IN this chapter, accent is understood in the most literal way, as it refers to the varieties of English spoken by South Africans. Accentedness and lack of accentedness are themes running through the work of Njabulo Ndebele, considered by many to be the leading intellectual in South Africa today. He has published some highly acclaimed fiction (in particular Fools and The Cry of Winnie Mandela), but it is his cultural and literary essay collections, Rediscovery of the Ordinary (1991, 1994 and 2006) and Fine Lines from the Box (2007) that have come to have the greatest influence. Many of the pieces collected in Rediscovery of the Ordinary and in Fine Lines from the Box were delivered as addresses and lectures, and contain traces of and references to the particular contexts for which they were written and where they were delivered. Repeatedly, one sees Ndebele drawing attention to the fact that every speech utterance is the activation of intertextual fields. The second volume of essays contains a rather shocking postscript by a South African academic, Tlhalo Raditlhalo. Raditlhalo has written elsewhere on the effects of exile on South Africa's literary traditions, and his approach to literary history is a good example of the accented scholarship about which this book theorises. Being invited to contribute a piece on Njabulo Ndebele's work, writes Raditlhalo, was ‘the culmination of a dream long harboured’ (2007: 257). Yet, contrasted with this statement of a dream long dreamt and now about to come true, is another anecdote which at first reading seems perplexing. It is a story of silence and misperception, of lack of trust in his audience. Raditlhalo (2007: 257) begins: