When a postgraduate student of african languages, looking for a topic for her doctoral thesis, happens upon an obscure and incomplete lexicon of metaphorical names for indigenous sanga-nguni cattle by a long-dead academi...When a postgraduate student of african languages, looking for a topic for her doctoral thesis, happens upon an obscure and incomplete lexicon of metaphorical names for indigenous sanga-nguni cattle by a long-dead academic, she knows, instinctively, that she has found her subject.