An e-mail circulating among academics at the University of Cape Town (UCT) has fuelled the controversy around poet Antjie Krog by decribing what it calls Krog’s “close borrowing” from Wits University writer and academic Isabel Hofmeyr.
UCT English department head Stephen Watson recently set the cat among the pigeons by claiming, in an article in New Contrast, that Krog had failed to acknowledge material lifted from a range of writers, including English poet Ted Hughes.
Krog has denied the claim, while two of her publishers, Random House and Kwela Books, are investigating a possible defamation suit against Watson.
The new allegation centres on a passage in Krog’s account of South Africa’s truth commission process, Country of My Skull. In this, she reports on a discussion she had with “my friend Professor Kondlo, the Xhosa intellectual from Grahamstown”.
Kondlo is quoted as saying: “Unlike the stories of the men where boundaries are set, these stories undermine boundaries: men turn into women and vice versa, animals become people, women fall in love with animals, people eat each other, dreams and hallucinations are played out.”
Country of My Skull was published in 2002. In We Spend our Years as a Story that is Told, published 11 years earlier, Hofmeyr writes that stories told by women in the African oral tradition can be understood as “subversive and unsettling accounts in which all known social categories and boundaries are upset. Men become women; animals become human; women fall in love with animals; people eat one another. The stories are also characterised by hallucination, vision and illusion …”
Academic sources pointed out that the sequence of the information given in the two extracts is identical, that one of the phrases is identical, that a number of other phrases are virtually identical, and that the sense of the two excerpts is identical.
Kondlo is not reported as having indicated that his views are drawn from any recent reading of Hofmeyr’s book, as indeed he is not obliged to do. But an academic commentator said it was hard to believe that a person would recall almost verbatim a passage from a book he had read, without — in the kind of free-flowing discussion reported by Krog — indicating where he had first encountered so unusual an opinion.
Stephen Johnson, the managing director of Random House, the publisher of Country of My Skull, would not comment.
Random House spokesperson Eve Gray said Krog was not available for comment. The Mail & Guardian could not contact Hofmeyr, who is said to be in London.