ABSTRACT

For the most part, the narratives recounted by the San informant Qing to the magistrate, Joseph Orpen, who had employed him as a guide and scout in the Maloti mountains during the Langalibalele rebellion of 1873, have been discussed in terms of rock art. This is unsurprising since Qing’s narratives were told, at least in part, in response to Orpen’s questions about the rock art they saw on their journey through the Malotis. This focus has meant, though, that the discussion has generally been conducted with a careful consideration of only selected passages from Orpen’s (1874) published version of Qing’s narratives. Folklorists, linguists, archaeologists and historians are now turning to the whole text in ways that promise to produce more insight into both the text itself and the context in which it was produced. The aim of the present article is to contribute to the embryonic project of reading Qing’s materials in new ways. In the course of offering a close reading of a single story it seeks to show that the stories possess a value as literature, quite apart from the information about rock art or ethnography that they also offer, and that the literary technique of close reading can bring an invaluable dimension to the study of the stories.