In June and July, 2006, in the remote Kalahari administrative town of Tsumkwe in northern Namibia, six young Ju/’hoan San trainees, trained in computer literacy and transcription of their only-recently-written language, were hard at work on donated laptops. With anthropologist Megan Biesele, they were transcribing and translating from digital soundfiles hundreds of hours of folktales, healing narratives, and other materials Megan had recorded as long ago as 1970. At one point in a detailed phenomenological description of the mechanisms of traveling on the “threads of the sky” to God’s village, which Ju/’hoan healers do in an altered state of consciousness, a trainee sighed, “If only /Kunta Boo (the raconteur on the old soundfile) were here to help explain all this to us so we could get it written down right!” At that moment, Biesele looked towards the doorway of the community library where she was working with her trainees. There stood old /Kunta himself, having trekked in from his far-off camp when he heard they were in town. It was the first time Biesele had seen him in years. Without further ado, he and his wife sat down by the computers in the midst of the young people and didn’t get up for two solid weeks except for breaks or to go to bed at night. They went through the soundfiles with the trainees word for word. Excitement erupted around this collaborative process which, along with transcriptions, began to generate many esoteric vocabulary words for the trainees to use in updating their dictionary. The result was over 200 pages of authoritative, annotated, richly nuanced, transcribed and translated Ju/’hoan material that answers many questions outsiders have had about the people’s famous, but mysterious, healing dance. When /Kunta and his wife left to go back to their village, one of the trainees was moved to read a speech he had written, which contained the words “We young people could never have done this work correctly without you, our elders.”

This 2006 field experience describes the program’s innovative workshop format for processing authoritative texts. It also signals the continuation of a community-based, contextualized, and critical language project that has been building for several decades and is still operating today in 2016. This project is called the Ju|’hoan Transcription Group (JTG) and it has provided the basis for the extensive archive of Ju|’hoan soundfiles and metadata provided to the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) in the course of two grants to Megan Biesele by the Endangered Languages Documentation Project (ELDP), a Field Trip Grant and a Major Documentation Project Grant.

The Ju|’hoan Transcription Group was established in 2002 as an outgrowth of the Nyae Nyae Village Schools Project (VSP) in Namibia, a mother-tongue school project co-founded by Megan Biesele, the late linguist Patrick Dickens, and educators Melissa Heckler and Lesley Beake in 1990. The VSP is a primary-grade, mother-tongue literacy undertaking, rare in that it is not only a community-based project but has professional linguistic credentials. Still ongoing today, the VSP made possible the formation of the Ju|’hoan Transcription Group (JTG) by providing training in the use of a professional orthography for Ju|’hoan, a previously unwritten language. Local JTG members received computer literacy and transcription training with ELAN software. They participated in the creation of national literacy education curriculum in Namibia as well as Ju|’hoan enrichment materials, drawn from their own traditions, for English-medium schools in the Ju|’hoan speaking area. The JTG is a community-based language documentation project that is being used as an example by other San and Khoe language groups in southern Africa. JTG transcribers process, publish, and archive verbal materials ranging from folklore and oral history to political meetings and local creative writing. A growing international reputation has brought them recent work with linguists, anthropologists, and filmmakers from around the world. The Ju|’hoan Transcription Group provides not only their own community but also scholars with nuanced, contextualized, fine-quality cultural materials for research.