To give true voice to those original poets

Willemien le Roux

I realise that the debate is winding down, but just having arrived from the north of Botswana where my family and I have been closely involved with the San for the past thirty years, I would like to offer a position from a slightly different perspective.

When Alison White and I worked on the many interviews from which we compiled and edited the San’s oral testimony book, Voices of the San, (Kwela Books, 2004) our toughest decisions were about how to present the San’s true words, untarnished by our own interpretation. Our problem was that the texts had already gone through one stage of translation into English (often from Afrikaans or Setswana in addition to nine San languages); how could the simplicity of these translations be retained without being patronising? We needed language that would transcend the San’s silence of more than a century, that would make people sit up and say, “Hey, listen, the San are talking!”

Of all the world’s marginalised, indigenous hunter-gatherers, the San have probably been silenced most effectively by modernisation and colonisation, in fact, they were often deemed to be extinct. South Africa is privileged to have the remarkable gift of the inheritance of 11,000 pages of text that provide some insight into the stories, beliefs, poetry and worldview of the now extinct |Xam San, by mouth of Bleek and Lloyd. The Voices of the San and other community books coming from the Kuru and other San organisations’ regional oral history project, allowed the San of today to speak for themselves, but unfortunately still only in languages they have adopted, just like //Kabbo and Dia!kwain had to use Afrikaans to bridge the gap for those disabled in their world.

Like Krog, we were aware that we were merely the medium presenting the San’s translated words, leaving interpretation to the reader. But now the issue of who needs to be acknowledged and who steals from whom is an interesting one. We had the privilege of being able to ask some literate San people to help interpret their elders’ words, and it was they who chose the themes by which to present the San’s story today. Like Krog, we gave credit by means of photographs and the names of the original speakers, and we included art as visual communication to enhance the voices of the original speakers. Still, our names stand on the cover of Voices of the San.

It would have been interesting to ask the San’s judgement on which of Watson’s and Krog’s books they would consider to be closest to plagiarism, as the debate on the right of academics to write on their behalf is alive in the modern San world. Even though my life has been devoted to the understanding of the San and to try to illuminate their presence and struggles in today’s world, I cannot and will not speak for them. I can only do what Bleek and Lloyd did – record what I hear and then reflect what I have heard, for others to interpret. But when I read Antjie Krog’s poetic arrangement of those texts from a hundred years ago, I could recognise her effort to fade into the background and give true voice to those original poets. Her engagement with the Bleek and Lloyd transcriptions have gone so deep that she can even recite some of these verses from The Stars Say Tsau in an astonishingly accurate imitation of the sounds and vocal interjections of San story-telling, attributed by her to the meticulous care and attention to the finest of linguistic details by those two 19th century researchers.

We were all charmed by Stephen Watson’s verses when Return of the Moon saw the light of day in the early nineties. It was a poetic tribute, and a true-sounding interpretation of those often obscure texts. The poetic freedom of those verses helped to make them more English-reader friendly, and Return of the Moon played an important role in raising awareness for the San. It was probably the most popular one of all previous efforts to present these texts. But Krog’s verse took us further. And I just have to add that, to deflect the debate towards ‘de fect that I rreelly hev to struggle wif dis difficult Inglis tail to tell you dis and dat Antjie Krog is my hero’, is to take us away from what the real issue is: Who got the closest to the San’s tale and who has given the real authors their due credit?



LitNet: 13 March 2006

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