ABSTRACT
One important factor that made the comparison of a Khasi with a Khoekhoe folktale seem feasible is the fact that each of the tales is a written recording emanating from what Alan Barnard has finely termed a 'memory culture'. One noticeable contrast between the Khasi and Khoekhoe cultures that is evident from the two chosen stories is between the material riches and the relative elaboration of the former and the material poverty and relative simplicity of the latter. Reading folktales should never be an exercise either in romanticism or condescension. Painful histories of dispossession and profound cultural ironies are involved in connecting and eventually interconnecting First People's languages and stories by means of multiple acts of anthropological study, political colonization and cultural-linguistic translation. According to Elphick and others, the Khoekhoe may have originated as one of the many San groups, all speaking different and mostly mutually unintelligible click languages.
