In the Time of Cannibals: The Word Music of South Africa's Basotho Migrants
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In the Time of Cannibals: The Word Music of South Africa's Basotho Migrants
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Overview
Coplan discusses every aspect of the Basotho musical literature, taking into account historical conditions, political dynamics, and social forces as well as the styles, artistry, and occasions of performance. He engages the postmodern challenge to decolonize our representation of the ethnographic subject and demonstrates how performance formulates local knowledge and communicates its shared understandings.
Complete with transcriptions of full male and female performances, this book develops a theoretical and methodological framework crucial to anyone seeking to understand the relationship between orality and literacy in the context of performance. This work is an important contribution to South African studies, to ethnomusicology and anthropology, and to performance studies in general.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226115733 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 02/07/1995 |
| Series: | Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 322 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
IN THE TIME OF CANNIBALS
The Word Music of South Africa's Basotho MigrantsBy DAVID B. COPLAN
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 1994 The University of ChicagoAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-11574-0
Chapter One
"Hyenas Do Not Sleep Together"The Interpretation of Basotho Migrants' Auriture
It was in those times,
It was in those times when cannibals ate people.
Helele! Matsela!
In truth I am sure, I swear,
Me, I cannot simply be grasped!
The meerkat when it grazes keeps an eye out,
The antelope suckles [its young] at dawn,
Aware when hunters are coming—ee!
It was in those times when, it was in those times when cannibals ate people.
From "In the Times of Cannibals," mohobelo dance song by Letsema Matsela
The image of the cannibal, the human being who prospers by devouring his own kind in an ultimate zero-sum game, is a resonant and fearful symbol in Basotho historical consciousness. The emergence of the Basotho kingdom in what in the late 1820s constituted the remote reaches of the Cape Colony's northeastern interior is framed in legends of grim defense against the predations of war, forced migration, starvation, and addictive anthropophagy. The chiefs of militarized clans and incipient states were much feared for their ravenous capacity to "eat up" external enemies, internal rivals, and prosperous followers alike. Shaka Zulu, by far the most famous, was seen by his unfortunate neighbors as a kind of Lord of Chaos consuming the chiefs and clans of the region and setting them to consume each other. Mohlomi (died c. 1815), a diviner-chief of the Bakoena clan, tutored the young Moshoeshoe I (c. 1786–1870) in statecraft and gave him the medicine needed to found the Basotho kingdom. He is credited (admittedly in the accounts of hardly unbiased missionaries) with the saturnine deathbed prophecy: "After my decease a cloud of red dust ... will come out of the east and devour our tribe. The father will eat his own child ... (Dornan 1908, 71). The "cloud of red dust" refers to the armies of Shaka, whose approach could be spotted at a distance by the long clouds of red dust they raised against the clear southern African sky. The antiproductive powers of such heroes as viewed by their victims is summarized in the contemporary description of Shaka as "a determined, a systematic, and a practiced plunderer, raising no corn, breeding no cattle, and procreating no children" (The Cape Colonist, August 19, 1828). Killing one's agnates was considered understandable since they could as easily be rivals as supporters, but Shaka was baldly criticized, even by his own people in a praise stanza composed in his lifetime, for the shocking willingness to victimize even his own maternal kinsmen—the act of a witch:
King, you are wrong because you do not discriminate, Because even those of your maternal uncle's family you kill, Because you killed Bhebhe, son of Ncumela of your maternal uncle's family. (Mbongeni Malaba, cited in Vail and White 1991, 68)
