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SESUTO AND SECHWANA PRAISES. 
By the Rev. Professor W. A. Norton, M.A., B.Litt. 
If we allow a wider meaning to literature, and make the term cover all 
art-forms of the spoken language, we at once obtain a whole range of such. 
Open, for example, Carl Meinhof's volume on the poetry of the African at 
the title-page, and you will find the fairy tale, myth, saga, epic, hymns 
and embryo drama, proverb and riddle and song, enumerated as examples 
of what I mean. If these examples fall mostly below the literary level, in 
the way of bulk, of our European poets and dramatists, the same can by 
no means be said (in the matter of finish) in the case of many of the royal 
praises, delivered at dawn from the edge of the acropolis rock of some chief 
in his praiser's stentor voice, and re-echoed among the boulders which 
strew the stad or astu. I had never realised the full meaning of the Greek 
city state, with its central town and citadel, and but scattered villages 
beside, through wide territory, till I saw the stads of the chieftains Sebele 
and Lenchwe in Bechwanaland. The acropolis of the latter is an enormous 
pile of rocks, like Pelion on Ossa, approached by a most narrow winding 
path, tangled with bush. 
To turn back from such chiefs to their bardic literature (if I have success- 
fully made good its claim to the term), of which they are in their kind, like 
Alcinous of old, the patrons, let me illustrate the liihoko (or praises), which 
to my mind have something of the heroic type of Homer's epic. To test 
this statement one needs, of course, to have an appreciation of them in the 
original : let me give first an attempt to render the spirit of them in English 
verse, and I will choose the famous story of Lethole, the material for which 
was gathered by my old friend the Resident Commissioner of Bechwanaland 
in the days when he was still in Basutoland. Lethole, chief of the 
Makhoakhoa in Basutoland (early nineteenth century), had hired Zulus 
to help him attack the brother of the famous chieftainess Mantatise. He 
refused them their share of the spoil, but they caught him later and sen- 
tenced him to death. He begged them first to let him sing his own praises 
for the last time, and they stood listening. 
