Abstract
Highman’s chapter explores how, in South African letters, both instances of plagiarism and allegations of plagiarism have often served to mark cultural difference – even while attesting to an active (if disavowed) practice of cultural translation. Highman shows how transcultural sources are frequently effaced in favour of presenting a distinctly national voice, with plagiarism serving to obscure such sources. The chapter traces a debate between the English-speaking poet Stephen Watson and the Afrikaans poet Antjie Krog over their respective adaptations of the San orature recorded in the colonial Bleek-Lloyd archive, contextualising it within a long history of appropriative white writing about indigenous peoples, and arguing that Freud’s ‘narcissism of minor differences’ is at work in the dispute by these white writers over these indigenous texts.
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- 1.
Antjie Krog, the stars say ‘tsau’: |Xam Poetry of Dia!kwain, Kweiten-ta-||ken, |A!kunta, Han#kass’o, and ||Kabbo, selected and adapted by Antjie Krog (Cape Town: Kwela, 2004). Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull (Johannesburg: Random House, 1998).
- 2.
Antjie Krog, ‘Stephen Watson and the Annals of Plagiarism’, New Contrast, 34 (2006), p. 72. The |Xam were a group of people variously known as San/Bushmen who spoke a particular dialect, |Xam. Selections of the kukummi were published by Lloyd, after Bleek’s death, in Specimens of Bushman Folklore (London: George Allen, 1911). The notebooks in which Bleek and Lloyd recorded the kukummi were rediscovered in 1973 and now form part of the Bleek-Lloyd archive, held at the University of Cape Town.
- 3.
Watson, ‘The Annals of Plagiarism: Antjie Krog and the Bleek and Lloyd Collection’, New Contrast, 33:2 (2005), p. 57.
- 4.
Ibid., p. 48.
- 5.
The debate spilt out across the national weeklies the Sunday Times and the Mail & Guardian, and to the literature website Litnet, and was also reported on in the British Guardian.
- 6.
Marilyn Randall, Profit Plagiarism: Authorship, Profit and Power (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), p. 8.
- 7.
Watson, ‘Annals’, p. 58.
- 8.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, The Penguin Freud Library Volume 12: Civilization, Society and Religion, general ed. James Strachey, Volume 12 ed. Albert Dickson (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 305.
- 9.
See Tom Eaton, who characterised it as a ‘cream pies’ versus ‘koeksisters’ slanging match. Tom Eaton, ‘Koeksisters vs. Cream Pies’, Mail & Guardian, 3 March 2006, Friday Supplement, p. 5.
- 10.
Watson, ‘Annals’, p. 48.
- 11.
See Elwyn Jenkins, ‘San Tales Again: Acknowledgment and Appropriation’, English Academy Review, 27:1 (2010), pp. 24–35. Jenkins focuses mostly on appropriation in children’s stories and also discusses the dispute between Krog and Watson. This essay considers the question of plagiarism more specifically.
- 12.
Watson, ‘Annals’, p. 48.
- 13.
Robert Kirby, ‘Cheats, Loots and Thieves’, Mail & Guardian, 24 February 2005, p. 28. Fred Khumalo speaks of a ‘virus’ in ‘If Words Don’t Come Easy, Some Simply Filch Them’, Sunday Times, 9 December 2009; Claire Verstraete of a ‘cultural outbreak’ in ‘Plagiarism: The Cultural Outbreak’ (Unpublished MA thesis, University of Cape Town, 2007).
- 14.
Watson, ‘Annals’, p. 58.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Malcolm Gladwell, ‘Something Borrowed’, The New Yorker, 22 November 2004.
- 18.
Ashleigh Harris, ‘Accountability, Acknowledgement and the Ethics of Quilting in Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull’, Journal of Literary Studies, 22:1 (2006), p. 47.
- 19.
Watson, ‘Annals’, p. 58.
- 20.
Stephen Watson, The Return of the Moon: Versions from the |Xam (Cape Town: Carrefour, 1991), p. 1.
- 21.
Ibid., p. 13.
- 22.
Jack Cope and Uys Krige (eds.), The Penguin Book of South African Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968); Arthur Markowitz, With Uplifted Tongue: Stories, Myths and Fables of the South African Bushmen Told in Their Manner (Cape Town: Central News Agency, 1956); Eugène Marais, Dwaalstories en Ander Vertellings (Cape Town, Stellenbosch and Bloemfontein: Nationale Pers, 1927).
- 23.
