A vigorous oral tradition has existed throughout South African history, and in many ways
represents our truly original contribution to world literature. Despite this, oral literature is
largely absent from accounts of literary history in this country. While the particular oppressions
of South African political life have contributed to the exclusion of oral forms, the suppression of
the oral in favour of the printed text is a feature of literary studies worldwide, and appears to be
related to the critical practices that have been dominant in universities and schools for most of
this century. In this study I consider ways of recovering oral forms for literary debate, and offer
what I consider to be more appropriate strategies of 'reading'. My aim is to re-establish a line of
continuity in South African poetry and performance from the songs and stories of the Bushmen,
through the praise poems of the African chiefdoms, to the development of Christianised oral
forms, the adaptation of the oral tradition in 'Soweto' poetry of the 1970s, and the performance
of poems on political platforms in the 1980s.
Recovering oral poetry and performance genres for literary debate requires the
development of an appropriate critical methodology. Through a consideration of advances in the
study of orality, I aim to suggest ways of reading which grant credence to the specific strategies
and performative energies of oral texts while locating the texts in the spaces and constrictions of
their societies. A great many oral texts from the past survive only in printed, translated forms,
however, and a key aspect of such a critical project is how - while acknowledging the particular
difficulties involved - one 'uses' highly mediated and artificially stabilised print versions to
suggest something of the dynamic nature of oral performance in South African historical and
social life. This thesis also considers how texts address us across historical distances. I argue for
maintaining a dialectic between the 'past significance' and 'present meaning' of the poems, songs
and stories: for allowing the past to shape our reading while we remain aware that our
recuperation of history is inevitably directed by present needs and ideologies.
These ideas are explored through five chapters which consider, respectively, the songs and
stories of the nineteenth-century /Xam Bushmen, the izibongo of Shaka, the hymns of the
Messianic Zulu evangelist Isaiah Shembe, Ingoapele Madingoane's epic 'Soweto' poem "black
trial", and the performance poetry of Mzwakhe Mbuli and Alfred Qabula in the 1980s. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1995.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:ukzn/oai:http://researchspace.ukzn.ac.za:10413/6364 |
| Date | January 1995 |
| Creators | Brown, Duncan John Bruce. |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
Page generated in 0.0021 seconds