THIS chapter develops further the sceptical and uncelebratory understandings of translation introduced earlier. The histories of translation in early colonial South Africa might have provided an instance of accented interaction, yet did not. Despite the multilingualism of the early encounters, and the presence of a number of skilled translator and interpreter figures, these early instances of translation practices provide us in fact with a clear example of lack of accentedness, and lack of intertextuality. Instead of the mutuality and equality promised by translation encounters, we find instead examples of unequal language contact, and asymmetries which have remained as dominant features of the South African multilingual landscape. This chapter seeks to demythologise translation as a metaphor for greater understanding and identification, and to draw attention to translation's silencing effects. Turning the gaze to this scene of early European settlement seems like acceptance of exactly the vision of South Africa that this project wants to resist, with its assumptions that a European presence, and speakers and writers of European languages, are what make history begin. As Harry Garuba recently put it in a public address at the University of Stellenbosch, ‘How not to think Africa from the Cape’ is the challenge our scholarship needs to set itself. This chapter takes the insights of Ndebele's work about the need to live at the intersection of languages to see how and why the early colonial phase in South African history precisely did not create an intersection of languages despite multilingualism and the multiple acts of translation and interpreting. The interest in this chapter is in multilingualism and the ways in which multilingual environments are not a simple guarantee that accented thinking will necessarily take place.

Although the early colonial encounter (and in particular language contact) is what is at issue, the chapter is constantly on the lookout for ways of avoiding a version of history that privileges the colonial archive. Written documents of early multilingual encounters on South African soil make it obvious that Africa was multilingual long before European ears arrived to hear it. Attempting an accented reading of the written texts of the ‘early Cape’, this chapter questions closely understandings of multilingualism during the early years of colonial settlement. In particular the argument here is suspicious of readings that want to excavate this multilingualism as evidence of reciprocity and mutuality – as a horizontal contact zone.