In April 2012, during a brief moment in which I could access the Web while on a field trip to the Upper Karoo, I received out of the blue an email from Michael Wessels offering me a postdoctoral fellowship at UKZN and urging me to give him a quick answer. This was serendipitous, as my funding at the University of Cape Town had almost run out and my wife and I were beginning to plan our return to Spain in the next few months. Thanks to Michael's offer I was able to prolong my research until 2014. This act of generosity and trust came from a scholar whose work I had read and admired but whom I could not say I knew personally. I had met him briefly in August 2011, when both of us participated in the "Courage of ||kabbo" conference at UCT in the organization of which I was involved. By then, however, I had already read with trepidation his groundbreaking study, Bushman Letters (2010a), arguably one of the three or four most important books ever published about the Bleek and Lloyd Collection of |xam narrative and ethnography. As a matter of fact, on learning of its imminent publication while still in Spain, I had obtained the book as soon as it was out. I had, however, some misgivings about this new monograph that purported to offer a "close reading" of part of the |xam corpus with the aid of the theories of Derrida, Spivak and Bourdieu, who at first sight seemed to me unlikely choices on which to base the analysis of the oral literature of a culture of hunter-gatherers. I feared the "hermeneutics of suspicion" at its worst but found quite a different thing. Even if I often find myself disagreeing with what Michael has to say about the stories, it is always a productive disagreement, because his comments on the narratives invariably offer many new insights and routes for further study. Furthermore, a substantial part of the book is devoted to a critique of what previous researchers had written, thereby offering a pioneering and valuable analysis of the "academic industry" that over the years has grown around the Bleek-Lloyd Collection. In his speech during the launch in Cape Town of Bushman Letters, Michael described how, when he met with Liz Gunner at the University of KwaZulu-Natal to discuss with her "a proposal for a doctoral research project on Credo Mutwa and the New Age", Gunner suggested instead that he write about the |xam corpus, which had barely been touched by literary scholars. Michael followed the advice and eventually spent a long time in Cape Town, where he found his thorough reading of the notebooks, he tells us, to be "a total and overwhelming experience" that left him "with a completely different and not always coherent perspective on this world" (Wessels 2010b, 2).