Recessional for Grace

There is a saying in Zulu: ‘If you were in my flesh, I could tear you out, But you are in my blood, which cannot be divided.’ When a post-graduate student of African languages, looking for an angle for her doctoral thesis, comes across an obscure and incomplete lexicon of metaphorical names for indigenous Sanga-Nguni cattle by long-dead academic. CJ Godfrey, she knows, instinctively, that she has found her subject. She is given access to his personal papers, his catalogue of index cards and his filed notes, recorded in a remote and desolate valley in South Africa in 1946. Among his many photographs is a small print of a delicately-patterned cow. In finding it, she discovers – unwittingly – a cipher to his world.

ISBN-13: 9780143024545
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