I knew the calves in the kraal,
Cattle of my family, sorted out in the Sotho way.
Travelling songscapes 2: Departure
Customarily, lifela begin with some lines of self-identification and praise, mixed with exhortations to the listeners to listen, followed by a leave-taking for the mines. Implicit in the symbolism of travel is the acquisition of knowledge through experience. By his late teens, the night-watchman will be off on his watchful journey to the mines on his first contract. The perils of the journey begin even before the migrant leaves his home village, where malevolent witches plot his downfall:
Mohlankana mohlang ke tsohang ke palama
Mosali ea loeang ha se ho sokola
Ke bone a tsohella ho ea mabitleng
O thethana ea mafitoane o ntse a e fasa
O phaka sa mofu o ntse a foka
O mothamo oa mali o ntsa a khoefa sebakeng
O re banna ba eang ka libere
Ba ka tla ba shoeletse tlelemeng
Ho ’na Ngoana Rakhali
Ha kea shoa le ha ’ma joale ke ntse ke phela
Ke moleleri oa litleleme sootho …
Lad, the day I’m going, I mount to ride away
A woman of witchcraft was already hard at work;
I saw her early going to the graveyard,
She puts on a string skirt fastened with knots,
She takes the arm of a corpse and waves it,
A mouthful of blood, she spits into the air,
She says, ‘Men gone to De Beers [diamond mines]
They can come home dead from the mines.’
To me, Child of Rakhali, I am not dead;
Even now I still live,
I am a wanderer of the mines, Sootho …
(Majara Majara, ‘Ngoana Rakhali’ 1984).
Travelling songscapes 3: The train
In migrant songs, as in life, a man meets homeboys and men of neighbouring districts upon arrival at the labour depots in Lesotho’s border towns. There they club together, undergoing induction and passport formalities, sing lifela and await the trains that will take them to the mines. The train is of particular importance, a metaphor for the cyclical, unending life process of labour migration. Today, there is no longer a rail service from Maseru for migrants and most who do not take private taxis to the mines travel on the special red and yellow buses provided at the border by South African Railways. But in sefela, migrants still thunder over the countryside behind the clouds of black smoke puffing from the ‘nostrils’ of this khomo ea ’muso, ‘the cow of the government’, praised with its own onomatopoeic names: Makholi Makholonkhotho, ‘Owner-of-gunsmoke-hundred-footed-trudger’. The train is also a mythical, devouring watersnake called Khanyapa, tutelary deity of diviners and spirit mediums that travels in a cyclone (iconically referenced by the smoke spouting from the engine); it shake-dances like a male initiate or an entranced diviner; it’s an adventurer, a warrior, a madman, a raging prairie fire, a whole menagerie of wild, swift animals, a centipede, a millipede, a swallower and disgorger of the ‘people of Moshoeshoe’. In between such fancies, the train covers real territory, with the South African towns through which it runs lovingly catalogued like the pit stops in the popular old American migration song ‘Route 66’. So we can enjoy the following example, a text as refined as any chief’s praises, by the outstanding migrant poet, Majara Majara (‘Ngoana Rakhali’):
Figure 12.3
David Coplan
Migrants line up at Maseru bridge border post
1983
Collection of the Author
Figure 12.4
David Coplan
Mohobelo dance: The ‘centipede’ movement
1984
Collection of the Author
Bolomo, le khaotse lekanyane
Ke pere ea bo-ntate ea khale-khale
E ne e thapisoe ke maburu mehleng ea khale
Terene ha e tloha joale e ne e entse mehlolo:
E ne e qala ho etsa makhobonthithi
Letokisi e tloha e le o tla morao …
Instantly it came down from
Bloemfontein, short-cutting hyena,
It’s the horse of our distant forefathers,
It was tamed by the Boers, in times of old.