In the foothills and western reaches of the Drakensberg (the Maloti), fierce bands of refugees displaced by the Shaka's conquests (lifaqane) were said to have taken up hunting fellow humans as a preferred mode of subsistence. Cannibalism appears to have begun its sanguine career in the region as a metaphor for the dangerous untamed. Witness the Zulu term for South Africa: Ningizimu, "Cannibals' Africa." In African accounts, cannibalism arises as a by-product of war and social disruption. Among neighbors of the Zulu, cannibalism is said to have originated in Zulu-speaking areas of Natal. James Stuart's Zulu informants credit Shaka himself with both creating the conditions under which pastoralists became cannibals and with attacking and dispersing them (Webb and Wright 1979, 81), and Lagden cites Theophilous Shepstone's intriguing assertion that cannibals were a greater scourge to the Natal countryside than Shaka himself (Lagden 1909, 1:46–47). Perhaps Julian Cobbing (1988) is on to something, at least in arguing that Shaka was more of a spark than an engine of conflagration. If the Shaka of conventional historical narrative is largely myth, however, it is a myth as much of African as European construction. Certainly for Basotho, Shaka is a symbolic foil for their own Bakoena aristocracy's efforts at state formation, a darkness against which to appreciate Moshoeshoe's light. There is no more powerful narrative of the Basotho vision of Shaka as both cannibal and king than Thomas Mofolo's novel Chaka, which he finished in 1909. Writing of the progress of Shaka's pillaging regiments, Mofolo abruptly editorializes:
It was at that time that, on account of hunger, people began to eat each other as one eats the flesh of a slaughtered animal.... And then after a few years the persecutions and sufferings from the east climbed over the Maloti mountains and entered Lesotho, and there too cannibals came into being because of hunger. This is the worst of all the evil things of those days, and that too arose because of Chaka, originator-of-all-things-evil. (Mofolo [1925] 1981, 137)
Cannibalism thus has had a long career as an unsavory emblem of social pathology, parasitism, and disintegration in Sesotho. Moshoeshoe is said to have regarded the cannibals more as refugees, than aggressors, and so it was said of the first of the legendary Basotho travelers, the revered Mohlomi, that he "visited the cannibal tribes who lived far to the north, and they not only did him no harm, but overcame their fears, and sacrificed an ox in his honor, saying that he was a man of peace" (Dornan 1908, 70). It is not at all fortuitous that among the achievements with which Moshoeshoe is credited (Ellenberger and MacGregor 1912, 218–24) is the reincorporation of cannibal bands into Basotho society. Among these were Rakotsoane's Bakhatla, who ate Moshoeshoe's grandfather Peete during the his emigration from Butha-Buthe south to the new redoubt at Thaba Bosiu in 1824. Contemporary accounts relate that when the culprits were dragged before the young monarch, he declined to defile the grave of his ancestor by their execution and instead purified them as living tombs, settling them upon the land with grants of land and cattle, which provide the food proper to socialized men:
This song reminds me of the old days,
When I was still a boy, I Letsema;
I found places named with the names of cannibals,
So when I asked the older people to tell me,
Why in the end [they] are named in this way,
They said, "There cannibals stayed."
"So what finished them?"
They said, "King Moshoeshoe slaughtered cattle,
And collected them all.
Then on arrival he gathered them at this home,
He said, Took, men, the food to be eaten,
it's these cattle—
You shouldn't eat people,' and they understood."
(Letsema Matsela, "In The Time of Cannibals")
Moshoeshoe's close friend, Thomas Arbousset, enhanced the legend in a letter from the mission field in 1846: "There is nothing more beautiful than a field of wheat or millet at the foot of a lair, the haunt of erstwhile cannibals; nothing is more gratifying to the soul than the sight of these men driving their flocks to the pastures. This is the spectacle which Rakotsoane and his people offers today" (Germond 1967, 146). Thus is the Basotho founder contrasted with Shaka, who sent expeditions to extirpate cannibals in his realm. It is possible that Moshoeshoe's inability to settle the marauding bands of Baroa (San, or "Bushmen") gatherer-hunters with gifts of cattle is indexed as wildness in the Sesotho term for South Africa: Afrika Boroa, "Bushman Africa" (Mabille, Dieterlen, and Paroz 1983, 443).
Since mountain areas were originally used only for summer pasture or as a place of temporary refuge, "Lesotho" formerly meant only the lowland areas, from most of which the Basotho were forced to retreat before the advance of settler colonialism. British Basutoland, since 1966 the independent Kingdom of Lesotho, includes the Maloti, their foothills, and what was left of Moshoeshoe's lowland domains. From the beginning, the campaigns and upheavals attending the rise of indigenous states were affected by the presence of white settlers and British colonial garrisons in the Cape of Good Hope. Male residents of what would become Lesotho were migrating to work on the farms and railways of the Cape as early as 1820 (Kimble 1982). The system of labor migrancy is thus coeval with the historical existence of the Basotho state.
