Seema in the sources
Seema is a ward at Mapela of Matlala origin. The people are Koni, and their totem is the small bird tlhantlhagane.
What the sources say
Jackson says it is not certain when they joined the Langa, but it seems to have been under Mapela, and that they say they came of their own free will. Their praise poem has not been recorded (about p. 140). In the courtyard of the headman a pair of stones is placed for each girls’ initiation course completed in the ward; the stones are called elephants (ditlou), and there are such stones at three other places in the ward where earlier rulers lived.
The ward had some 130 households. Jackson says the people of Seema still live in traditional homesteads (dikgoro) far more than in any other ward. One sub-headman, Ramasobane, has ten households on the farm Zwartfontein. The totem is shared with Masenya.
Cautions
This is the ward as Jackson found it in 1968; headmen and household counts will have changed. The praise poems are printed in his book and we are not reproducing them here. Jackson was a government ethnologist, and his fieldwork at Mapela took about 100 days between 1962 and 1967; he says the opinions are his own. His present tense describes 1968. We read the book through machine OCR of a typed transcription, so names and numbers may contain errors, and page numbers are approximate.
Izithakazelo and totem
The book records the totem and praise poem of this ward where given above, but we are not printing them in full. If you belong to the Seema and recite your own izithakazelo or direto, we would like to record them, with your permission and credited to you.
Sources and further reading
See also Langa, Kekana and Ndzundza.
Do you belong to the Seema? Tell us your praises and what elders say about the history, and we will add it, credited to you. Share what you know or WhatsApp 065 138 8213.