the courage of ||kabbo - conference abstracts

8/6/2019 The courage of ||kabbo - conference abstracts

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PAPER ABSTRACTS

Click on name to go to abstract

Adrien Delmas, University of Cape Town

G. McCall Theal and the writing of an introduction to Bleek and Lloyd

Andrew Lamprecht , Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape TownWilhelm Bleek’s Reynard the Fox in South Africa and its methodological basis: a precursor to the

Specimens

Anne Solomon,

‘People who are different’: alterity and the |xam texts

Benjamin Smith, Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand

The Porcupine’s father: |xam stories and non-San rock art

Carolyn Hamilton, University of Cape Town

The life of the archive

Chris Low, African studies, University of Oxford

Locating |xam beliefs and practices in a contemporary KhoeSan context

David Lewis-Williams, Rock Art Research Institute, University of the WitwatersrandThe Impact of the Bleek & Lloyd Collection on Southern African Rock Art Research

David Morris, McGregor Museum, Kimberley

The place of oral literature and ethnography in the re-membering of a Northern Cape rock art site

Florian Lionnet , University of California, Berkeley

Lucy Lloyd’s !xun notebooks: towards an edition and linguistic analysis

Hedley Twidle, University of Cape Town

From The Origin of Language to a language of origin: a prologue to the Grey Collection



PAPER ABSTRACTS

Helize van Vuuren, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University

“Does the //gárraken lower open?”: postcolonial approaches to the extinct |xam culture

Hermann Wittenberg, University of the Western Cape

On narrative, culture and colonial censorship: the story of ||kabbo and “Reynard the Fox”

Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the WitwatersrandArchives in Heaven

Janette Deacon, Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand

Jeremy Hollmann, KwaZulu-Natal Museum

|kaggen’s code: paintings of moths in southern Africa hunter-gatherer rock art

Jill Weintroub,

The Rock Art and Linguistic Researches of Dorothea Bleek

José de Prada Samper, University of Cape Town

The pictures of the |xam people are in their bodies’: presentiments, landscape and rock art in

||kabbo’s country

Marlene Winberg, University of Cape TownSilent children of the archive: reading Lucy Lloyd and the !kun boys’ visual archive

(1879-1881)

Mary Elizabeth Lange, University of KwaZulu-Natal

Storytelling and engravings, past and present: Biesje Poort, Northern Cape

Mathias Guenther, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada

Dreams and Stories

Megan Biesele, University of Texas, Austin

||kabbo’s Legacy: San Heritage Conservation and Language Development Today

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PAPER ABSTRACTS

Menán du Plessis, University of Cape Town

One hundred years of the Specimens - a hundred years of academic neglect.

Michael Wessels

The irst |xam man brings home a young lion: the story of a narrative

Nigel Crawhall

Understanding the !Ui-Taa language family’s sociolinguistic history in South Africa:

putting the |xam informants in context

Nigel Penn, University of Cape Town

Child captives, ‘Bushman Labour’ and the destruction of the Cape San

Robert Thornton, University of the WitwatersrandBleek, ||kabbo, and the debate about the origin of language

Robyn Loughnane and Tom Güldemann, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

The Bleek and Lloyd Collection: ||kabbo’s linguistic legacy

Sam Challis, Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand

Bushman herders of the Drakensberg: mixed raider-pastoralists in the 19th century.

Siyakha Mguni, Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand

The meerkats and ||kaggen’s arrows of fury: metaphors of sociality and antagonism in the southern

San mythology and paintings

Sven Ouzman, Pre-colonial archaeology, Iziko South African Museum

The South African Museum as San Archive and as Artefact

Tanya Barben, University of Cape Town

Gathering wisdom: re-assembling Wilhelm Bleek’s library

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PAPER ABSTRACTS

Adrien Delmas, University of Cape Town

G. McCall Theal and the writing of an introduction to Bleek and Lloyd

Starting from the preface written by G. McCall Theal to Specimens of Bushman Folklore, this

paper deals with the intent, at the turn of the 20th century, to gather the different historicities and

chronologies of archeology, ethnography, linguistics, history etc into a coherent framework. Its

concern is to propose a wider view of the different connections between these temporalities and the

controversies they have provoked, not only in the case of Theal and a South African national history,but also before it (as far as from the 16th century or even earlier), and around him, i.e. in other parts of

the world, especially the Americas.