When that train moved, it performed miracles:
It began to do amazing feats,
Rail spikes popped, joints jumped up and down …
Travelling songscapes 4: Natural healing
A migrant’s travelling does not, literally or figuratively, begin with crossing the Caledon River border. Much of the travelling in sefela is done on foot in Lesotho, where the solitary migrant, often strangely without comrades, establishes identity and status through knowledge of his country and its inhabitants, while remaining critically apart; a homeboy with a homeless mind. In sefela, buses and taxi vans hardly exist. Instead, the migrant pictures himself in a Brechtian theatrical metaphor, lean and penniless, walking through the mountains and river valleys on his way to or from the western border towns. As he long-legs it through the country, the poet identifies in a few telling details each village: its natural features, its social character, its poets and medicinal specialists, the name and personal qualities of its chief, memorable occurrences, scenes of his crimes and the crimes of others. Poetic travel is a picture of the political as well as physical landscape; a social geography that provides opportunities for commentary and satire as well as praise on a wealth of characteristic behaviours. A poet cannot truly be called ‘eloquent’ without displaying a word-painter’s eye and a homeboy’s love for its features and creatures. Thus Majara Majara:
Linonyana tsena ka ’mala li ntle
Litsomila le letle lehlabana
Letsoanafike le lephatsoana lipheeo
Seroebele ’mathe a bolile
Motintinyane se le konki
Lekolikotoana khaka ’malane
Kokolofitoe ea malula o futahane
‘O futantseng mokota naheng?’
‘Ke lahlehetsoe ke lenaka la meleko;
Ea le thotseng, a mpe a ntholise.’
These birds are beautiful in colour:
Red-winged starling is beautiful brown and black;
Mountain chat has black and white wings;
Sparrow, [of] the high, sour whistle;
Neddicky is not a large bird;
Quail finch is bar-breasted [black and white];
Heron, sitting doubled up:
‘Why are you folded up, country breeder?’
‘I have lost my medicine horn of sorcery;
Whoever has picked it up, please give it [to me].’
Or, in an evocative couplet from a sefela by the renowned poet, Mphafu Mofolo of Ha-Shale in the Roma district:
… Maru ke ana a pepile mafube
Khoeli ke eane e pepile naleli …
… These clouds cradle on their shoulders the dawn;
This moon cradles on its shoulders, the stars …
Among the most pervasive and commanding metaphors in sefela, apart from the many modes of travel, is traditional medicine and the afflictions and uncertainties to which it ministers. Hugh Ashton suggests that for Basotho, knowledge and ritual action are identical as forms of power: ‘The use of medicines does not stop at the curing of sickness but extends far beyond, to almost every situation where a man requires help to control nature and social phenomena, or is faced with difficulty, danger, and uncertainty.’18 As the missionary Eugene Casalis observed of traditional healers: ‘There is in fact, no manner of question which they do not undertake to answer.’19 Diviners, even more than poets, are persons of cultural knowledge, partly explaining why sefela singers so often present themselves metaphorically as healers, whether they have such training or not. Both bokheleke (eloquence) and bongaka (healing) are repositories of Sesotho and the singer as traditional diviner/herbalist is one of the most popular tropes through which composers dramatise their authority.20 Underground, many miners use magical herbal protections and healers do a thriving mail-order business in meriana (medicines), used to establish certainty and control over a situation or to bring luck, promotion, money, lovers, victory in court cases, sporting matches and even sefela competitions. In lifela, doctoring is often a means to both assert and demonstrate expressive prowess and, in some songs, singers represent themselves narratively as traditional herbalists and diviners, as in the following passage by Makeka Likhojane :
Joale ba joetsa Ngoana Komane
Ngaka e teng masimong koana,
Motho eo ke Ngoana Mokhalo.
Ha ke fihla ba ’mpitsitse,
Ke fihla ho ngoana Komane,
Ke li qhala lifalafala,
’Taola tsaka tsa bohlokoa, bana ting,
Ke li qhala ke li qamaka.
Ke moo ke joetsang, ngoana Komane,
Mokuli tsoha o ba latele,
Ba ja khomo o qele;
Masapo a khomo, kunutoll’a batho
Ka seea letlalo la ntja e khunong,
Ka nka le bohloa bo botona,
Haholo banna le le tsehali
Mafura a tsoene le boko ba ’meutla
Tsikitlane ke etse mothamo …
Now they tell Komane’s child,
A doctor is over there in the fields,
That man is Mokhalo’s Child.
When I arrived they called me,
I came to the [chief] child of Komane,
I scattered them [bones] ‘lifalafala!’
