African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 853
“ownership,” the traditional roles of men as opposed to those of women, chieftainship,
witchcraft, the roles of the medicine man and the diviner in times of sickness and other
misfortune, and religion. Each of these studies, and others mentioned here, carry long
lists of references and bibliographies that show just how much work has been done by
scholars from various backgrounds on the folklore of southern Africa.
It is clear to modern scholars that, far from providing evidence that southern African
societies lived in a state of homeostasis, as Dudley Kidd and others claimed, folklore is
decidedly responsive and adaptive to changing sociopolitical developments. This is
evident in many of its genres, particularly in the ones on which most research has been
done. In 2001, Russell Kaschula published a collection of essays from a 1998 conference
under the title African Oral Literature: Functions in Contemporary Contexts. Omit the
colon in the title and you have Kaschula making a statement about the perennial
relevance to African life of one genre of folklore. Or, perhaps not one genre, when one
considers the chapter headings in the book, about which he writes:
The chapters in this book comment on various aspects of contemporary
African existence and how orality permeates our daily lives. These
chapters are grouped under the following appropriate headings: orality
and music; orality and gender; orality and medicine; orality, theatre and
cinema; orality and religion; orality, text, texture and context, as well as
orality, history, and politics (2001, xvi).
Folklore permeates the lives of the people of southern Africa, in the sense that its
knowledge is like that of a nonverbal language, particularly as it serves what Michael
Halliday (1971) called the “ideational” and the “interpersonal” functions in one’s life. Of
the ideational function he wrote, “the speaker or writer embodies in language his
experience of the phenomena of the real world,” for himself and others. The interpersonal
function serves to position the individual in relation to others who have knowledge of the
folklore shared by the community to which they all belong. Folklore serves to guide, to
evaluate, and to criticize conduct, providing a running commentary on human behavior.
The leader of Zimbabwe’s war veterans, who in the first years of the twenty-first century
violently dispossessed white farmers of their land, was asked by journalists what he
planned to do with the two or more farms that he allegedly acquired. The story goes that
he replied, “I plan to become a successful white farmer.”
References
Brown, Duncan. 1998. Voicing the Text: South African Oral Poetry and Performance. Cape Town.
Oxford University Press.
Coplan, David B. 1985. In Township Tonight: South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre. New
York: Longman.
Damane, M. and P.B.Sanders, eds. 1974. Lithoko: Sotho Praise Poems. Oxford. Clarendon Press.
Dube, C. 1988. Ndebele Oral Art: Its Development within the Historico-Socio-Economic Context.
M. Phil, thesis. University of Zimbabwe.
Dundes, Alan. 1980. Interpreting Folklore. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.