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South African Folklore originates from an oral, historical tradition. [1] It is rooted in the region's landscape [2] with animals [3] – and the animal kingdom – playing a dominant role. [4] Some of the subjects covered include: plant life taking on a human form, women being married to gods, messages being delivered by thunder.
South Africa has a rich tradition of oral poetry. Several influential African poets became prominent in the 1970s such as Mongane Wally Serote , whose most famous work, No Baby Must Weep , gave insight into the everyday lives of black South Africans under apartheid.
Oral repositories are people who have been trusted with mentally recording information constituting oral tradition within a society. They serve an important role in oral cultures and illiterate societies as repositories of their culture's traditional knowledge , values, and morals.
Griots have the main responsibility for keeping stories of the individual tribes and families alive in the oral tradition, with the narrative accompanied by a musical instrument. They are an essential part of many West African events such as weddings, where they sing and share family history of the bride and groom.
The African storyteller: stories from African oral traditions, 1990 (with Nongenile Masithathu Zenani) The world and the word: tales and observations from the Xhosa oral tradition, 1992; The tongue is fire: South African storytellers and apartheid, 1996; A dictionary of African mythology: the mythmaker as storyteller, 2000; The poem in the ...
Africanist Sigrid Schmidt asserted that the tale type was particularly widespread in Southeast Africa. [9] In fact, according to her studies, the tale type 707, as well as types 706, Maiden Without Hands, and 510, Cinderella, "found a home in Southern Africa for many generations". [10] Schmidt provided the summary of two manuscript tales.
Historians generally view oral traditions as neither entirely symbolic or wholly true, but a synthesis of the two, requiring great skill and subtlety to separate them. [125]: 11 Jan Vansina, who specialised in the history of Central Africa, pioneered the study of oral tradition in his book Oral tradition as history (1985).
Traditional African religion, like most other ancient traditions around the world, were based on oral traditions. These traditions are not religious principles, but a cultural identity that is passed on through stories, myths and tales, from one generation to the next.