(Re)staging ‘Sekese’

A moment when multitudes fell under the blade of Shaka’s assegai; when scores were made into wanderers; and when a great many perished of hunger and thirst. This is the description given in the classic Sesotho-language novel by Thomas Mofolo, Chaka, of a particularly tempestuous chapter in the history of modern Southern Africa: the Lifaqane. 

Commencing in the late eighteenth century and reaching its most intense period between the late 1810s and the early 1840s, the Lifaqane’s causes are still under dispute. Some historians and writers, including those Mofolo drew on for his novel, blame the aggressive expansionist policies of Shaka and his fellow abeNguni contemporaries. Others have argued that the Lifaqane was instigated by European settlers and their Griqua accomplices to cover up the slave raids they were conducting in the region. Still others have pointed to deteriorating environmental factors that made resource conflict inevitable. Whatever the Lifaqane’s true causes, what has generally never been debated is that the period was characterised by the death and displacement of hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of Southern Africans. 

This tumultuous period of history is not only the focus of Mofolo’s magnum opus (which turns one hundred this year); it is also the backdrop of another less known and less discussed Sesotho-language literary piece, ‘Tseko ea Sefofu le Seritsa’. This text opens on a cave – the home of two men who are part of what is a presumably small unidentified chiefdom that has been driven out of its homeland by an enemy group, which is also unnamed. Although the group made it the cave together, the men are now its sole inhabitants, the others having progressed to higher ground without them due to one of the men being blind and the other lame. They have not been left there out of cruelty, though; rather, it was deemed safer for them to seek shelter in the cave than to risk being wounded by a stray spear they may not see coming or manage to outrun. More proof that the rest of the group isn’t heartless: they periodically bring The Blind Man and The Lame Man the little food they have managed to find in the drought-stricken land. And it is during one of these visits that the story takes place. 

The group learns that, some time before their visit, The Blind Man and The Lame Man discovered a dead antelope and worked together to bring the carcass back to their cave before skinning and cooking it. However, neither of them seems as jubilant as the group might expect. When questioned about this, the men explain they have been arguing over which of them deserves the antelope’s hide. The group then decides to have the men argue their respective cases. It is their compelling, at times humorous, justifications – together with rebuttals from The Blind Man’s father – that form the bulk of the text. 

‘Sefofu le Seritsa’ is the second of two texts credited to Azariele Sekese that were jointly published in 1928, about three years before Sekese’s death at eighty-one, in a single volume titled Bukana ea tšōmo tsa Pitso ea Linonyana le Tseko ea Sefofu le Seritsa. The title is usually shortened to the first, and more well-known, text, Pitso ea Linonyana. Like many other early Sesotho-language literary works, Bukana ea tšōmo tsa Pitso ea Linonyana le Tseko ea Sefofu le Seritsa was published by Morija Sesuto Book Depot, which was founded by missionaries from the Société des missions évangéliques de Paris (SMEP) who settled among the Basotho towards the close of the Lifaqane. 

In keeping with ‘Sefofu le Seritsa’’s themes of cooperation and unacknowledged labour, according to the Livre d’Or de la mission du Lessouto, which was published in 1912 to celebrate the SMEP’s seventy-fifth anniversary,1 Sekese may not have composed these two texts on his own but alongside fellow teacher and catechist Jobo Moteane. However, it is unclear precisely how Moteane may have contributed to the work – Moteane, who, as far as I’m aware, never authored a book by the time of his death in 1942, unlike Sekese, who did. Also unclear is why Sekese’s name alone ended up on the cover of the book, if Moteane indeed contributed to this work. 

