Fictions that save: Migrants' performance and Basotho national culture
Date
1991-03
Authors
Coplan, David
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Abstract
Of all South Africa's neighbors, none has suffered more severely from expropriation and
underdevelopment by white colonialism and supremacy than the Kingdom of Lesotho. In
reality, Lesotho is not South Africa's neighbor but its backlot: an eroded, mountainous,
Belgium-sized (11,716 sq. mi.) remnant of a once expansive semi-feudal African highveld
state. The military depredations of the Free State Afrikaners, combined with successive
betrayals by its erstwhile "protectors," the imperial British, transformed Basutoland from a
largely self-sufficient agricultural exporter to an impoverished, dependent supplier of labor to
South Africa (Murray 1980). While independence from Britain in 1966 did nothing to
improve its economic position, Lesotho is one African nation whose citizens have never felt
the slightest nostalgia for the colonial period. In the mid-19th century, the Basotho (sing.:
Mosotho) were lauded by missionaries and resident British officials for their courtliness,
ingenuous adaptibility, and eagerness for the "progress" they believed would come from the
adoption of European ways. In the event, however, British and white settler colonialism
deprived them of both autonomy and resources in virtually every sphere... Among the various categories of Basotho performers and performances, this paper focuses
on migrant tavern singers turned recording artists, to whom some of the task of making and
remaking Basotho "national culture" has fallen. Their songs, long performed in wayside bars
and now widely distributed on radio and audio cassette, reveal the dynamics of genre, gender,
and expressive authority in the politics of performance. Their relation to Sesotho as emergent
tradition embodies the layered contradictions created by the need for social solidarity in the
face of competing positions and interests, and for historical continuity (represented in
collective metaphors in the face of a radically transformed and fragmented social reality
(Marcus and Fischer 1986:184-5). In proposing the universality of the marginal as the
defining condition and not merely the by-product of structuration, Babcock-Abrahams argues
that marginality is not a structurally residual category, but "That which is socially peripheral or
marginal is symbolically central and predominant" (Babcock-Abrahams 1975:155).
Recognizing this, performers openly adopt "marginality" as a stance from which to address the
tension between the impracticabilities of solidary structural ideals and the conflictual structure
of real social practices.
Description
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented March, 1991
Keywords
Sotho (African people), Ethnology. Lesotho, Culture. Lesotho