'I sing of the woes of my travels' : The Lifela of Lesotho
Maake, Nhlanhla
Difela form a unique genre within the Sotho oral tradition. It developed
from the migrant labour system and is not extant in the literary tradition of
any of the other Bantu languages spoken in South Africa, or southern Africa
as a whole for that matter. It has been argued that ‘Basuto participation in the
labour markets of southern Africa during the years between the diamond and
gold discoveries . . . during the middle and the late nineteenth century was
not atypical of other southern African peoples’ (Kimble, ‘Labour Migration in
Basutoland’, p. 119). Perhaps the question which begs an answer is why this particular migrant experience resulted in the development of a unique genre
such as difela in only one language group. Perhaps its uniqueness, as I shall
argue and demonstrate in this chapter, derives from the landlocked location
of the Kingdom of Lesotho (formerly Basutoland up to independence in 1966),
within the Republic of South Africa.
↧