IN the previous chapter, the early history of intertextuality in South African writing was mapped out – or, more precisely, the history of an early lack of intertextuality. I argued, through a reading of early colonial Cape documents, that the beginnings of European written traditions in South Africa had an explicit agenda precisely of not engaging with the local context. The readers for many of the earliest paper texts produced on South African soil – letters, reports, journals – were not local; in fact, the potential local readers were regarded with suspicion, and as a threat to the physical objects that were the written texts as well as to the financial profits they guarded. The second idea in that chapter concerned early translational encounters at the Cape, and the ways in which translation has come to figure as a self-forgiving narrative for current scholarship in South Africa. Through looking at the early translators and interpreters at the Cape, and at a later, Victorian-era incident of teaching and translation, translation was shown to be not necessarily proof of mutuality. Translation often privileges one side of the encounter and silences or disempowers the other.

This present chapter develops some of the insights on translation and its attendant losses and inbuilt hierarchies. In this chapter, I reflect on the histories of our disciplines, and how they might work to exclude a certain kind of knowledge – and a certain kind of learner of course, but that is not the main focus of my thinking here. Building on this work, I try to trace a discourse of staged origin (the origins of our academic and curatorial work, the origins of our disciplines), and a connected discourse of imagined theft as central themes running through South African writing. This chapter is attuned to tropes of theft and obliteration, and to narratives that construct an alternative ‘original’ that will absolve the translator/transcriber of the blame of the scandal associated with the loss or destruction of the original.