My precious [divining] bones, you children,
I scattered them and examined them.
It’s then I told him, child of Komane,
The sick must get up and follow them,
Those eating a cow you must ask [for meat];
Cattle bones, the revealers of people,
I skinned a brown dog,
I took a male ant, men,
Especially the females,
Monkey fat and rabbit brain
A mouthful of marigold …
Here the poet portrays himself as a well-known selaoli, a ‘bone thrower’, a healer who divines through the use of four major and a variable number of additional ‘bones’ (litaola) – actually pieces cut from the front of the hoofs of cattle. Incised with specific patterns, each bone has a name and represents a significant actor in the oracular drama, including the patient, close kin and associates, witches, lovers and so on. The diviner is a performer, throwing the bones on the ground and interpreting their leoa (fall or scattering) while singing curing songs and chanting lithoko tsa maoa (praises of the falls).21
Travelling songscapes 5: Disaster underground
As demonstrated, many scenes depicted in these migrants’ songs are above ground, in open country far from the drama of the subterranean rock face. One common theme that does draw directly on such drama is of accidents underground, in which miners are maimed and killed. A moving passage comes from Majara Majara (‘Ngoana Rakhali’), a Mosotho hero:
… Ho tsoella pele ke reng ho lona bana ba molimo
Oa tseba Fereginia VA Tikoe Maokeng
Thaba-Mashai ea heleela batho
Ke moo ho shoeleng lekholo la batho
Ho setse ’na lelimo la motho.
Ke setse ke le moneketsana ke le mong
Ke ne ke hula litopo tlasa mafika
Bana ba batho ba bolile ba nkha
Ba se bile le ba nyeunya litsenyane
Che litaba tsa mokoti le mpe le li tlohele …
... Furthermore I say what to you, children of God?
You know VA [Virginia], Tikoe [River] among
Whitethorns
Mountain-Mashai it fell on people [miners]
It’s there a hundred men died.
It’s me who survived, a cannibal of a man.
I alone survived among that tribe [of corpses].
I was pulling corpses from under rocks.
People’s children have rotted; they smell.
They already swarm with maggots.
No, but these mine affairs, you can leave them …
Virginia is a mining centre on the Tikoe River in the Free State and the site of Harmony Mine, which in the mid-1980s employed so many Basotho that their remittances accounted for 9 per cent of Lesotho’s total gross domestic product.22 In this song, it is the setting for a mine disaster so terrible it is as if Mount Mashai, a tall peak in Lesotho, has fallen on the miners. The singer, who alone survives, is sent in some days later to help retrieve the rotting corpses of his comrades. No wonder he is ready to change the subject and no wonder so many poets never even broach it. Elsewhere in the same text, however, Majara returns again to the world underground, this time transcending the mere description of disaster and death to create an extended trope of praise for his own powers as a poet:
… Ke se ke khema lipenta telele
Ke thapo ea o leche matontsantsima.
Ke hana ha likokopane li teromong,
Le moepeng ke ntse ke li tlatsitse.
Likomponeng tsena, khale ke li sebetsa
… Ke reng ho lona likempolara?
Ke qati ea ntja ha ke butsoe
Ke lekoko le linta ha ke aparuoe.
Ke serobe sa botsikoane ha he ke kenoe.
Ke ka holo e setseng sekoereng,
Bona, e hanne mochini-boi, o chaise;
Mochini-boi, ke o pomme hlooho
Sepannere, ke se pomme letsoho
Ke moo sepannere se neng se qala ho omana:
‘Uena, pekenene, uena thimba-boi,
Koala metsi, u koale limoko;
Thapo tsena li se li re chesitse;
Mali a batho a kopane le majoe …’
... I am already running long distances:
I [recite] as long as the cable
pulling ore buckets around the scotch-winch.
I refuse [to empty] into the collecting drum,
Even back down to the diggings still full.
These mine compounds, I’ve long worked them. ...
What do I say to you, gamblers?
I am a dog’s stomach, I don’t get cooked,
I am skin with lice, I am not worn,
I am a nest of mites, I am not entered.
I’m like a fresh charge remaining in the ore face.