Andrew Lamprecht, Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town

Wilhelm Bleek’s Reynard the Fox in South Africa and its methodological basis: a precursor to the

Specimens

I examine Wilhelm Bleek’s folkloric research with particular reference to his work Reynard the Foxin South Africa, within the context of his broader philological research. In many ways this work can

be seen as a forerunner or model for the much larger and more ambitious Specimens of Bushman

Folklore undertaken by Lucy Lloyd and published under his and her name in 1911. I look at how Bleek

began his researches into Zulu folklore during his earliest period in South Africa and how his interest

in Namaqua and other indigenous folklore was inluenced by philological conventions developed in

Europe, especially those of the Grimm brothers.

I examine Bleek’s methodology, particularly in visual and bibliographical terms, as well as

attempting to locate his practice in a broader terrain of European scholarship. This basis was

ampliied and extended by Lucy Lloyd in compiling the inal version of Specimens, long after his death.

Anne Solomon

‘People who are different’: alterity and the |xam texts

Interest in the /Xam and their testimonies turns both on their alterity and the way in which they

allegedly speak of and to a shared humanity. It has been argued that research ‘aimed at vindicating

and safeguarding the primitive or aboriginal Other from West-centered representational violence’

unavoidably reproduces it, while ‘celebration of the indigenous Others’ radical alterity only serves

to redeem the modern Western self’. The corollary is that the alterity (or not) of the /Xam in current

scholarship demands ongoing, relexive critique. But what is that alterity? Enthusiasm for the /Xamaside, our understanding of ‘/Xam-ness’ still depends on limited exegesis of the /Xam testimonies

themselves; this is a key issue in need of attention.



PAPER ABSTRACTS

Benjamin Smith, Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand

The Porcupine’s father: |xam stories and non-San rock art

In the |xam kukummi, Porcupine is the adopted daughter of Mantis and Dassie. She and her adopted

parents are the subjects of many |xam kukummi. This paper concerns a lesser discussed character in

the family, the person said to be Porcupine’s biological father: ||khwai-hem. I consider three stories

told by ||kabbo and |han≠kass’o concerning ||khwai-hem and try to ind answers as to why a series of

non-San rock paintings seem to depict him.

Carolyn Hamilton, University of Cape Town

The life of the archive

Chris Low, African studies, University of Oxford

Locating |xam beliefs and practices in a contemporary KhoeSan context

Scholars have explored connections between the belief and practices of the /xam and northern

Kalahari Bushmen, principally the Ju/’hoansi. In this paper I draw on my own ieldwork to cast the

net wider across the Nama, Damara, Hai//om and ≠Khomani and examine how the /xam material

might it into what I have identiied elsewhere as a KhoeSan healing grammar, rooted in long term

continuities found at both a social and environmental level. Starting with relections on how this

historical material might relate to my recent indings, the focus of the paper is on the ingredients

of healing, in terms of methods and substance, and how this relates to a certain sort of thinking that

seems characteristic of recent KhoeSan. Themes explored include relationships between weather,hunting and shamanism, the importance of smell and an aesthetics of care, captured by the idea of

doing things ‘nicely’, which relates to broader ways of being a hunter-gatherer. In wider terms the

paper informs understandings of historical identity in southern Africa.

David Lewis-Williams, Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand

The Impact of the Bleek & Lloyd Collection on Southern African Rock Art Research

Interpretation of the /Xam texts with the help of 20th Century ethnographies opened the door to anew paradigm in rock art research in the 1970s. The paper will describe some of the key issues that

inspired both research and controversy.



PAPER ABSTRACTS

David Morris, McGregor Museum, Kimberley

The place of oral literature and ethnography in the re-membering of a Northern Cape rock art site

The use of the Bleek and Lloyd archive of Karoo kukummi in the interpretation of rock art in Southern

Africa has been huge and portentous. Work on rock engravings in the vicinity of Kimberley has

drawn on this corpus of oral literature and the insights from its application in other rock art contexts.

