ABSTRACT
The things we call data often come to us, rather than us going out to find them. And they come to us because of what we can call ‘structured accidents’: coincidences that are influenced by one’s particular position. In the winter of 1994, a Belgian lady whom I shall call Mrs Helena Arens sent a handwritten text to my friend Marcel Van Spaandonck, with a request to translate it into Dutch. Van Spaandonck, who had just retired as Professor of Swahili at Ghent University, passed it on to me. The text was written partly in Shaba Swahili, partly in French. It was an autobiographical account written by a Congolese man whom I shall call Julien and sent to the Belgian lady as a form of symbolic repayment. The Belgian lady was Julien’s former employer: Julien had been her houseboy while she and her husband lived in the Congo in the late 1960s and early 1970s. After her departure, and systematically since 1973, she had sent him money and goods to support him and his family. When he raised the issue of repayment, Mrs Arens suggested that instead of the rather hopeless prospect of raising cash, Julien should write the story of his life in what the lady believed to be his mother tongue, Swahili. I translated the text for the lady, and afterwards published (with Mrs Arens’ permission) an edited and annotated version (Blommaert 1996).1 Between 1994 and 1997 I had frequent contacts with Mr and Mrs Arens. I visited the couple, interviewed them, and saw part of the voluminous correspondence Julien had maintained with them.