Leon de Kock, ‘Naming of Parts, or, How Things Shape Up in Transcultural Literary History’, in Studying Transcultural Literary History, ed. Gunilla Lindberg-Wada (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2006), p. 18.
- 24.
As Michael Wessels points out, Krog’s project does resemble Watson’s more than any other, in particular in the ways his own collection differed significantly from previous adaptations of the kukummi. Return of the Moon was the first collection to draw on the Bleek-Lloyd notebooks (rather than Specimens); to deal solely with the |Xam (rather than conflating them with other San peoples); and to provide contextual notes informed by contemporary research. Similarly, Krog works with the notebooks and restricts herself to the |Xam kukummi (though she includes !Xun drawings).
- 25.
Annie Gagiano, ‘Just A Touch of the Cultural Trophy Hunter’, Litnet, 21 February 2006. This review was republished on Litnet, at Gagiano’s request, after Krog had referred to it in her response to Watson.
- 26.
Krog, ‘Stephen Watson’, pp. 72–73.
- 27.
Ibid., p. 73.
- 28.
Watson, ‘Annals’, p. 49.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Krog, ‘Stephen Watson’, p. 73.
- 31.
This kum is included in Specimens, pp. 299–317. The fragment is ‘Oh moon, give me the face/ with which you, having died, return’. See Peter Sacks, In These Mountains (London: Collier Macmillan, 1986), p. 51. Compare with Stephen Watson, Return of the Moon, p. 25.
- 32.
Helize Van Vuuren, ‘Plagiaat? Appropriasie? Kulturele Oorplanting? Huldiging?: Brandende Kwessies Rondom Mondelinge Tradisies – Eugène Marais En Die San Opnuut Bekyk’, Journal of Literary Studies, 24:4 (2008), pp. 96–97.
- 33.
Mathias G. Guenther, Bushman Folktales: Oral Traditions of the Nharo of Botswana and the |Xam of the Cape (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GMBH, 1989).
- 34.
Watson, ‘Annals’, p. 53.
- 35.
The kukummi collected in Specimens are divided into two categories: ‘Mythology, Fables, Legends and Poetry’ and ‘History: Natural and Personal’.
- 36.
Watson, Return, p. 16.
- 37.
Lloyd’s Book V-15, pp. 5101–5102. Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd (eds.), Specimens of Bushman Folklore (London: George Allen, 1911), p. 236.
- 38.
Stephen Watson, ‘Annals’, p. 54. Watson is generally caustic about Krog’s alleged ‘tin ear’ for English – suggesting that she writes by the ‘“carriage-return” principle of poetry-writing’.
- 39.
Michael Wessels, Bushman Letters: Interpreting |Xam Narrative (Johannesburg: Wits UP, 2010). p. 188. See pp. 188–190 for an expanded discussion of this that engages with Watson’s contention that Lloyd was aiming to be as accurate as possible in her translations. Wessels does not mention that Specimens includes a category of ‘poetry’.
- 40.
Watson, ‘Annals’, p. 57.
- 41.
Lloyd is responsible for two-thirds of the notebooks; of the 138 notebooks only 28 are Bleek’s, even though it is his name that is generally associated with the collection. Bleek died in 1875, but Lloyd continued collecting material and also worked at the Cape Library, editing the material collected by Bleek and herself. Lloyd, after considerable struggle, succeeded in having some of the narratives published in Specimens.
- 42.
Watson, ‘Annals’, p. 51.
- 43.
Krog, the stars say ‘tsau’, p. 10.
- 44.
Ibid., p. 52.
- 45.
Andrew Banks, Bushman in a Victorian World: The Remarkable Story of the Bleek-Lloyd Collection of Bushman Folklore (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2006), p. 180.
- 46.
Krog, ‘Stephen Watson’, p. 72.
- 47.
Antjie Krog, ‘Krog: “Met Hierdie Liggaam Is Ek”’ [Krog: ‘With This Body I Am’]. Interview with Willemien Brümmer. Die Burger, 2 June 2006, p. 15. Author’s translation from Afrikaans.
- 48.
Watson, ‘Annals’, p. 53.
- 49.
Gagiano, ‘Just A Touch’, n.p.
- 50.
Watson, Return, p. 14.
- 51.
Ibid., p. 16.
- 52.
Ibid.
- 53.
Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia UP, 2002).
- 54.
Watson, Return, p. 13.
- 55.
Ibid., p. 11.
- 56.
T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, Four Quartets (London: Faber & Faber, 1944), pp. 39–48.
- 57.
Ibid., p. 19.
- 58.
Ibid, p. 14.
- 59.
