Editors’ Notes

Abstract

The tragic death of Michael Wessels, former Associate Professor of English and Head of Department at the University of the Western Cape, and Regional Chair of the Southern African Association for Commonwealth Literature and Languages (SAACLALS), in April 2018, robbed the research and academic community of a robust researcher, writer and affable giant of a human being. As the chair of the SAACLALS committee, Michael, together with Professor Shaun Viljoen and other colleagues, organised the successful 2016 Association for Commonwealth Literature and Languages Triennial Conference, held at Stellenbosch University. Michael also played a significant role in establishing networks between the South African academy and the global world, as noted in the South Africa–Canada research project on indigenous literatures and his participation in SAACLALS activities. It is thus befitting that this issue of Current Writing, the official journal of SAACLALS, should carry the publications that follow in his honour. Various aspects pertaining to the personal, academic research, and academic citizenship related to Michael’s worldview inform this Special Issue. His love for travelling, hiking and nature; the inspiration he derived from indigenous arts and various forms of spirituality; interest in and teaching of various literatures, and his growing literary creativity at the time of his death constitute some of the thematic focuses treated in the articles published in this volume. Michael Chapman’s article, drawing on interactions with Michael Wessels over the mountain rock art at Rosetta Stone on the Drakensberg Mountains, examines the significance of Michael’s book on Bushman Letters in the constitution of “Bushman Studies”. The article further examines Xam narratives documented in the Bleek and Lloyd archive and argues that these narratives and their people, the San and Khoi, play a significant role in South African literary cultural studies. Kobus Moolman’s article focuses on the creative side of Michael Wessels as a poet. Using Wordsworth’s “Prelude”, Moolman traces Michael’s creative journey, his yearning to be a poet and his poems that were published during his time and posthumously. The poem “Spots of Time” is critically linked into a framework of study that reflects the poem’s aesthetic and thematic beauty and documentation of Michael’s life experiences as a young man, traveller and ultimately the successful fulfilment of his longing to be a published poet. Itunu Ayodeji Bodunrin’s article focuses on contemporary San cultural productions. The article considers the history of and representations of the San from the precolonial to the postapartheid era and available scholarship on San literature and culture, by critics such as Michael Wessels, to establish the position of marginality occupied by the Xun and Khwe San youth from Platfontein, in Kimberley. The article further examines the way the San youth use hip hop music to sing about their experiences and thus argues that the Xun and Khwe San youth’s popular cultural productions, such as hip-hop, represent their contemporaneity and