In the early 1970s, Tim Couzens, then a lecturer in the English department at the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), had begun to cultivate an interest in the history of black South African literature. ‘But there is no black South African literature!’ the professor in the department interjected. ‘Well,’ Couzens responded, ‘I've got 27 kilos of it’ (Couzens 2014).

The anecdote illuminates, in a flash, what lay at stake in literary studies in South Africa at the time. Against the symbolic violence of denial exercised by a senior representative of his own discipline, Couzens retorted with the weight of materiality, of the empirical hereness and thingness of actual books, manuscripts and photocopies. Build facts on the ground: this could serve as one motto for reconfiguring the legitimate definition of an academic field of study. For the recalcitrant professor, legitimacy hinged on guarding the values of canonical English literary studies, the particular version of which in South Africa was strongly influenced by F.R. Leavis's close reading of the ‘Great Tradition.’ For Couzens, the challenge was nothing less than to redefine value.

Couzens had embarked at this time on what would be a long career as a literary scholar with a leaning towards social history. He had been animated in the 1960s by, among other things, his discovery of the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe's work, and wondered if there was a South African counterpart to Things Fall Apart. After some spadework he found it: Solomon Plaatje's Mhudi, first published by the Lovedale mission press in 1930 but largely forgotten in South Africa. The article resulting from this (re)discovery, ‘The Dark Side of the World: Sol Plaatje's Mhudi,’ became Couzens's first notable intervention in the field of South African literary studies. In the article, he presents a revisionist case in favour of Plaatje's novel.