‘I've Worked Longer Than I've Lived’: Lesotho Migrants’ Songs as Maps of Experience

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between the social transformation of southern African Basotho agro-pastoralists into migrant workers and the musical–literary forms (‘auriture’) they created to express this transformation. Far from declining, such forms have undergone considerable innovation and elaboration in response to Basotho experience of rural dispossession and urban and mine labour migrancy. For the Basotho, the performance of existing aural literary forms was evidently inadequate to express the dramatic change in their social position and work–life experience. This particular account emphasises matters of cultural aesthetics in an effort to put some ethnographic flesh on the skeletal assertion of the reciprocal determination of material forces and cultural forms. Playing by such ancient aesthetic rules, Basotho migrant men and women have created new and astonishing artistic games well-suited to the brave but sadly soulless new world of work to which by racial, colonial capitalism they have been commended.