The Immortality and Universality of a Setswana Folklore: Setlhotsa le Sefofu (The Blind and The Cripple)

The taking over of African lands by imperial forces not only took away that substratum upon which all material life depends, but it also usurped the space of the dispossessed to perform their being. Subsequent to land dispossession was the near extinction of the African intellectual heritage, which suffered what in Marxist literary circles is referred to as social Darwinism, an ideological and cultural battle in which cultures of superior nations subdue those of the conquered ones. As part of the colonial project, a form of epistemic violence was committed against Batswana, and this could be generalized to other peoples who have suffered the same fate. Their intellectual heritage was systematically relegated to a pastime and the infantile form of literary expressions. This was particularly targeted at their oratory. In this paper, a folklore titled Sefofu le Setlhotsa (The Blnd and The Cripple) was selected to demonstrate that the literary value of Setswana folklore transcends: creed, race, time as well as space, and like any literary product, it does also derive its material from the ‘universal’ human behaviour, and thus, it equally addresses superordinate thematic concerns such as vice and virtue. With the view to demonstrate the universality of this Setswana folklore, one juxtaposed it with some Western and African modern literary productions. Additionally, some concepts from modern Social Sciences were used to analyse characters and incidents in the story. Analysis of this folklore yielded that Setswana folklore is still capable of serving as a potent tool for the socialization applicable to the human race across time and space. This paper can, therefore, be regarded as part of the African renaissance project, which Ngugi calls the re-membering of Africa.