Cherish ‘oral storehouses of memory’ by making it compulsory learning

One of the weaknesses of the post-apartheid education system is that oral traditions are not included as mandatory learning for pupils or students.

This means that these oral storehouses of memory and archive is under threat of vanishing within two decades or so because we have not given oral tradition the respect that it once had as an African classical literary canon.

Ironically, under Bantu Education in the apartheid period, oral traditions were taught and examined at school for the perverse intent to “tribalise” black children by teaching them narrowly within their designated language groups.

Thus a child in KwaZulu-Natal would have been expected to memorise and recite izibongo zikaShaka (the praises of King Shaka) as a means of trying to force them into some one-dimensional “Zulu-ist” political identity.

This Verwoedian pedagogy had the unintended positive outcome of ensuring that my parents’ generation, by learning oral traditions at home and at school, had a strong epistemological arsenal by which to critique Christian Nationalist history.

If after all, you are learning the praises of King Shaka, you are also learning a form of precolonial history outside of the dominance of settler colonial versions of history.

This is because the oral traditions, especially in the form of the praises of the kings, are historical records that are not just for memorising.

It is however necessary to know the historical explanation behind the idioms and literary mechanisms that make up the poem.

But more importantly, oral traditions transmit a kind of socio-cultural sense of things.

In other words, the praises of kings require that a student learn to engage analytically at the level of idiom, at the level of facts, and at the level of sociological understanding – you cannot analyse an oral tradition if you do not do so from an understanding of the history and culture of a people.

This is why I decided to make oral traditions, izibongo (praises) and iziduko/ izithakazelo (clan names) foundational concepts to the first-year South African history course I am teaching at Nelson Mandela University.

However, this is not as easy as I would have liked it to be because in the first instance, I had to begin by locating oral histories of the San and Khoi and most texts on Khoisan languages are too specialised for first years.

Fortunately, I was able to locate online a fairly easy to understand text by Menán du Plessis which documents Kora language oral traditions.

In the extract below taken from Du Plessis, we get an insight into the codes of social responsibility taught in the doro, the Korana male initiation custom:

The rules of our Korana doro are: Do not steal! Do not harm!

Do not lie!

Do not light (dao-kx’ai) your pipe (!xob) from fire you have found in the veld!

And if you find or see someone’s property, do not leave it in the veld, but bring it with you (hã\xa) !

And if you do not act in this way (\\nati), you have gone against the rules, and you are expelled (!’ao\\na-he).

Another oral tradition I have introduced, are the praises of King Shaka.

Now the praises of Shaka are important because they also critique his sometimes relentless form of conquest in lines such as “Dlungwane, Son of Ndaba, who raged among the homesteads.

Until the sun rose and the homesteads were collapsing onto each other.”

That line can be read ambiguously, it opens room for critical reasoning and debate on the nature of Shaka’s reign.

Lastly, oral traditions are encoded not just with information, but a form of African historical consciousness that speaks to a deeper sense of self to students so that they develop a mode of learning that shares a social sensibility with the majority of Africans.

Perhaps if we taught these traditions, students would not be so alienated by our education system.