Look, that stopped the drill-boy from working;
Drill-boy, I slashed his head,
Drill-guide, I slashed his hand,
It’s then the drill-guide started to scold:
‘You, charge-setter; you, timber-boy,
Shut off the water, so you stop the steam;
These cables have burned us;
Men’s blood is mixed with the stones …’
In the first part, Majara uses cables, ore buckets and other mining machinery as a metapoetic metaphor for his own ability to extemporise in sefela performance. Then he inserts a burst of characteristic migrant irascibility and toughness, comparing himself to infested clothing and shelter and inedible animals, for a travelling man and a champion poet is not to be used or digested by others. Shifting into high gear, he uses the theme of a frequent workplace oversight, leaving an unexploded charge in a drill hole, as a metaphor for his own explosive poetic powers. But he returns to his first metaphor to do the real damage, slashing and burning the miners with the long (winded) cables of a performance now too hot for other poets to handle.
Traveling songscapes 6: Troubles at home
Fears of death and injury below ground are not the only worries troubling a miner’s mind. Unless he is a permanent lekholoa, a ‘deserter’, or a lechepa who goes from one contract to another, one mine to another without going home, he will have to steel himself against heartsickness over his family’s welfare. It is the central contradiction of migrancy that the male head of household is its least frequent resident; that the migrant must leave his family in order to sustain it. The ability to read, of course, may only facilitate the arrival of complaints from home:
Lengolo la ’me la be se le fihla
La ’me motsoali’a me-
Mosali e mosa ’mae a Mahase
Mosali ea tsoetseng Mahooana
E ka ba ho uena Mosotho, Tsokolo
Nyoloha ngoan’a ka mohlanka
Nyoloha joale u tl’o nyala
Thaka li nyetse kaofela u setse
Le bana ba ba nyane ba malom’au
Le bona ba nyetse sethepu
Bofutsana ha bo tsekisoe Molimo
Hojaneng e be bo ne bo tsekoa
Molimo re ka be re mo tsamaisa linyeoe
Re lula makhotla a maholo
Ha e le bona bo ntsoa ke ho sebetsa feela
Ke leshano, ba ea re thetsa
Le hoja ho ea ka ho sebetsa hoa ka
Le li khomo nka be ke li rekile
Le mohoma ke lema ka o lesiba
Sefofane ke kalama se sefubelu!
A letter from my mother arrived,
Yes, from my mother, my friend,
The kind-hearted mother of Mahase,
A lady who has given birth to Mahooana clansmen.
Also included is you, Mosotho, Tsokolo:
‘Come home, my child
Come home now and get married,
All your comrades have married but you,
Even the younger ones of your uncle,
They even have married polygynously.’
For your poverty God cannot be blamed;
If poverty were contested,
God would be tied up endlessly in court,
We would sit in High Court against Him [people say]
‘Poverty is eliminated by hard work only.’
This is a lie, they deceive us:
If this went in accordance with my working,
Even cattle I could have bought them,
Even a plough that ploughs like a feather [strong and light]
Yes, I would have bought a jet plane!
(Tsokolo Lecheko)
Other poets emphasise the troublesome aspects of life with women, warning against the fickle and exploitative attitudes of town girls of other nations or the worry and discord that come with marriage. Among the most pathetic passages is the following by Sebata Mokokoane:
Banna le nyale basali le tle le bone,
Banna, meleko e ata joale ke le siko,
Ke le siko ngoan’a Molete,
Ke le siko ngoan’a Mokokoane.
Banna, ke le siko morena Sebata,
Joale ke le siko ke le makhooeng koana,
Lapa la ka le fetohile lithako, Paape,
Kobo tsa ka li jeoe ke lifariki,
Banna ke bolela tsa likonyana.
Ke fihla ka Tsoane mabalane koana,
Ke fumane ntja ho se le e ’ngoe,
Ke qalelle ntat’a Tholang.
Banna le beisini ho se le e’ngoe,
Banna le khaba ho se le e’ngoe.
Men, you marry women and see,
Men, evil doings multiply now in my absence,
In my absence, Molete’s child
In my absence, Mokokoane’s child.