Although Bukana ea tšōmo tsa Pitso ea Linonyana le Tseko ea Sefofu le Seritsa is Sekese’s only published full-length creative effort, it isn’t his first published full-length work. Thirty-five years earlier, Morija Sesuto Book Depot put out Sekese’s compendium of Sesotho customs, sayings and folklore titled Buka ea pokello ea mekhoa ea Basotho le maele le litšōmo. Notably, the appearance of this compendium made Sekese the first-ever published Mosotho author. More than that, according to Albert S. Gérard’s 1971 study, Four African Literatures: Xhosa, Sotho, Zulu, Amharic, this compendium is ‘the first of its kind’ by a sub-Saharan African, such books up until then having been written and published by Europeans. It may also be one of the first full-length works of prose by an author of sub-Saharan African descent who was born and raised in the region to be made available in standard book form for the general public that is neither a slave/abolitionist narrative, like Olaudah Equiano’s 1789 memoir, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African; nor a translation, like UHambo lomhambi: owesuka kweli lizwe, waye esinga kwelo lizayo, Tiyo Soga’s 1866 isiXhosa-language translation of John Bunyan’s 1678 novel, Pilgrim’s Progress; nor an explicitly religious work. 

For nearly a century, Sekese’s resonant stories were only accessible to Sesotho-language readers. Thankfully, that changed in April this year following the publication in Asymptote of my English-language rendition of ‘Sefofu le Seritsa’, ‘The Blind Man, The Lame Man and the Antelope’. 

In translating the piece, I made a potentially controversial decision: to rewrite Sekese’s work as a conventionally formatted one-act play.  

As I mention in a note accompanying my piece, ‘Sefofu le Seritsa’ possesses a ‘messiness’, a generic fluidity and a history that invited the decision I made, in spite of the text seemingly hewing closer to prose in form. 

Curiously, Sekese’s works were labelled ‘litšōmo’ – ‘tšōmo’ in the singular. While ‘tšōmo’ could be taken to mean ‘story’ or ‘tale’ in the broadest sense, as Pule Maphike has noted in his 1991 PhD thesis, by the time of the volume’s publication, it had come to specifically refer to folktales, fables and legends ‘told to children around the evening fire in beautiful rendition consisting of narratives, refrains and choruses’. The publication of Sekese’s 1893 compendium further cemented this definition of the term, as did the appearance of two volumes of traditional folktales collected by SMEP missionary and Sesotho orature enthusiast Éduoard Jacottet, Litšōmo tsa Basotho I and II, respectively, in 1908 and 1911 (not to mention Jacottet’s The Treasury of Ba-suto Lore: Being Original Se-suto Texts, with a Literal Translation and Notes, Vol. 1, published in 1908). Even the advertisement announcing the book’s publication in a June issue of the SMEP-founded weekly newspaper Leselinyana la Lesotho – to which Sekese contributed innumerable articles, including a history of the amaZulu that Mofolo seems to have consulted when writing Chaka – referred to the first text in the volume as a tšōmo, by implication applying the label to its companion piece, ‘Sefofu le Seritsa’:  

On the one hand, the label ‘tšōmo’ is apt. After all, ‘Sefofu le Seritsa’ incorporates elements of the many iterations of The Blind Man and The Lame Man fable first attested in Greek-language sources from the first century BCE (just as ‘Pitso ea Linonyana’ is also the title of a folktale in Litsōmo tsa Basotho II that bears a very different plot from Sekese’s). Moreover, ‘Sefofu le Seritsa’ concludes with an Aesopian-like epigram, like those that can be found in other tales that he recorded in Leselinyana la Lesotho and in his 1893 book, about the importance of fairly dispensing justice. Yet, Sekese’s recasting of ‘The Blind Man and The Lame Man’ in Sesotho ignores several other key conventions regarding Sesotho folktales, including how it begins. 

When retelling a tšōmo, even in print, it’s customary to begin with the phrase ‘Ba re e ne e re (e le)’ or ‘Ho thoe’, both of which could be rendered in English as ‘It is said that’ or ‘Once upon a time’. ‘Sefofu le Seritsa’ eschews that tradition, which is fine, but the piece’s direct opening is practically alien to the genre. It could be argued that Sekese foregoes this ‘rule’ in ‘Sefofu le Seritsa’ precisely because its inspiration is foreign. But Litšōmo tsa Basotho II suggests that Sekese still could have, in fact, observed it. Even as Jacottet notes, with some ironic sadness, that a few of the folktales in the collection, unlike those in the first, seem to have been ‘tainted’ by Europeanisms, particularly as regards vocabulary, the folktales compiled in his collection nevertheless adhere to this convention: ‘Ba re e ne e re e le’, most of them begin. Therefore, instead of launching, as it does, with an invitation – ‘Metsoalle e tšepehang, ka hlompho kea le mema’ – ‘Sefofu le Seritsa’ could have very well begun in the following way: ‘Ba re e ne e re e le Sefofu le Seritsa; joale banna bana ba babeli ba be ba le thabeng, lehaheng…’ and on and on it could have went. 

