A co‐authored ‘curio’ from the ‘dark continent’: A. S. Mopeli‐Paulus and Peter Lanham's blanket boy's Moon

Abstract

The Mosotho writer A. S. Mopeli‐Paulus is perhaps best known for Blanket Boy's Moon, a novel co‐authored with Peter Lanham in 1953. To try to discern where one writer's pen stops and the other's starts is an impossible task that leads to a scholarly dead‐end. This article focusses instead on the curiosity of this particular co‐authorship, pursuing issues of appropriation within this artistic partnership to explore how and why this text was produced, and to examine the numerous and differing myths that swirl around its making.