Men, in my absence, Chief Sebata,
While I was away at the mines yonder,
My homestead turned to ruins, Paape,
My children became motherless orphans,
My blankets eaten by pigs,
Men, I mean those of lambskin.
I arrived at Tsoane in the lowlands,
To find a dog, there was not even one.
I began anew, father of Tholang.
Men, a basin there was not even one,
Men, a spoon there was not even one.23
Travelling songscapes 7: Women of eloquence
Certainly it is a world of uncertainty, where town women can cheat you and rob you, while at home your wife takes your furnishings and leaves you. But Lesotho and South Africa are not the only social arenas ambiguously yoked together. Mirroring the world of male migrants is the world of women, with difficulties and hardships and voices to tell of them. Women’s songs do in fact proclaim a resolute, individualistic and adventurous spirit, imitative of male itinerant heroism, deliberately contrary to the stationary domestic commitment expected of adult women. The tragedy of women left in Lesotho or forced into migration themselves by absent and unsupportive husbands has long found expression in village women’s feast or party songs, such as the following recorded by Hugh Tracey in 1959:
Aunt, stretch out the blanket
There are two of us.
Stretch out the blanket,
I’ll be coming; I’m going out to smoke [make love].
When I leave here, going away,
Montsala remain here and look after my children.
Look after Mamotolo and Malerato and Toma.
Toma, look after these children of mine
Particularly Mamotolo and Malerato.
It looks as if I’ll be going away.
I feel I’m going.
I really feel I’ll be crossing the [Caledon] river [into
South Africa].24
Today many girls do not even wait for a marriage to fail, but avoid early marriage and the danger of forced elopement, preferring to take their chances in the informal sector in towns on both sides of the border and in the South African interior. Among them are superbly talented tavern singers, who perform to the accompaniment of the accordion and drum. Their flight from the normative is an enforced one, however, and the accompanying sense of displacement profound. Theirs is an explicitly shared affliction, grieving the loss of kinship and marital security; friendship found, sundered and betrayed; the embattled reality starkly outlined against the conjugal and communal ideal.
Hee! Sehloho sa ’me motsoali,
Sa ’me ’mosali oa batho o lla mehla oe!
Ka mehla pelo ha e tele.
Chabane kea tsamaea.
Ke motho ea phelang ka bothata:
Ke phela ka ho khothotsa basebetsi,
Ha ke sebetse; ke mahlalela,
’Na ngoananyana oa Lesotho.
Mpheng tekete banna, tekete le molamu oa ka
Ha ke tloha kea tsekela,
Ke ikela haeso, haeso Lesotho koana
Ha ke tloha kea kolla,
Hele helele ngoan’eso Anna,
Hobaneng kea tsamaea,
Ke ’Mamanyaloa
… Basali ba na ba nrerile.
Ba buoa ka ’na ngoanana ka ’na likhutlong tsa matlo.
Ke ba Sheba ba sheba koana.
Hee oena, ngoan’aka ngoanana, Ntate kapa Nthako,
Ke siea bana beso
Ke ba na kampong ea Hlotse, banana,
Ke ba siea ke ba tsepisang mang?
Ke tsepile Ramaseli ee!
Ke tlohele nthapelle
Che, hobane ke letekatse.
Ba botsa hore na ke busoa kae?
Ke tseba moo ke phelang banana
Kampong ea Hlotse,
Helele, helelele, helehelele,
Pelo eaka e loana le maikutlo,
’Na ngoananyana oa ha-Masupha.
Heee! the cruelty to my mother,
To my mother, an unfortunate
woman, she cries daily oe!
Always my heart never forgets.
Chabane, I am going away.
I am a person living in difficulties:
I live by cheating workers [migrants],
I’m not working; I’m a wandering divorcer;
I, a little girl of Lesotho.
Give me a ticket, gentlemen,
a ticket and my stick
When I leave, I wander about,
I am going home, home to Lesotho.
When I leave, I move fast.
Hele helele! my sister Anna,
The misfortunes that have seized me!
Why am I going?
I am the mother of marriages [have many men].
These women, they speak about me,
They speak about me, girl, about
me at the house corners.
I look at them; they look away, yonder.
