ABSTRACT
This chapter initially delivers as a keynote address at the conference ‘Orature in South Africa: An Arc to the Future’ in 2015, which was coupled with a joint project of same name, headed by Andrew van der Vlies of Queen Mary College, University of London, and Deborah Seddon of Rhodes University, to produce a digital archive of historical and contemporary orality and performance from South Africa. With the ‘retribalising’ policy of the National Party following its coming to power in South Africa in 1948, studies of oral literature – especially in departments of African languages – became, in some cases, problematically entangled with the ideology of apartheid and its promotion of fossilised and essentialised notions of ‘ethnic identity’ and ‘racial otherness’. The lack of engagement by postcolonial scholars in South Africa with the oral and the performative may be attributable in part to a wariness of the relative lack of historicisation or theorisation in the institutional practices of oral studies.