During the middle years of the nineteenth century, Moshoeshoe's Basotho were subject to unrelenting attacks and depredations by African (Mzilikazi's Ndebele), mixed race or "Coloured" (Adam Kok's Griquas), and white (Free State Afrikaner) neighbors. It was the latter, however, who "ate up" Basotho lands with a rapaciousness beyond African comprehension. In disregard of universal indigenous legal norms, the Afrikaner intruders did not admit to becoming subjects of the rulers who granted them permission to till and herd within their realms. Nor did the whites' own practice of "annexation" retain its European application. In southern Africa, as a missionary noted in 1867, "It does not mean to bring a country and its people under a new Government but to expropriate the inhabitants in order to substitute oneself to them" (Germond 1967, 284). The settlers desperately required African labor, however, and so Moshoeshoe's subjects, if they were young, were coerced or cajoled to remain as servants and workers on white farms. Those who chose to take refuge in lands still under Basotho control were condemned for "retreating before civilization," but as the missionary Eugene Casalis complained in 1865, "It is the habit of our race when it establishes itself in the midst of primitive populations to embellish with the fair name of civilization that which would be termed otherwise under our European sun" (ibid., 267, 266; italics orig.).
Nevertheless, the Basotho took to commercial agriculture with alacrity, exporting wool, hides, grain, and livestock to the Free State and the new diamond-rush city of Kimberley. In 1874, despite the loss of lowland provinces and greatly increased migration, the 127,323 official inhabitants of Basutoland exported 100,000 bags of grain (ibid., 326). Temporary as opposed to permanent labor emigration centered on the diamond fields of Kimberley, where Basotho used their earnings principally to purchase rifles and ammunition. As Moshoeshoe had learned to his sorrow and his grandson, Prince Lerotholi, to his credit, "civilization" in practice meant that a people have precisely the rights they can defend.
During the late nineteenth century, Basutoland was a grain basket of South Africa (Murray 1980a), a situation that prompted white farmers in the Free State to protest that they were being out-produced and undersold by blacks to whose labor they regarded themselves as divinely entitled. By the turn of the century, the Cape railway that brought cheap Australian and American grain to Kimberley, drought, a herd-decimating rinderpest epidemic, and human-induced ecological degradation led to the irreversible decline of Basotho agriculture. British colonial policy responded to white farmers' complaints by restricting Basotho exports into South Africa, and with two-thirds of its arable lands now in the hands of the Free State, the kingdom was reduced to a rump, mostly mountainous "Basutoland," from which Basotho men and women ventured out to earn subsistence wages, pay colonial taxes, and subsidize another people's patrimony. As the Sechaba Consultants recently put it, "South Africa took the good land, took the produce of the land that remained to the Basotho, and took the labour of the dispossessed Basotho. What was left is poverty" (1991, 5).
After independence, Lesotho became increasingly dependent economically on the wages brought home from South Africa by migrant workers. An irony of this situation is that the massive retrenchment of mineworkers since 1987 has made the decade 1976–1986, when more than half of all working-age Basotho were absent as migrants at any given time, look like the good old days. There is little other work. Migration began as a source of ready cash to pay taxes, buy livestock, equipment, and seed, and supply consumer wants from rifles to concertinas. Labor migrancy still provides over half of Lesotho's gross domestic product and employs approximately 10 percent of the total population. Before it was made illegal in 1963, female migration made up a surprising 25 percent of the total. Even today women are estimated to constitute between 7 and 10 percent of the total migrant work force. Many others are working in South Africa illegally. But this does not include the thousands of women who, blocked from working in South Africa, have migrated internally to the capital, Maseru, and other burgeoning border towns (Wilkinson 1985). Lesotho is the only member of the United Nations Organization entirely surrounded by another state, and the only one whose chief export is listed by the UNO as "labor."
