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Two Magic Birds: Part One
| Article
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19203 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1991 |
3,383 Words |
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Retold by Jan Knappert
Jan Knappert is a retired London University professor of
African and Asian languages; he now devotes his time to
writing. A thorough explanation of the origin of Basotho tales
and one folktale used to educate young chieflings appeared in
our last issue. |
The Basotho (or Basuto) people are a large group of Bantu who speak closely related dialects of Sesotho, a beautiful Bantu language. Before 1800, they lived in scattered groups in southern Africa, north of the great Orange River on the "High Veldt," west of the Drakensberg mountain range, and as far as the foothills of the Zoutpansberge Mountains in northern Transvaal. Together with the Batswana, they are the oldest Bantu peoples to settle in southern Africa.
In the 1820s, when the Zulu king Chaka began his wars of expansion, many of the settled peoples of southern Africa were forced to flee, the Basotho of the High Veldt among them. Following a number of wars, the Basotho fragments were rallied together by the perspicacious leader Moshoeshoe (Moshweshwe) in the mountainous region between the Orange and Caledon rivers.
By 1830, Moshoeshoe had organized a new kingdom, Basutoland, known today as Lesotho. From the start, danger approached in the form of white farmers who were settling land to the west. Paradoxically, Moshoeshoe saw that offering his new nation as a protectorate to the British sovereign was the only hope for its preservation. He also decided that in order to be accepted as a nation-state by the world community, Basutoland had to become Christian.
In 1843, Queen Victoria agreed to take Basutoland under her protection, thus achieving Moshoeshoe's first goal. The seeds of his second goal had been sown more than a decade before. At the some time that Basutoland was forming as a nation, French Protestants began an evangelical drive in Africa. After arriving in Cape Town, three missionaries set out on a treacherous ride--one thousand kilometers long--across mountainous, bandit-infested lands to arrive in the new Basotho kingdom. Their first order of business was to learn Sesotho and devise an alphabet so that it could be written because they wanted to translate the Bible.
It is largely due to those early missionaries that so much of the oral tradition of the Basotho has been preserved; they and their successors collected folktales, songs, proverbs, and riddles in order to have original texts for study and the compilation of a Sesotho dictionary. First published in 1875, that dictionary is still in use today, following many revisions and new editions.
As a result of Christian missionary influences, the folktales of the Basotho are different from those of most other African peoples--they are more relaxed and benevolent,
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