Re-animating the works of Thomas Mofolo by engaging with the original Sesotho texts

Abstract

A project around translation was established in 2014 at the University of the Western Cape's Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR) to engage with literary texts written in indigenous South African languages. The project, entitled Re-animating and re-imagining African futures: a project for translating African language texts, ethical discourses and critical aesthetics in South Africa, focuses specifically on texts in their original languages in order to introduce new debates around translation, translating from and between indigenous languages, and interpretation and its effect on current new and relevant knowledge creation. Through sustained analysis, older texts (whether translated from the original or not) forged in earlier moments of historical engagement with intruding structures and ideological formations such as colonialism and apartheid, could open up new ideas and incubate an informed debate around current topics such as decolonisation, the Africanisation of the curriculum and institutions, and so forth. Homi Bhabha uses the words of Salman Rushdie to underline the fact that new ways of thinking can begin to take place when the self is decentred. For this, Bhabha (227) foregrounds the interstitial, the in-between, which will “create the conditions through which comes into the The place where he sees this happening most acutely is during translation. The moment one has a word in the source text for which one has no clear equivalent in the target text, then one should recognise newness: this is how newness enters the world. Why then the choice of Mofolo's work? Antjie Krog became aware that in the list of the top hundred books written by Africans, a smaller list of twelve exceptional books was compiled. The only text by a Southern African writer on that list was not one by this area's Nobel Prize winners, but Thomas Mofolo's Chaka.