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

Moagisi Edwin Kagiso Seleka ORCID iD 

Issue: Vol.6 No.15 Article 3 pp. 4260 – 4275
DOI: https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.20256153| Published online 30th December, 2025
© 2025 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the CCBY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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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.

Keywords: Vates, Social Darwinism, intraspecific competition, difaqane (tribal wars), Narcissism, psychoanalysis

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Moagisi Edwin Seleka, is a senior lecturer and head of department-Academy Literacy and Science Communication at the Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University. He obtained a BA in Education, majoring in Setswana, History and Education. He then started a pursuing a four-year non-degree program in English (Language and Literature). Upon finishing this program, he enrolled for an honour’s degree in English Literature, followed by Master’s degree in English (General and Applied linguistics & African Literary Debates). In 2008, he was offered a Fulbright scholarship to study another master’s in English (TESOL) at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania which was preceded by an advanced certificate in Academic Literacy from the university of Syracuse in New York. He came back to South Africa and enrolled for PhD in English Literature at the University of the Northwest, Mafikeng Campus. Among other qualifications he holds are a one year certificate in Strategy Implementation with Wits University and a one year course in Jungian Psychology which he completed last year. His recent passion is the relationship between Language Arts and human wellness as well as an understanding of the human psyche through literary works. This has led to the following:a jointly presented paper on bibliotherapy at the 2023 confereence of the Gauteng Library Association of South Africa (LiASA) with Dr Grace Phalwane, another co-presented paper on the Arts and human wellness at the South African Association of Health Educationalists (SAAHE) in 2023, and the last being a paper on bibliotherapy, using a short story by Ngugi to demonstrate the efficacy of stories to inoculate, restore and preserve human wellness at an international conference hosted by the SRM University in India in 2024.

Seleka, Moagisi Edwin Kagiso. “The Immortality and Universality of a Setswana Folklore: Setlhotsa le Sefofu (The Blind and The Cripple).” E-Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences 6, no. 15 (2025): 4245 – 4259, https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.20256153.

© 2025 The Author(s). Published and Maintained by Noyam Journals. This is an open access article under the CCBY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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