Hee you, my girl child, my father or Nthako,
I abandon my sisters [fellow barmaids];
Here they are at Hlotse camp [town], girls,
In whose trust do I leave them?
I have entrusted them to God ee! [no husbands]
I have left, pray for me,
Yes, because I am a prostitute.
They ask of me, where am I ruled [staying]?
I know where I live, girls:
At Hlotse, the camp [town],
Helele, helelele, helehelele,
My heart fights with my understanding,
Me, a little girl of Masupha’s.
Nthabiseng Nthako, the composer/performer of this passage, was 22 years old, an unmarried barmaid, afraid that the miner who paid the rent on her tiny, ramshackle bedroom might forsake her, but confident of attracting a replacement when he did so. The cross-gender dimension of her stance is exemplified by the rhetorical request: ‘Give me a ticket, gentlemen, a ticket and my stick’, referring to the train ticket and heavy wooden fighting stick (molamu) that symbolise the intrepidity of the male migrant. Their fellow travellers, the women of eloquence, sustain themselves and their companions in affliction with songs of innocence and experience, in which their misfortunes are lamented, but their care for true friends and lovers never dies.25
Notes
1. JF Midgley, ‘The Orange River Sovereignty’, PhD dissertation, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, 1949.
2. DB Coplan, In the Time of Cannibals: Word Music of South Africa’s Basotho Migrants (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1994).
3. All song texts were recorded by the author as performances in the field, transcribed in Sesotho and translated into English by the author and his assistant, Seakhi Santho. Performers may well refer to their auditors as ‘gamblers’, as sessions are often competitive, with singers betting money that they will better their rivals (winner takes all, by common consensus).
4. DB Coplan, ‘“I’ve Worked Longer Than I’ve Lived”: Lesotho Migrants’ Songs as Maps of Experience’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 32.2 (2006), 226.
5. HE Davidson (1978: ix), cited in J Opland, Xhosa Oral Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 271.
6. M Biesele, ‘How Hunter Gatherers’ Stories “Make Sense”: Semantics and Adaptation’, Cultural Anthropology 1.2 (1986), 98.
7. T Beidelman, Moral Imagination in Kaguru Modes of Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 204.
8. G Marcus and M Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), 46.
9. Hlope refers to the ‘white-bead dance’ held as a curing ceremony for those suffering from motheketheke, a nervous disease of demonic possession, in which the victim staggers about helplessly.
10. R Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
11. DB Coplan, ‘History Is Eaten Whole: Consuming Tropes in Sesotho Auriture’, History and Theory (special issue, ‘History Making in Africa’) 32 (December 1993), 84.
12. L Vail and L White, Power and the Praise Poem (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991), 72.
13. SM Mofokeng, ‘Notes and Annotations of the Praise-Poems of Certain Chiefs and the Structure of the Praise-Poems in Southern Sotho’, Honours thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1945, 144.
14. Vail and White, Power, 21.
15. R Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 142.
16. Vail and White, Power, 28–29, 206, 211.
17. A Pope, An Essay on Criticism, edited by Raymond Southall (London: Macdonald & Evans, 1975).
18. H Ashton, The Basuto (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 303.
19. E Casalis, The Basuto, or Twenty-Three Years in South Africa (Cape Town: C. Struik, 1965), 288.
20. DB Coplan, ‘The Power of Oral Poetry: Narrative Songs of the Basotho Migrants’, Research in African Literatures 18.1 (1987), 1–35.
21. F Leydevant, ‘The Praises of the Divining Bones Among the BaSutos’, Bantu Studies 7 (1933), 341–373.
22. G Seidman. ‘If Harmony Closes, Will the Last One to Leave Turn Out the Lights? Downscaling in the Free State Goldfields’. Unpublished manuscript, 1993, 2.
23. MIP Mokitimi, ‘A Literary Analysis of Lifela tsa Litsamaea-Naha Poetry’, MA thesis, University of Nairobi, 1982, 346–347, 474.
24. International Library of African Music, Music of Africa Series, AMA. TR-103 (B-3).
25. L Gunner, ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience: Women as Composers and Performers of Izibongo, Zulu Praise Poetry’, Research in African Literatures 10.2 (1979): 239–267.