There are other ways in which the text diverges from what might be expected of a tšōmo. Except for the opening paragraphs – three of which were left out of later editions of the work, presumably because they were deemed redundant – and the concluding epigram, ‘Sefofu le Seritsa’ consists almost entirely of monologues, unlike most recorded Sesotho folktales, whose speech tends to be reported. What’s more, when traditional Sesotho folktales take place in the past, this past isn’t generally specified. ‘Sefofu le Seritsa’, as I’ve mentioned, takes place during a particularly pivotal moment in Southern African history.  

Though it’s conceivable that Sekese was merely experimenting with the traditional folktale prose form, as Mofolo’s contemporaries like Zakea Dolphin Mangoaela and Edward Motsamai did in their 1912 collections, Har’a libatana le linyamatsane and Mehla ea malimo, respectively, I’m convinced that the unorthodox form of ‘Sefofu le Seritsa’ (and the even more unconventional one of ‘Pitso ea Linonyana’, of course) has more to do with its official pre-publication life as a stage-play, or a tšoantšiso, as they are referred to in Sesotho. 

Mention is made in the Livre d’Or of ‘Pitso ea Linonyana’ and how the mission school students enjoyed performing it as a ‘petite comédie’, a short (comedic) play, since its first appearance, which the Livre d’Or does not disclose. While ‘Sefofu le Seritsa’ isn’t specifically named in the Livre d’Or, it’s not hard to imagine that it was composed around the same time as ‘Pitso ea Linonyana’ and was performed too. In this way then, Sekese’s two stories can be seen as hybrid playscripts of sorts, which is why Sekese is also often regarded – albeit with some reservations – as the first Mosotho playwright. In a preface to Moshoeshoe le baruti, his 1947 debut play charting the broader history of Sesotho-language drama up until that point, Bennett Makalo Khaketla writes: 

Having read and taken all of this in, I was curious to not only know what ‘Sefofu le Seritsa’ might sound like in English but also what it might look like as performable ‘play proper’. The result of that curiosity is ‘The Blind Man, The Lame Man and the Antelope’. Apart from including some stage directions, excising quotation marks and such, I’ve also attempted to (re)stage the text, as it were, by naming and – despite my strong anti-royalist sentiments – ‘crowning’ the nameless narrator we meet at the beginning as The Chief, since the role of settling disputes was, in the Lifaqane-era setting of the story, a chiefly one. 

An essay appeared in this publication not too long, ‘The Value of Differences’, by Jennifer Lindsay. In it, different literary stakeholders in the Anglophone world – particularly prize boards and reviewers – are urged to make a much more concerted effort in acknowledging the art and process of translation, and to generally embrace the distinctions between translated texts and those written originally in English. In a similar vein, the essay, like many that have been published in recent years, calls for greater translator visibility. This is all well and good. However, the essay’s conceptualisation of who these literary translators are and can be is rather limited, as especially evidenced by its opening sentence. ‘Translators are usually passionate about language – their own and others’ – and about other places’, it begins. 

I imagine that many readers of my essay won’t notice the myopia of this line since it describes the most prominent kind of English-language literary translator: the often white North American or Australasian or British literary translator who, like many other (white) North Americans and Australasians and Brits, was a monolingual English speaker until secondary school or university, when they decided to take a ‘foreign’ language course, perhaps after a holiday to a place where said ‘foreign’ language wasn’t so. There’s also the literary translator who didn’t encounter the language from which they translate on holiday but during the year they spent volunteering in said country (while frequently failing to come to grips with the role their much wealthier country may have played, whether in that moment or at an earlier time, in facilitating the dire socioeconomic conditions that ultimately justified their charity). There’s yet another kind of ‘literary translator’ I hope we would have done away with by now that seems to be making a comeback in figures such as Mary Jo Bang and Traci K. Smith; ‘literary translators’ who will ‘kidnap your poems and call them translations’, as Mona Kareem amusingly, if sadly, observed a few years ago; ‘literary translators’ who don’t speak a word of the languages they ‘translate’ from, and have confessed as much repeatedly, but strangely get invited to talk about their ‘translations’ – from languages as disparate as Italian and Japanese – on NPR and in the pages of The New Yorker, on top of getting to judge translation prizes. However, these are far from the only kinds of English-language literary translators. 

