Heard the one about the Spaniard, Ouma and the lion?
. . . or the people who have eyes in their feet?
Mail & Guardian. February, 2017
The Man Who Cursed the Wind and Other Stories from the Karoo by José Manuel de Prada-Samper (African Sun Press).
One of my favourite South African books is Specimens of Bushman Folklore by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. Published a little over 100 years ago, Specimens is a delightful collection of stories narrated to Bleek and Lloyd by former Bushmen prisoners in Cape Town in the late 1880s.
But, as enchanting as the stories are, there is something that always stops me when I open the book. It is written in two languages, side by side, /Xam on the left and English on the right. To be able to collect the stories of //Kabbo, Dia!kwain and others, linguist Bleek and his sister-in-law Lloyd first had to devise a system to write /Xam, including its complexity of clicks.
But it is extraordinary that the /Xam text came to be included in Specimens. There were never more than three people who could read /Xam: Bleek, Lloyd and Dorothea Bleek, Wilhelm’s daughter.
https://mg.co.za/article/2017-02-28-heard-the-one-about-the-spaniard-ouma-and-the-lion/