History is Eaten Whole: Consuming Tropes in Sesotho Auriture

Abstract

For some time, historians and anthropologists have been collaborating on the excavation of Africa's history through the analysis of transcriptions of unwritten sources. A major obstacle has been the forms, the generic structures of African historical discourse, which constitute a style of historiography culturally contrasting with our own. This paper examines two central vehicles of this historiography: the temporal, situational, and generic elaboration of historical master metaphors, and the performative contexts and processes in which they are necessarily expressed. Here, the formal and semantic resources and procedures of African historical narrative are analyzed in certain performance genres of the Basotho of southern Africa (Lesotho). revealing how Africans' experience of events is rhetorically encoded and interpreted, the discussion emphasizes the importance of performance as the constitutive context of African historical discourse, militating against the separation of history from the aesthetic of its representation. More important, it demonstrates how historians working in an empirical, positivist narrative framework can go beyond attempts to glean isolated facts and referential content from African texts, and use what I have termed auriture performative realizations to draw out the ideological and structural context that informs African constructions of history. It was in those times, It was in those times when cannibals ate people, Helele! Matsela! 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! (from In the Times of Cannibals, Sesotho mohobelo dance song by Letsema Matsela)