Krog, ‘Stephen Watson’, p. 72.
- 60.
Eugène Marais, Dwaalstories en Ander Vertellings (Cape Town, Stellenbosch and Bloemfontein: Nationale Pers, 1927).
- 61.
Sandra Swart, ‘The Construction of Eugène Marais as an Afrikaner Hero’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 30: 4 (2004), p. 848.
- 62.
Ibid., p. 853. Marais originally expressed the idea in Die Siel van die Mier (The Soul of the White Ant). See Eugène Marais, ‘Die Siel van die Mier en Maurice Maeterlinck’, Die Huisgenoot, 6 January 1928, pp. 8–9.
- 63.
Ibid.
- 64.
David Van Reybrouck, Die Plaag: Die Stil Geknaag van Skrywers, Termiete en Suid-Afrika, trans. Daniel Hugo (Pretoria: Protea, 2013).
- 65.
Eugène Marais, Die Skepbekertjie: Oor die Voëls van Witklip (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1968), p. 9. Die Skepbekertjie is a children’s story, and does not include any poems. Nor does it reference the Bleek and Lloyd archive, although there is mention of ‘ons ou Boesman’ (‘our old Bushman’) and their folklore, specifically a story about a ‘skepbeker’ (a beaker or jug).
- 66.
Antjie Krog, ‘Creative Non-Fiction: A Conversation’ Interview with Duncan Brown, Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, 23:1 (2011), p. 63.
- 67.
Marais’s Dwaalstories was first published in book form as part of a ‘Self-lees-serie’, and it seems was aimed at building a sense of national pride.
- 68.
In an interview, Krog asserts that Marais visited Bleek and Lloyd and that a |Xam person told him that the ‘he could speak bird or lion’ (‘Creative Non-fiction’, p. 63). The story must be apocryphal – Marais would have been four years old when Bleek died, and thirteen in 1884, when Lloyd’s last work with |Xam narrators at Mowbray was done.
- 69.
Marais, Dwaalstories, p. 7.
- 70.
Eugène Marais, ‘The Yellow Streak’, Standpunte, 18:6 (1965), pp. 40–43.
- 71.
Dennis Walder, Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and Memory (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), p. 69. Antjie Krog, ‘From ||Khabbo to Zapiro’, in Duncan Brown, To Speak of this Land: Identity and Belonging in South Africa and Beyond (Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006), p. xiii.
- 72.
Krog, the stars say ‘tsau’, p. 11.
- 73.
Sandra Swart, ‘Mythic Bushmen in Afrikaans Literature: The Dwaalstories of Eugène N. Marais’, Current Writing Text and Reception in Southern Africa, 15: 3 (2003), p. 103.
- 74.
Ibid., p. 96.
- 75.
Ibid., p. 103.
- 76.
Swart does not note this.
- 77.
Gideon Retief von Wielligh, Boesman-Stories: Deel 1. Mitologie en legends (Cape Town: De Nationale Pers, 1919). See also successive volumes published in 1920 and 1921.
- 78.
Roger Hewitt, Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand UP, 2008), p. 9.
- 79.
WP Koorts and Auke Slotegraaf, ‘/Xam sidereal narratives and Gideon Retief von Wielligh’s Boesman-stories 2’, conference paper presented at the 2005 African Astronomical History Symposium, Cape Town.
- 80.
Gideon Retief von Wielligh, Boesman-Stories: Deel II, p. iv, quoted in Koorts and Slotegraaf.
- 81.
Sigrid Schmidt, ‘Khoisan Folktales: Original Sources and Republications’, African Studies, 41: 2 (1982), p. 211.
- 82.
This trope appears in von Wielligh too.
- 83.
Ibid., p. 203.
- 84.
See David Chidester, ‘Classify and Conquer: Friederich Max Müller, Indigenous Religious Traditions, and Imperial Comparative Religion’, Beyond Primitivism, ed. Jacob K. Olupona (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 71–88.
- 85.
Robert J Thornton, ‘“This Dying Out Race”: W.H.I. Bleek’s Approach to the Languages of Southern Africa’, Social Dynamics, 9:2 (1983), p. 7.
- 86.
Edmund R. Leach, Edmund and Herbert Weisinger, ‘Golden Bough or Gilded Twig?’, Daedalus, 90:2 (1961), pp. 371–399.
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Highman, K. (2017). ‘The Narcissism of Small Differences’: Plagiarism in South African Letters. In: Boehmer, E., Kunstmann, R., Mukhopadhyay, P., Rogers, A. (eds) The Global Histories of Books. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51334-8_11
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