Certain further oral and ethnographic accounts from the area may be brought to complement the

Karoo narratives. Together these various records have been sourced for the light they shed in aninterpretation, particularly, of the Driekops Eiland rock engraving site. By referring to this process

as a ‘re-membering’ an allusion is made to the persistence of certain elements, albeit fragments, of

contemporary belief or lore having discernable links to ideas evident in the older stories. Issues of

continuity and change are central to the discussion.

Florian Lionnet, University of California, Berkeley

Lucy Lloyd’s !xun notebooks: towards an edition and linguistic analysis

From 1879 to 1884, Lucy Lloyd worked with Tame, N!ani, |’Uma and Daqa1, four young boys from

Northern Namibia, who spoke !Xun, a click language of the Juu-Hoan family, spoken in north-eastern

Namibia and south-western Angola. She spent approximately ive years studying and documenting

!Xun, and left 17 notebooks – now digitised – which constitute the irst written record of any Juu-

�Hoan language: about 1,300 pages of precious cultural, historical, ethnographic and linguistic data

that have yet to be edited and analysed.

This talk is intended to present the irst results of a project undertaken two years ago whose long-

term goal is to produce an annotated edition of L.Loyd’s !Xun notebooks. About 100 pages of texts

and wordlists have been edited so far. The focus has been mainly linguistic: the work accomplished

has yielded enough data to make it possible to identify the particular !Xun dialect(s) spoken by the

four boys as well as its location along the Okavango river on the borders of Namibia and Angola. A

description of its phonological and grammatical structures as well as its relations to the other Juu lects

is in progress.

I will irst present the notebooks and the information they contain: wordlists, drawings, and, most

importantly, texts, mainly by N!ani and Tame, covering a wide variety of topics (myths and legends,

tales, songs, but also personal stories, genealogies, aspects of material life, and remarks on ethnic

groups, languages and inter-ethnic relations). All this information makes it possible to reconstruct to a

certain extent the history and culture of the !Xun people of this region at the end of nineteenth century.

I will then give an overview of the (mainly linguistic) work accomplished so far: after mentioning

a few challenges one faces when working on Lloyd’s data, I will outline the main characteristics of Lloyd’s !Xun and its position within the Juu language complex.

Reference:

Bleek, W.H.I. & L.C. Lloyd. Unpublished note



PAPER ABSTRACTS

Hedley Twidle, University of Cape Town

From The Origin of Language to a language of origin: a prologue to the Grey Collection

This paper will attempt to chart the curious, contested space occupied by the Grey Collection in

contemporary South Africa: how this once celebrated but now forgotten bequest housed at the

National Library in Cape Town might be (or might not be) approached, used or appreciated; the

complex networks of exchange across the southern hemisphere through which it was constituted

under British imperialism; its curiously dual nature and its afterlives, or lack of them.Paying attention to a provocative series of ‘doublings’ that structure the archive – among them the

division between medieval European treasures and nineteenth-century ‘indigenous’ materials, as well

as the Jekyll and Hyde like double-act performed by George Grey and Wilhelm Bleek – this account

suggests that while several approaches (particularly the more celebratory narratives surrounding

the Bleek and Lloyd Collection) seek to separate out the uncomfortable and enlightened elements of

colonial text-making and translation, it is their co-presence within the language act which constitutes

the ongoing, uncomfortable but also enabling paradox of working with such materials.

Speciically, I hope to offer an account of Grey’s compilation of translated Maori narratives,

Polynesian Mythology (1855), which in New Zealand literary culture occupies a similar (and similarly

troubling) place to that of Specimens of Bushman Folklore (1911) in the South African context.

Helize van Vuuren, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University

“Does the //gárraken lower open?”: postcolonial approaches to the extinct |xam

culture

Early scientists, linguists and observers recorded more (Bleek & Lloyd: 1870-18809) or less (Von

Wielligh: 1870-1883) meticulously and scientiically at the end of the nineteenth century what they

could from the last of the indigenous |xam Bushmen informants still alive in the northern Cape region

of South Africa. In postcolonial times the |xam collection of myths, narratives and poems has been

declared part of UNESCO World heritage. In 2009, rock art expert Anne Solomon identiied a hiatus

in what has been called “Bushmen Studies”, in that hitherto mostly anthropological interpretations

were forthcoming of the narratives and fragments of narratives left over from this erstwhile rich

culture, whereas more meticulous literary interpretations are still lacking in the attempted recovery

of the full meaning of this culture. From the traumatic period of the late nineteenth century, till now,

where the |xam language’s last speaker has long died, recuperation of this aspect of South African

heritage is demanding new methodologies and is becoming an increasingly pressing issue against

the “lattening” and equalising pressure of ever greater globalisation upon the existing cultural South

African landscape. Different approaches either accentuate the trauma of colonial interaction and stressthe divisive, whereas alternative, more nuanced literary approaches offer recovery and reconciliatory

aspects for contemporary South African society. The paper suggests ways of such readings, in literary

readings and new poetry.



