In 2007 Struik published an illustrated children's book by Rafaella Delle Donne (2007) called San Tales from Africa. In Helen Yardley's review of it (Mail & Guardian, 6 April 2007) she declared, “A number of children's books based on African myth and legend have been published, but this is the first that focuses solely on those originating from the San people.” This emphatic statement is wrong. There have, in fact, been other books of San tales published for children. At least Yardley acknowledges the existence of “a number of children's books based on African myth and legend”, although “a number” does not indicate the extraordinary scale of their production.

The authors of English and Afrikaans versions of San lore, and commentators on their books, often do not acknowledge the existence of earlier published versions. This silence arises from both ignorance of what else has been published and a particular view of the nature of authorship and intellectual property rights. In this chapter I consider acknowledgements, silences and debts in English-language children's books that draw on San material.

Yardley does point to one of the reasons for her ignorance about San stories for children, which she shares with a great many other people, including literature experts. In the above-mentioned review she remarks, “The author intended it as a welcome relief from the Eurocentric fairy tales available to our children, and that it is.” Eurocentric fairy tales are indeed available to South African children, and have been for at least two centuries. While South African bookshops pack their shelves with European books, local children's books will remain largely unknown to the general public.

Delle Donne herself is scrupulous in acknowledging her sources, though she is careless in other respects. Her stories are extensively rewritten versions of ones she has taken from previous books. She names the sources in subtitles at the top of each story, but they are not listed or mentioned anywhere else in the book. For example, “The jackal visits the lion's wife” (Delle Donne 2007, 32) is subtitled “A story based on the version that appears in Bushman Stories, E.W. Thomas (1950). Oxford University Press: Cape Town, London, New York”. This is a strangely prominent place for an academic acknowledgement, as the child reading the book is not likely to be interested in or to understand what the reference is about.