There are also those like me, ‘Commonwealth literary translators’, so to speak, who aren’t driven by an inquisitiveness about ‘other places’ per se, but whose ancestors were forced – to borrow from a chiShona expression I quite like, ‘Kudya ma-B’ – to eat the English alphabet, and to devour it if they wished to amount to anything in society, making sure not to forget the tastes of the alphabets of the languages the English may have already found them speaking – mostly Sesotho, among the Africans in the Mohokare Valley and the surrounding areas, but also a variety of other languages like siPhuthi, Khoekhoe and Taa. 

Crucially, in nearly every place where the English had left their mark, the chewing would continue even long after the lowering of the Union Jack. And in the mouths of subsequent generations, the English language would gain the familiar flavour of the ‘native’ languages, and vice versa. For the Basotho, ‘change’, for instance, would morph into ‘chencha’ and almost obliterate ‘fetola’ in many instances of everyday speech. Sentences would become a motley of English and Sesotho, and such amusing arrangements as ‘ho etsa make sure’ – in English, ‘to make make sure’ – would abound. Sayings too would be imported, with Mofolo going on to write in his second novel, Pitseng, published in 1910: ‘Empa kamoo ba bang ba bolelang kateng ha ba re, moo thato e leng teng tsela e teng…’ – ‘However, as others have said, where there’s a will, there’s a way…’ Indeed, the transformation would be so thorough that Mofolo would choose to go primarily by the name Thomas instead of Mokopu, just as Sekese would prefer to be known not as Matšela but as Azariele all his life. Across the former British empire, English would become ours. 

The consequence of this linguistic subjugation, amalgamation and appropriation is that a good many Sesotho-language readers – from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds and professions – who encounter my literary translations may not only be able to read their Sesotho-language antecedents but also be in a position to offer valid feedback about my choices. By contrast, the English-language literary translator from Russian, for instance, doesn’t necessarily have to worry about the average Russian high-schooler picking apart their work. I would argue that the same is generally true for other languages from which the bulk of English-language literature in translation comes from: Spanish, French and German. In places where these languages possess the status of national or official language, fluency in the English language continues to be the reserve of a small, usually highly educated, part of the populace (though I’m aware that this is fast changing). I therefore not only feel especially compelled to ‘get it right’ when it comes to my translations, but to also make the experience of the story ‘fresh’. I especially felt this with ‘Sefofu le Seritsa’, which was first published fairly long ago now. I sought to draw new attention to it among Sesotho-language readers and to encourage different readings of the text. And while I prioritise the non-Sesotho-language reader when it comes to my literary translations, the Sesotho-language reader who’s been made to also read English their entire lives isn’t wholly absent from my mind.  

All of that said, in many ways, the decision to rewrite the text as a conventional play and in so doing, honour its roots in folklore and drama – both of which have more elastic relationships with fidelity and, in fact, embrace multiplicity and personality – wasn’t an entirely free choice. When it comes to a piece like ‘Sefofu le Seritsa’ – an old, ‘weird’ work that was first published in an African language in the 1920s – the avenues for publishing such a translation are, unfortunately, severely limited. If I wished to see my retelling of such a work somewhere other than a folder on my OneDrive, it was imperative that I display some resourcefulness and cunning. 

