In seeking to understand better the traditions and culture of the Khoisan people, so insistently recalled in the notebooks of David Mungo Booi, I learnt a great deal from Alan Barnard’s elegant study: Hunters and Herders of Southern Africa, Cambridge 1992.
I am grateful to Cambridge University Press for permission to reproduce Alan Barnard’s explanation of the five basic click sounds found in Khoisan languages (see page 282).
An account of my discovery of the English notebooks of David Mungo Booi first appeared in the Daily Telegraph in October 1994.
The fragment of verse on page 166, translated from the original /Xam by Stephen Watson, is reproduced with the permission of the author.