Southern African Folklore
The folk traditions of the San, Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho-Tswana, Ndebele, Shona, Venda, Tsonga, and Ovambo peoples, from the Mantis-trickster of the Kalahari to the Tokoloshe, the sangoma diviner, the masked Makishi dancers, and the legends of Great Zimbabwe.
In this section
The Tokoloshe
A small, hairy, pot-bellied spirit of Zulu and broader Southern African tradition, summoned by jealous men, banished by raised beds, and still used today as a sharp edge of political satire in modern South Africa.
Zulu Trickster Tales
The jackal, the hyena, the hare, and the bull-frog of the Zulu folk tradition: stories of deception, greed, and the carnival reversal of the social order, told around the evening fire in the homesteads of KwaZulu-Natal.
Southern Africa is a vast and varied region: the Kalahari and the Namib deserts, the high Drakensberg, the broad savanna of the Limpopo, the gold-bearing ridges of the Witwatersrand, the salt-spray of the Cape, the tropical lowveld of Mozambique. The peoples who live on this land — the San, the Zulu, the Xhosa, the Sotho-Tswana, the Ndebele, the Shona, the Venda, the Tsonga, the Ovambo, and many others — have built a body of folk tradition as deep and varied as the land itself.
The folklore of Southern Africa is the inheritance of the oldest inhabitants of the region (the San, whose rock art and oral tradition go back at least twenty thousand years), of the Bantu-speaking agricultural and pastoral peoples who moved down the continent from the second millennium CE, and of the colonial and postcolonial encounters with the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, and the German. None of these has been lost. They lie in layers, and at the surface they form the rich, contested, and beautiful folklore of the contemporary region.
The San: The First Storytellers of the South
The San — the Bushmen of the Kalahari, the /Xam, the /Khoekhoe, the Hadza — are the oldest continuous inhabitants of Southern Africa. Their rock art, particularly that of the Drakensberg and the Brandberg, is the largest body of prehistoric art in Africa, and their oral tradition is the oldest continuous one in the world.
The central figure of San cosmology is //Kaggen, the Mantis. In the /Xam belief, //Kaggen created the world, and he is the great trickster and the great teacher. He made the first people out of a bulb of a plant, and he taught them how to hunt, how to make fire, and how to make the rain. He is also, in his other aspect, the mischievous one: he is greedy, he is vain, and he is capable of deceiving even the spirits of the dead. The San tales of //Kaggen are the African cousins of the trickster tales of the West African Anansi and the North American Coyote.
The most important of the San stories are the moon stories and the hare stories. The San explain the phases of the moon by the myth of the moon and the hare: the moon was once a man, and he sent the hare to bring the people the message of resurrection, but the hare, by a fatal misunderstanding, brought the message of death. The moon, in anger, struck the hare on the mouth, splitting his lip, and from that day the hare has had the cut on his lip, and the moon has been the lord of death. The myth, in the nineteenth century, was first recorded by the German missionary Wilhelm Bleek and the English linguist Lucy Lloyd, working with the /Xam prisoner informants in Cape Town. The book Specimens of Bushmen Folklore (1911), by Bleek and Lloyd, is the foundational text of San folklore.
The San are also the keepers of the trance dance, the great ritual in which the dancers enter the spirit world and heal the community. The /Kaggen myth is closely tied to the trance dance, and the eland, the most sacred of the antelopes, is the chief spirit-helper of the dance.
The Zulu and the Xhosa
The Zulu of KwaZulu-Natal are the keepers of one of the great folkloric systems of Southern Africa. The Zulu court, the Zulu homestead, the Zulu marriage, the Zulu war — all are the subject of a complex body of songs, stories, proverbs, and praise-poems. The Zulu trickster cycle — the jackal, the hyena, the hare, and the bull-frog — is one of the most extensive animal-story cycles in the world.
The most important spirit-figure of the Zulu household is the tokoloshe, the small, hairy, mischievous spirit sent by a jealous man against a named victim. The Tokoloshe, banished by a raised bed, salt, and iron, is one of the great folk figures of the world, and has become a central figure of South African political satire. The Zulu are also the keepers of the great ancestor-cult of the amadlozi, the spirits of the dead, who are honoured in the memulo (the ritual of the first-fruits), the imbiza (the feast of the beer), and the ukubuyisa (the bringing-back of the spirit of a dead chief).
The Xhosa of the Eastern Cape are the kin of the Zulu, and share many of the same folk traditions, with their own variations. The Xhosa are the home of Nongqawuse, the prophetess of 1856–57, whose vision of the rising of the dead and the expulsion of the colonisers led to the great cattle-killing of the Eastern Cape, one of the central folkloric events of modern South Africa. The Xhosa are also the home of the great South African novelist Zakes Mda, whose novels Ways of Dying (1995), The Heart of Redness (2000), and The Whale Caller (2005) are major works of the contemporary South African folkloric revival.
The Sotho-Tswana, the Ndebele, and the Shona
The Sotho-Tswana of the high plateau — the people of Lesotho, the Free State, Botswana, and the North-West Province — are the keepers of a complex folkloric system. The Ngaka (the diviner) and the Ngaka ya Ditaola (the diviner of the bones) are central figures. The water snake of the Limpopo, the great spirit of the rivers and the flood, is a central figure in Tswana religion, and the thunderbird of the high plateau is the messenger of the storm.