There are only a handful of English-language literary journals that consistently publish translations of work from other languages, and fewer that are actually open to non-European ones. And of these, fewer still will consider ‘older’ work – i.e. work that wasn’t originally published in the last decade or so and whose original authors have now died. By way of example, last year I received a rejection letter from a publication that almost exclusively publishes works in translation thanking me for my submission, a story which was first published and is set in the 1950s, saying, ‘We don’t tend to publish stories by authors who are deceased (as there is so much good work of the living to promote.)’ Curiously, this magazine had very recently published an excerpt of a European-language novel from the late sixties whose author died in the late 2000s. Just a few months ago, another literary magazine whose output consists almost entirely of works in translation turned down that very story for the same reason: ‘We’re focused on contemporary writers.’ This move from these magazines is likely a measure to avoid having their submissions inboxes flooded by English-language editions of Madame Bovary and Idiót and other works that have already been translated into English several times now (although, of course, these magazines' book publishing counterparts and arms gladly continue to publish them because, as Rémy Ngamije impeccably put it in a blog post a few years ago, ‘Dead white men have a gravity that cannot be explained by physics,’ though I’d argue this is just as true for many a dead white woman.) 

Bafflingly, most of these magazines won’t mind publishing a contemporary work set even further back in time. In addition to submitting ‘The Blind Man, The Lame Man and the Antelope’ to Asymptote, I sent it to another publication – one that occasionally publishes dramatic works in translation – which ultimately turned down the piece, probably because the publication ‘places a strong emphasis on publishing work by and about living authors’. And yet, a year or so before I sent my translation to it, this journal published a work by a living author which is set in Ancient Sparta (since the numerous depictions of Ancient Greece in existence are apparently too few). 

Of the publications willing to publish ‘older’ work, an even smaller subset are willing to publish non-Western work they consider especially ‘unconventional’ in form. Earlier this year, an essay by Saudamini Deo decrying this very matter was published in Words Without Borders (yet another publication of literary translations that sadly limits its output to contemporary work). As Deo notes, the majority of publishers of English-language literature, most of whom are based in the UK or North America, tend to not only platform non-Western work that perpetuates particular kinds of narratives – that is, those that conform to pre-existing, and usually stereotypical, views. They also tend to showcase work that adheres to popular and pre-existing forms in English, ‘ignoring experimental and unusual literary works from non-Western writers’. Deo goes on to write: ‘In a milieu that already marginalises experimental non-Western writing, experimental non-Western translation is maybe a step too far.’ 

In short, there were a limited number of outlets where I could reasonably hope to place my translation of Sekese’s text, Asymptote being one of them. Founded with the aim of showcasing non-English-language literature in translation, they don’t seem to much care whether a text was first published in 1923 or 2023, the other dramatic text in the issue in which my piece appears being an English-language translation of an 1895 Russian-language play. There is also the fact that submissions from sub-Saharan African languages and writers are exempt from their submission fee, indicating an eagerness to publish work from the region. 

I even held out hope for an acceptance of ‘The Blind Man, The Lame Man and the Antelope’ despite an earlier rejection I had received from Asymptote for another translation I had submitted: a brief excerpt from Mofolo’s Pitseng. (While I have eventually come to somewhat agree with the editor’s assessment that the section I chose didn’t necessarily stand alone, I would argue that similar supposedly great works of literary fiction, devoid of ‘development’ and ‘tension’, have been published in the English language, and that Pitseng is not too radical a departure in these respects, though that is perhaps a story for another time.) 

Though Asymptote’s editors would probably argue otherwise, with the above rejection still rather fresh in my mind, I thought I’d simply have no luck insisting that they publish a piece that otherwise resembles prose in the journal’s Drama section. I thought that, to borrow from Deo, it’d be a step too far – even though there are a few other Sesotho-language writers besides Sekese who published ‘prose-plays’; writers like Twentyman Mofokeng (mentioned in the Khaketla quote above, with his 1939 text); Mallane Libakeng Maile (some seven years earlier with Ramasoabi le Potso); and, to a lesser extent, Bernard Kokolia Taoana (with Moshoeshoe, published in 1981). I especially thought I’d have no luck with a more faithful-to-form English-language translation, considering these other works had not yet been translated into other languages, including English, which might have otherwise set a precedent and paved the way for an acceptance of this text.  

