Structure, secrets, and Sesotho: Migrants' performance and Basotho national culture

Abstract

Lesotho's economic and political dependency on South Africa affects every aspect of Basotho social and cultural life. In response, the concept of Sesotho, Basotho language and culture, has been reflexively ideo-logized to refer to anything that Basotho regard as their own, unadulterated by ‘external’ influences. Sesotho has become a koma, a sacred secret, a cognitive and behavioural defence against the loss of Basotho cultural identity and the limited resources to which this identity gives title. Creative leadership in Sesotho performance is now exercised by artists occupying a position of structural marginality in Basotho culture. Migrant working men and women have created new performance genres that enlarge Basotho cultural boundaries and increase their permeability, challenging idealized or authoritative notions of what constitutes Sesotho. The Basotho tavern singers turned recording artists, to whom the task of making and remaking Basotho ‘national culture’ has fallen, are focused on. Their songs reveal the dynamics of gender, genre, and expressive authority in the politics of performance. Employing their ‘marginality’ to address openly the tension between the ‘useful fictions’ of structure and the reality of social behaviour, these performers creatively produce as well as reproduce Sesotho. The work of these performers represents a ‘structure of feeling’: an articulation of experience with larger social forces and expressions of ideology, of authoritative genres and metaphors with what Bakhtin called the common people's creative culture of laughter'.