There is a misperception that whatever is indigenous in African culture is ‘made in the village’ and then hybridised in the urban or industrial workplace. In this view, migrant labour has led to an attrition of an authentic culture. Deeper research has shown, however, that whatever might be identified as ‘African culture’ in southern Africa is as much a product of road and rail, the transport depot, the administrative and recruitment camp, the hostel, the tavern and the shanties as it is of any idealised rural setting. Such ‘cultures of mobility’ include well-established genres of musical poetry, folk narration and dance that express experience over migrancy's long history. Such genres represent a building up of performative repertoires as responses to working men and women's lives lived on the move. Centring on the sung poetry of Lesotho migrants, this chapter presents and analyses such repertoires not only as cultural archive, but as action; not simply something migrants know, but something they do.

Musical migrations

From the earliest history of migrant labour, returning workers brought with them the experiences and the conceptual and material artefacts of colonial life. Among these were ‘trade-store’ musical instruments such as the concertina, violin and guitar, popular both on farms and in towns in the Cape with troubadours of all races. Fascinated youngsters in the villages produced their own home-made versions. The importance of music to migrants is expressed in a well-known folk story about the concertina or ‘squash-box’. According to this account, Basotho men first adopted the German or Italian concertina as a means of producing the choral ground and responses to their own solo poetic singing on the trek to the workplace. On the long migrations by foot, often in rain or winter cold, the concertina was played close to the chest under the uniform woollen blanket worn by Basotho, pumping out warmth as well as musical accompaniment to the migrants’ long rhythmic strides and lyric vocal passages.

Prior to these importations, however, not only Sesotho but all Bantu language music had been primarily vocal, with an emphasis equally upon musical and poetic features: a sung literature, or ‘auriture’.