The unfortunate truth is that translated literary texts are easier to place when they bear resemblance to preceding works from the same language that have met with success and acclaim. (Take, for example, the long and ‘fantastically realist’ shadow cast by the Latin American ‘Boom’ of the 1960s.) An English-language reader unfamiliar with the appropriate literary-historical and cultural frameworks by which to judge the literary merits of a text is liable to dismiss said text as ‘unliterary’ – which, indeed, remains a persistent problem when it comes to how black African literature is received in the West, even after – and maybe even because – sub-Saharan African literature experienced a similar boom as the above Latin American one around the same time.  

Going into rewriting ‘Sefofu le Seritsa’, I was well aware of this, the English-language literary establishment’s long history of discrediting black African literature (and the literatures of black and indigenous peoples elsewhere in the world). I had in mind Henry Newbolt’s foreword to Frederick Hugh Dutton’s 1931 English-language translation of Mofolo’s Chaka. In it, Newbolt writes that ‘there can be no doubt that in the author’s own view, [Chaka] is a serious contribution to history’ – Chaka, a novel with an abundance of blatantly fantastical and ahistorical elements; a novel that contains an admission from its narrator that aspects of the real-life Shaka’s biography have been deliberately embellished and transformed, presumably for some literary purpose. 

I knew these views were still prevalent and continue to be upheld not just by white critics and readers. (Take Saul Bellow’s indignant response to being pulled up for a remark he made in an interview about the Papuans having no Proust, nor the Zulus a Tolstoy.) I was aware of the disappointing, though not entirely surprising, reality that they are espoused even by ostensibly progressive and learned Western but non-white writers and critics with familial ties to the Global South, by such figures as Elif Batuman. In her viral 2010 London Review of Books takedown of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, the American-Turkish writer stated that while she recognised that ‘new fiction from a developing nation with no literary tradition’ possesses some ‘anthropological’ appeal, she ‘probably wouldn’t read it for fun’ – as though it’s not actually the case, as I’ve shown and will continue to show, that new work coming from shitholes developing nations like Lesotho, which apparently ‘no one has ever heard of before’, may actually be rooted in literary traditions going back a century or more; as though ‘developing nations with no literary traditions’ could still be said to still exist in the year 2010 CE.2 

There are those who will want to argue that the Hegelian attitudes towards black African and African-descent literature that Batuman’s statement exemplifies have vanished in our post-Black Panther utopia where black African stories are appreciated for their aesthetic and entertainment value. However, I’d like to point out that as recently as 2021, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, arguably the most widely read and prominent living black African writer of the last decade or so, once more lamented this profoundly troubling and non-literary engagement that Westerners have with creative writing from the continent, more than a decade and a half after doing so in the pages of Transition and again on the TEDGlobal stage. Upon being asked at the Book World Prague festival that year about which canon she saw her work as being part of – the American canon, because she lives in and writes about the States, the African canon, the Nigerian canon, or simply the canon of literature in English – the Nigerian-born writer replied, ‘Literature written in English.’  

Adichie then explained that while she didn’t deny that her work was part of the African and Nigerian canons, she found these labels to be unliterary and problematic. ‘So, in some ways, it’s almost like being in a glorified ghetto, where “African literature” is a thing that you read when you want to feel that you’re a good person who cares about the poor people of the world, but literature from Western Europe and America’ – as well as Russia, Canada, Australasia, East Asia and select parts of South America, of course – ‘is what you read when you just want to read literature.’ Adichie proceeded to share the following sigh-inducing anecdote: 

So, even apart from worries about where to place a translation of Sekese’s ‘Sefofu le Seritsa’, there was another concern in my mind as well: the impulse of even well-meaning readers to downplay the text’s literary elements and focus, rather, on its foreignness, or even its ‘anthropological’ appeal. I didn’t want to muddle through an unusual presentation of its depiction of disability, among others, which refreshingly isn’t intended to draw or inspire excessive pity from an able-bodied audience, unlike the many that litter the books and media from the supposedly ‘socially advanced’ minds of Westerners. Among others, I wished for readers to read it more clearly as a parable of the dynamic that typical exists between the non-English-language author and their translator; to see how, in spite of the fact that the fruit of this relationship, the target text, would not exist without both parties, one party – usually the translator but sometimes the non-English-language author – invariably ends up getting the short end of the stick, as happens with The Blind Man. This is regardless of the fact that, as is the case with The Blind Man and The Lame Man’s efforts, trying to parse out each party’s contributions to a target text is often a pointless exercise, particularly when one does not read the source language.3 This truth is underscored by the text’s ambiguous ending, which I similarly did not want to bury under an unfamiliar form. 

