Panel on South African Oral Traditions

Extract

The subject of African oral literature is so vast that it would require more than an hour to present it in an understandable way, particularly to people for whom some of its dimensions may be new or completely unknown. Southern African oral literature is even more difficult to handle because there is not one southern African oral literature, there are several. These are divided not by languages, forms, or types, but rather by geography and history. The Sotho-speaking peoples, for instance, include the Kgatlas, the Ngwatos, the Pedis, and various other subgroups. Sotho literature does not necessarily follow the history of the Sotho nation, because there are several Sotho peoples distributed in different areas who are producing their own unique literatures. So in discussing the oral literature of southern Africa, we are actually discussing several literatures created by several peoples. If you happen to know the literature of one Sotho group, you are not necessarily versed in Sotho literature. You are versed only in the Sotho literature of a particular region. This is very important to understand.