Stephen Watson provoked a furious debate, conducted for the most part on the Internet and in the newspapers, with his contentions in New Contrast (2005) that Antjie Krog's The Stars Say ‘Tsau’ (2004) constitutes a form of plagiarism. This tendency is not new in her work, avers Watson. Parts of Krog's Country of My Skull were borrowed, he claims, from Ted Hughes's 1976 essay ‘Myth and education’ (Watson 2005: 59–60). While conceding that Krog's work might not directly quote other writers’ work without acknowledgement, it possesses, Watson (2005: 50) claims, a ‘plagiaristic spirit’. In Watson's opinion (2005: 54–57), Krog's adaptations in poetry of the |Xam materials are so close to Bleek and Lloyd's prose originals, mostly as published in Specimens of Bushman Folklore (1911), that they represent an illegitimate instance of borrowing. The very ‘conception’ of The Stars Say ‘Tsau’, argues Watson (2005: 49), too closely parallels his own Return of the Moon (1991). Nor, he asserts (2005: 49–50), can it be accidental that many of Krog's statements in her introduction resemble the statements in his introduction, or that more than a third of Krog's selection of extracts coincides with his own.

Watson appeals to a commonly accepted tradition of originality in scholarly and literary practice and the protocols that attend the use of sources. He distances himself, however, from a rigid and legalistic application of these principles (Watson 2005: 57–58). The critical question is whether the borrowing is ‘derivative’ or ‘transformative’. In Krog's case, Watson concludes (60), it is merely derivative and thus constitutes ‘a blatant act of appropriation’, especially of Lucy Lloyd's translations from the |Xam.

The reactions to Watson's article were immediate and strong. Apart from Krog's own responses (Krog 2006a; 2006b), a number of academics, journalists and publishers defended Krog's work. These defences rarely included a dispassionate consideration of the broader questions that Watson raised. Several writers remarked that Watson's failure to observe academic rules of engagement and his ‘vituperative language’ (Gray 2006) did not invite a measured and impartial response (Mason-Jones 2006; Johnson 2006; De Lange 2006). For the most part, they attacked the suspected motives behind Watson's allegations, reiterating, for instance, the criticisms levelled against Watson's own volume of |Xam verse and suggesting that he was still smarting from them.