Towards the end of ‘Sefofu le Seritsa’, The Blind Man’s father points out that neither his son nor The Lame Man would have managed the trip to the antelope’s carcass and back safely on their own. Just as The Blind Man’s otherwise functioning feet would have only taken him so far before he stumbled, so would the Lame Man’s damaged feet have failed him along the way. Nevertheless, The Blind Man’s Father concludes that life is, on the whole, much harder for his son than it is for The Lame Man. ‘Ho lōna moo, ea sa tsebeng hore lifofu lia jeloa ke mang?’ he asks the other men present at the court. Who among you does not know that the blind among us can never have their meals in peace, that someone will always secretly help themselves knowing they won’t be able to do anything about it because they can’t see them? 

Given how much translation has historically been undervalued and translators maligned in the Anglophone world, I understand that many other English-language literary translators who are not black, who were not born and raised or reside in any of Britain’s less well-off former colonies, and who aren’t keen on translating older works from sub-Saharan African-languages will know how demoralising, hard and thankless literary translation generally is, especially now in the age of AI. However, as with the blind that populate the world of Sekese’s story, I feel that there are harrowing experiences I have had, and will continue to unfortunately have, that those from other backgrounds and with other occupations and interests may never have to, such as one I might write about one day with the University of Georgia Press that I will sum up for now as having been characterised by carelessness at best and contempt at worst.4 

As of the writing of this piece, there isn’t, as far as I’m aware, any other literary translator from my language and from my country in particular striving to break through to the spaces I have and would like to continue to, which has only exacerbated this. There’s practically no one I can call up and say, ‘Lekhooa ke lena joale le se le mpuela mehlolo’, no one to make my presence less odd and my experiences less isolating. And while I have a very supportive network of literary translators from a range of ethnic and geographic backgrounds who have kept me going, it’s just not the same. In this regard, I think it is therefore more accurate to say that I feel not so much like The Blind Man but The Lone Man. 

To make things worse, there isn’t anyone I can look to for guidance and strength from the past either. In the one hundred and sixty or so years that Basotho have been writing, very few of us have made a concerted effort to carry our work beyond Southern Africa, even as we have gladly imported the works of Shakespeare and Booker T. Washington, to name a few foreign writers. In other words, there hasn’t really been a figure like me before, that is, someone seeking to translate Sesotho-language literature for a primarily general and global readership. And I state this not to boast, but simply as a fact. Dutton, who, as I mentioned, produced the first English-language rendition of Mofolo’s Chaka – which also happens to be the first English-language rendition of a Sesotho-language novel – was a white European colonial officer. Moreover, based on the choices he made with text, Dutton’s motivations for translating Mofolo were more anthropological than ‘literary’; Dutton seemed keener on showing readers back in his native England that the Natives could write, and not that the Natives could write just as well as our own, as Alain Ricard has so convincingly argued. Daniel Kunene, who revised Dutton’s translation fifty years later, and produced the first English-language translation of Pitseng thirty-two years after that, looked like me. But he was also an academic, and his literary translations can more accurately be seen – and mostly read, unfortunately – as extensions of his research rather than of his creative practice.5 Fellow South African-born professor Johannes Lenake, who translated Khaketla’s 1960 novel, Mosali a nkhola, and Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng’s 1952 play, Senkatana, seems, similarly, to have had the (Southern African) academy in mind as his primary audience, having published the books through Oxford University Press Southern Africa. 

Disappointingly, none of these three individuals managed to get more than two full-length literary translations published in their lifetimes, even though they could have published more, especially considering the overwhelming volume of work they could have obtained permission to translate (or, in the case of Dutton, could have translated regardless) and that entered the public domain during their long lifetimes. One would have even expected them, and many other Sesotho-language writers and scholars before me, for that matter, to have long consecrated Sekese’s creative works in English, given their having definitely entered the public domain in the US, the world’s largest English-speaking territory, in 1996. One would have expected my translation of ‘Sefofu le Seritsa’ to be the fifth translation at the very least, considering that, by the time I was born, more than seventy years had passed since the first appearance of Bukana ea tšōmo tsa Pitso ea Linonyana le Tseko ea Sefofu le Seritsa. 

