‘Murder they cried’: revisiting diretlo—medicine murders in literature

Abstract

This article interrogates ‘medicine murders’ (diretlo) as a literary motif in a number of Sesotho prose and dramatic narratives published between 1950 and 1963. Mofolo's novel, Chaka (1925), is taken as a prototype or ur-text which instigated the discourse of diretlo, both in a literary and socio-critical sense. The article sets out, with reference to the above-mentioned texts, to investigate the nature of intertextuality, and to see how far given writers could be said to reflect major concerns of their society at a given time. The latter approach is adopted more from an applied than a theoretical perspective. The concept of intertextuality will be broadened so that the social and historical discourse, which form the social context of the texts, is brought under discussion.