The Ndebele of the Limpopo and Mpumalanga are famous for the geometric beadwork and wall-painting tradition of their women. The Ndebele bride, in her beaded blanket and heavy brass ring, is one of the great folk images of the world. The Ndebele are also the keepers of the great indlamu dance, the men’s dance of war, and the amabutho (the age-regiments of the king).
The Shona of Zimbabwe are the keepers of the great spirit-cult of the mhondoro (the spirit of the ancestral spirit-medium, often embodied in a python or a crocodile) and the midzimu (the spirits of the ancestors). The Shona are also the keepers of the mbira dzavadzimu, the thumb-piano of the ancestors, whose music, played at the bira (the all-night ceremony of spirit-possession), is the centre of the Shona folk tradition. The mbira is now the symbol of Zimbabwe itself, and the national instrument.
The Venda, the Tsonga, and the Ovambo
The Venda of the Soutpansberg and the Limpopo are the keepers of the great Domba initiation school, the python dance in which the girls of the village are led into adulthood. The Venda are also the keepers of the great thungwa drummer tradition, and the great tsikona dance of the court.
The Tsonga of the lowveld of Mozambique and Limpopo are the keepers of the great Makishi masked-dance tradition, recognised by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005. The Makishi masqueraders — embodying the spirit of the bridegroom, the spirit of the ancestor, the spirit of the wild, the spirit of the mother — are the centre of the Tsonga initiation, and are among the great masked traditions of the world.
The Ovambo of northern Namibia and southern Angola are the keepers of the great efundula (the initiation school of the girls), the oshikandjo (the ceremonial slaughtering of the bull), and the ohambo (the festival of the first-fruits).
The Sangoma and the Ancestors
The sangoma (the isangoma of the Zulu, the mungome of the Tsonga, the n’anga of the Shona) is the central ritual figure of Southern African folk religion. The sangoma is the diviner, the healer, the keeper of the bones, the seer. The sangoma is called to the work by the ancestors themselves: the sangoma hears the voices of the dead, is sick for a long time, and is finally initiated into the work by a senior sangoma.
The sangoma’s tools are the bones (amathambo) of the divining set, the snuff of the snuffbox, the drum of the spirit-possession, and the muthi (the medicine) of the herbalist. The sangoma’s work is to diagnose the source of the illness, the jealousy, the curse, the witchcraft, the broken taboo. The sangoma’s office is one of the most honoured in the village, and the great sangomas of the Southern African past — Nongqawuse of the Xhosa, Mmanthatisi of the Batlokwa, the rain-maker Sekonyela of the Basotho — are among the great figures of Southern African folklore.
The Legends of Great Zimbabwe
The ruins of Great Zimbabwe, the great stone palace of the Torwa and the Rozwi kings of the medieval Karanga Shona, are the central monument of Southern African folklore. The stone walls, the conical tower, the soapstone birds, the sunken enclosures — all are the subject of a rich body of legend.
The most famous of the legends is that of the Luminous Stone. The stone on the platform above the chief’s enclosure glowed at night, and the sun never set on the city. The stone was lit by a captive spirit, the soul of a great enemy, and the city prospered until the day a young woman with child saw the stone and laughed, breaking the spell. The stone has been dark ever since.
The legends of the ruins have been retold in the twentieth century by the great Zimbabwean novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga in Nervous Conditions (1988) and by the poet Dambudzo Marechera in The House of Hunger (1978). The great Zimbabwean musician Thomas Mapfumo has built a body of chimurenga music around the legends of the ruins, the most famous being the song Hondo Yemvura.
The Modern Echoes: Mda, Mapfumo, and the Folklore Revival
The Southern African folkloric revival of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is one of the most important in the African continent. The novelist and playwright Zakes Mda (whose Ways of Dying, The Heart of Redness and The Madonna of Excelsior draw explicitly on Sotho, Xhosa and San folk tradition) and the Nobel laureates Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee of the Eastern Cape have, in different ways, made the rural inheritance of the region a subject of the South African novel. The Afrikaner novelist André Brink and the Johannesburg-based curator Mpho Matsipa have done the same. The poets of the Drum generation — Mazisi Kunene, Oswald Mtshali, Dennis Brutus — have made the praise-poetry of the Zulu and the Xhosa the architecture of their work.
In music, Thomas Mapfumo of Zimbabwe and Hugh Masekela of the Witwatersrand have built a body of modern music around the folk traditions of the region. The kwela music of the townships, the mbaqanga of the gold mines, the maskandi of the rural homesteads, the sakhara of the Tsonga — all carry in their bones the older Southern African folk tradition.
In the visual arts, the painters of the Cape Town and Johannesburg schools — Irma Stern, Walter Battiss, Dumile Feni — have made the figures of the folk tradition central. The films of Gavin Hood (Tsotsi, 2005, Academy Award), Ralph Ziman, and the documentary work of Anant Singh have brought the figures of the trickster, the sangoma, and the makishi to the international screen.