A worse and increasingly more prevalent fate awaiting unschooled Basotho boys than the necessity of leaving for the mines is the lack of any opportunity to do so. The mining companies blame massive retrenchments on mechanization, rising wages and benefits, declining production, and on uncertain gold and coal prices. In reality the reduced need for labor is being used to target union members, the highly paid, and foreign workers (all disproportionately Basotho) for dismissal. Under such conditions, those who still have jobs become the relatively fortunate, a kind of migrant "labor aristocracy" whose arrivals and departures are viewed with wistful envy by those condemned to home. Life is hard for most of the citizens of this labor reserve, and the risks of being "eaten up" by a host of social, economic, and political agents and forces are unremitting. When a black majority government comes to power in South Africa, the restrictions which forbid migrant workers from bringing their families nearer to their workplaces may be abolished. If Basotho workers are tolerated and not legally excluded as foreigners (a fond hope), it is likely that Lesotho will lose a large proportion of its working population and become more a political fiction than an independent state. But many will continue, by choice, to work as migrants. Lest this statement provide a note of cheer for those, Basotho or other, who see ingestion ("integration" is the currently fashionable term) by South Africa as Lesotho's only hope, there is no reason to suppose that an already overburdened New South Africa will willingly agree to accept its fully independent neighbor as a dependent region, or even its citizens as fellow workers. With the unavoidable reincorporation of the homeland "republics" and "national states," Lesotho could end up as the only effective Bantustan within South Africa, not a very just reward for one and a half centuries of stout resistance to colonialism and political cannibalization. Tragically, it is always the times of the cannibals for the Basotho, a perception expressed in the continuous reapplication of this metaphor in the emergent culture of migrancy. In October 1988 a youth from the village of Likokong in Mafeteng District, looking hopefully to a future as a migrant, declaimed the following self-praises (lithoko) upon completion of lebollo, the formal rites of initiation into manhood:
Phuthiatsana [River], I can go and move there;
I can take the red cow, leaving the calf.
I once went traveling thoughtlessly—
When I was above the gorge of the Caledon [River],
I met them, the cannibals of war.
I kept quiet and brought down my prayers.
When I said, Let the earth swallow me up,
They answered mercifully, the cannibals of war:
"This day is your last."
I heard, remembering evil times.
It was the time blood almost choked me;
It was right out in the unknown wilderness—
There is a dam amidst the oceans yonder.
These praises begin with the initiate's assertion of an adventurous spirit, perhaps spurred by dissatisfaction with life at home. Hence the move across the Phuthiatsana River, a symbolic demarcation between rural and urban Lesotho, taking along only part of what belongs to him. Extending this theme, he imagines a poorly considered journey into South Africa. Bypassing the official job-seeking process requires a swim across the Caledon River, but no sooner does he descend to its waters then he is confronted by murderous "cannibals of war," waiting on the South African bank. At the mines, "cannibal" (lelimo) is a metaphor both for the earth itself, which consumes the miners in its belly, and for overeager black team leaders (boss boys) and white miners, who push black workers to the point of exhaustion in their gluttony for power and higher pay (see Coplan 1987a, 423). In the initiate's praises, "cannibals of war" conjures up in parallel the bloody chaos of Shakan times and the bloodsuckers who await the (illegal) migrant in South Africa. In addition, the image of war is invariably associated in contemporary styles of Sesotho song with the battles between fierce factions of Basotho marashea, "gangsters" (from English "Russian"), who formerly both defended and terrorized Basotho communities in South Africa's urban locations. No wonder the poet shuts up, praying silently that the earth, that oldest and most universal cannibal, will open and swallow him. The cannibals announce his death sentence in a citation from the famous depiction of the anticolonial Gun War of 1880–81 in the praises of Moshoeshoe's grandson, Chief Maama: Bongata bo re ke letsatsi la bofelo, "Many [men] they say it's [their] last day" (Mangoela [1921] 1984, 98). His imaginary life then passes before his eyes; times of hardship and suffering, images choking with blood, lost in South Africa's human wilderness. The poem concludes on a seemingly more hopeful note, that there is some kind of boundary or protected place amid the tempest-tossed oceans of life, or that one might like Hamlet take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from IN THE TIME OF CANNIBALS by DAVID B. COPLAN Copyright © 1994 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsPreface
Orthographic Note
Ch. 1: "Hyenas Do Not Sleep Together": The Interpretation of Basotho Migrants' Auriture
Ch. 2: "The Mouth of a Commoner Is Not Listened To": Power, Performance, and History
Ch. 3: "Greetings, Child of God!": Generations of Travelers and Their Songs
Ch. 4: "An Initiation Secret Is Not Told at Home": The Making of a Country Traveler
Ch. 5: "These Mine Compounds, I Have Long Worked Them": Auriture and Migrants' Labors
Ch. 6: "I'd Rather Die in the Whiteman's Land": The Traveling Women of Eloquence
Ch. 7: "My Heart Fights with My Understanding": Bar Women's Auriture and Basotho Popular Culture
Ch. 8: "Eloquence Is Not Stuck on Like a Feather": Sesotho Aural Composition and Aesthetics
Ch. 9: "Laughter Is Greater than Death": Migrants' Songs and the Meaning of Sesotho
Appendix One
Appendix Two
References
Index
Notes