Welcome to the Southern African Folklore Society’s website. SAFOS was formed as result of a need to have a body that would give voice to scholarship on matters pertaining Folklore Studies. Originally known as “The Scallan Society for Folklore Studies”, the Society changed to its to its current name in 1991. Since then SAFOS, through its accredited Southern African Journal for Folklore Studies (SAJFS) has provided the much needed platform for Researchers, Scholars, Academics, Folklorists and Indigenous Knowledge Practitioners alike to test their views on many broad issues pertaining folklore studies. The Southern African Society for Folklore Studies is a non-profit association of individual and affiliated Southern African and international researchers and scholars engaged in work on any aspect of folklore. The term folklore is used by the Southern African Society for Folklore Studies in its broadest and multidimensional senses “that encompass fields which impinge on folk culture, such as mythology, and all customs, rituals and structures of human society, the origins of which can be traced to oral transmission”. Thus SAFOS has become the repository of scholarship and critical engagement on matters pertaining to folklore especially in, but not limited to, the Southern African Region.

As averred by Celia Scallan Zeiss, the Founding Secretary of Southern African Society for Folklore Studies, later to be known as Southern African Folklore Society, “the impact of literacy on an oral community radicallt alters the dissemination and perception of learning. Rhetoric and oratory serve as mnemonic devices for the poet who conveys knowledge in a traditional society. Literacy permits laws and historic events to be recorded in concrete form and oratory is then transformed into poetry and other literary genres. Similarly, religion and philosophy, when written, can be amplified to form a systematic body of thought in which civilisations are grounded. The antecedents to such written systems, ritual, song and dance develop into the art of drama and music. An examination of folklore and mythology bears testimony to the phases of human history, indicating human beings’ attempt to explain the universe, the forces governing life and death, and the experiences of good and evils”

The foregoing statement, made years ago, is as relevant today as it was then. In a world that has seen the explosion of knowledge and information, it is important that SAFOS persists in foregrounding folklore both as a genre and an important area of critical inquiry that warrants the establishment of its own methods and approaches towards the articulation of knowledge and history. Some of the challenges the society faces has been the apparent dearth in folkloric scholarship that can be attributed, but is not limited, to the corporatisation and commodification of knowledge which has resulted in the decline in popularity, particularly in Southern Africa, of the Humanities and Arts as fields of critical and scientific inquiry, in favour of natural, applied, mathematical sciences as well as technology. Instead of folding its arms and bemoaning this as its fate SAFOS has decided to employ technology towards popularising Folklore Studies. It is hoped that visitors to this site will find it both academically vibrant and scholastically challenging especially wit regard to an area of inquiry that had become associated with inscrutable cultural exotica.