Abstract
This paper argues that we may read the images from the Lucy Lloyd archive of ancient Khoe and San symbols, drawings and pictograms in a special way that offers an intellectual seriousness to these collaborative picture-word creations that attempted to hold certain faunal and floral knowledge and descriptions from the South African landscape on the transcriber’s page. By foregrounding moments of textual innovation as is evident in the Lloyd archive, I make a case for what that I term ‘typographic reification’. This ‘reification’ is the fulcrum of the ancient drive of the indigenous people of Southern Africa (the Khoe and the San) to offer an excess beyond the translation of their world into a Roman alphabet (the given form) by linguists that came with this aim in mind. Contemporary advances in New Media technology allow this very element of typographic reification (observed in textual and graphic elements recorded on pages of sketchbooks and notebooks from the Lloyd archive) to be offered anew to an international public through the digital typefaces of the South African designer Jan Erasmus who similarly draws his natural environment into the very fabric of his creations. The parallels visible between the innovative methods of transcription and picture-word creations of Lloyd and her Khoe and San collaborators on the one hand, and the digital creation of Erasmus on the other, serve to amplify a conceptual agility that must be celebrated in the South African social imagination as an intellectual bridge between different spaces and times that is a contribution to African philology and a critical history of the text.
Highlights
As I have suggested, we may read the images from the Lloyd archive in a special way that sets it in a dynamic position, one that offers a seriousness to the picture-word creations that operate as a moment of unity, serving as a mode of reification that attempted to hold certain faunal and floral knowledge and descriptions from the South African landscape on the transcriber’s page
Reification, as identified in the Lloyd archive, brings the world of the Khoe and the San to our door. These creations offer the conditions for a dynamic concept: they invite a difficulty that is a potential “virtue” for the scholar in the sense that they ask that we see, within them, the genesis of a textual contribution to the intellectual history of Southern Africa
Despite the epistemic problems that arise in the face of engaging a 19th-century archive that has no mother tongue readers left, the reading of reification argued for in the Lloyd archive is fully exploited in the modern digital typeface, Thornface, developed by Jan Erasmus more than a century later
Summary
Stanley Morison, the recognized type designer of his age insists, as per the epigraph, that the modern letter must be nothing more than an envoy of that which dare not speak its name: a self-assured imperial system that accommodates no imagining beyond the given form of the Roman letter. This paper offers dynamic categorical contributions to the imbricated fields of philology and typography by foregrounding a moment of textual innovation from the past so as to make a case for an intellectual commitment to a method of practice we may observe in the present that I term ‘typographic reification’ This ‘reification’ is the fulcrum of the ancient drive of the indigenous people of Southern Africa (the Khoe and the San) to offer an excess beyond the translation of their world into a Roman alphabet (the given form) by linguists that came with this aim in mind. I am focusing on the approaches and artefacts of one designer so as to emphasize only the parallels between this designer and the archival material, the implications are both timely and emancipatory for humanities scholarship and production: Western letters are still open to intellectual scrutiny in relation to their change over time, and how they may yet proceed to move in the world even as they assure us of past intellectual moments that assist in their becoming
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