And yet, even as I write this, my own impact may wind up being more dismal than that of the men who came before me. 

‘The Blind Man, The Lame Man and the Antelope’ is the first of my translated pieces to make it out into the wider world. Earlier this year, I received an honourable mention for the inaugural Irena C. Katz Translation Prize for ‘Ruth’, my English-language rendition of Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng’s 1954 Sesotho-language story ‘Ruthe’, about an Afrikaner farmer family and the black Basotho family that comes to work for them, focusing on the matriarchs of these two families. The piece, which has, thankfully but sadly acquired some relevance for readers around the world, thanks to the Trump administration’s comically bewildering – not to mention, insulting – redefinition of the term ‘genocide’, is scheduled to appear soon in Mouse Magazine, which hosts the prize. Judging by this, it could be argued that I’m making progress, that I have a reason to hope and keep going. 

However, faced with the deluge of grey ‘Declined’ banners on my Submittable submissions page as well as the numerous unanswered months-old follow-up emails to editors who were once eager to hear about the ‘legendary work’ I wish to translate, editors who were at one time ‘very glad to be in touch with [me]’; thinking back on my painful experience with UGA Press and a disheartening meeting I had with a rightsholder recently, I’m a little doubtful there will be more meaningful victories ahead. I’m a little sceptical that the literary gatekeeping powers that be will make it possible for more of my retellings of Mofokeng’s sublime tales – of beloved fruit-and-vegetable hawkers and mountain-dwelling recluses, among others – to reach English-language readers. I worry that my other efforts with Ntšeliseng ’Masechele Khaketla’s ever-so-slightly irreverent stories of a courageous WWII veteran and his spiteful and homicidal housekeeper, who is just one among a fascinating cast of secondary characters, will continue to yield comments about what a pleasure they were to read but, alas, if only their original author were still alive. I am afraid that for many more years, the modern Sesotho short story will largely be regarded as having been pioneered not by C.R. Moikangoa, but will instead be regarded as the recent invention of writers like Litšoanelo Yvonne Nei and Moso Sematlane; that in addition to Mofokeng and Khaketla, J.M. Mohapeloa and Sekake Moeletsi and Mzamane Nhlapo and many other writers who contributed to the development of the Sesotho story will continue to be unsung. 

And yet, I don’t want to give up either. I don’t want to resign myself to the very real possibility that the sole ‘mainstream’ fictional treatment of Mohlomi, the eighteenth-century Mosotho – or Mokoena, to be more precise – healer and ruler will be the flat and culturally inaccurate treatment of Mike Mignola – Mignola, who stated in an interview ahead of the 2002 release of the Hellboy comic in which Mohlomi briefly appears that he ‘has always just liked Africa’ but thinks of it solely in terms of its wildlife, ‘the lions and elephants’, and has ‘no interest in the politics of the country’; Mignola, who admitted he ‘obviously didn’t do enough research’ beforehand because African folklore, while ‘amazing’, ‘[is not] really [his] cup of tea as far as the kind of stories [he] does’. I want to have faith that the considerably more fleshed out Mohlomi of Samson Mbizo Guma’s 1960 novel, Morena Mohlomi, mor’a Monyane, will not be deemed unnecessary to publish in English translation because ‘there is so much good work of the living to promote’, but that it will instead be regarded as a vital literary and cultural contribution. I don’t want to despair at the thought of our stories continuing to be told and retold by the Mignolas of the world when there are among us many who are very capable of doing this work. 

I want to stick it out, as another colleague told me to a while ago – I truly do. Like these writers, who wrote in spite of poor health, misogyny, a brazenly exploitative publishing ecosystem, the constant threat of government censorship, virulent state-sanctioned racism, and, importantly, the near absence of forerunners who looked like them. I don’t want to throw in the towel like Mofolo tragically ended up doing. Far from it. 

I want to stick it out – I truly do. But I am just so spent.