PAPER ABSTRACTS

Hermann Wittenberg, University of the Western Cape

On narrative, culture and colonial censorship: the story of ||kabbo and “Reynard the Fox”

Wilhelm Bleek’s Reynard the Fox in South Africa; or Hottentot fables and tales (1864) remains a

signiicant if under-recognized book in South African cultural history. Coming almost 50 years before

the celebrated publication of Bleek’s and Lucy Lloyd’s Specimens of Bushman folklore (1911), Reynard

should not merely be regarded as a minor trial run for their now famous |xam research project, but

needs to be seen as an important and consequential event in South African literary history – thougha problematic one, as this paper will indicate. Reynard was not only the irst published book of

indigenous literature, but, coming well before Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African farm (1883), must

rank as one of South Africa’s irst published works of sustained narrative imaginative iction, in a

context where colonial literary production had long been dominated by the more prosaic genres of

diary and travel writing. This paper will explore the complex distortive cultural politics that produced

the Reynard narratives in their published form by reading them contrastively against the corpus of

Leonhard Schultze’s Nama narratives. Finally, I will speculate on how the text’s signiicant gaps had

an inadvertent and fortuitous effect of leading to the recruitment of ||kabbo, the master narrator of

Specimens.

Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand

Archives in Heaven

The Bleek and Lloyd archive constitutes a remarkable collection that straddles languages, media,

materials and worlds – in short it deals with texts that straddles this world and the next.

This paper grapples with this feature which inheres in a range of African pre-colonial and early

colonial texts. Certain orders of texts are expected to be able to address the next world and have

agency in it. Examples include early African Christian manifestations of miraculous literacy (in which

the power to read (and sometimes to write) is conferred magically often by an angel in a dream).

Songs and hymns are expected to speak to ancestral worlds beyond the immediate.

This paper draws out the genealogies of such forms in order to bring into focus the distinctiveness

of the Bleek/lloyd project.



PAPER ABSTRACTS

Janette Deacon, Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand

‘Specimens of Bushman folklore’ includes a number of accounts about the landscape in which the

|xam lived that were written down by Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek during interviews with //kabbo,

/han≠kass’o, Dia!kwain and their family members. These range from the power of the rain in its

different personas, to the story that explained how the hills of the Strandberg were formed. However,

the relationship between landscape features and rock engravings was not one of the topics they

discussed. This conference session will illustrate some of the recurrent themes in the landscape of the

Upper Karoo and report on recent research to identify connections between |xam perceptions of thelandscape as expressed in the written records made by Bleek and Lloyd, and the subject-matter and

distribution of rock engravings made by the ancestors of the 19th century |xam. The session will be

held in the Iziko South African Museum where aspects of rock art in the landscape will be on display in

exhibitions.

Jeremy Hollmann, KwaZulu-Natal Museum

|kaggen’s code: paintings of moths in southern Africa hunter-gatherer rock art

This paper explores the possible meanings of uncommon hunter-gatherer rock paintings at Eland Cave

in the Ukhahlamba Drakensberg Park, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and at Raiders 1 in Raiders Gorge,

Brandberg/Daureb, Erongo Region, Omaruru District, Namibia, that have been identiied as moths.

The paintings are interpreted in terms of |xam Bushman beliefs in which the appearance of a moth

at the family ire heralds the killing of an animal on the hunting ground. These beliefs are part of a

more general ‘code’ of hunting practices aimed to ensure successful kills of game animals ‘owned’ and

protected by |kaggen, the |xam Bushman trickster deity. Central to this interpretation is the hypothesis

that hunter-gatherer rock paintings may have been perceived as supernaturally potent images.

According to this scenario the painters modelled the moth paintings on aspects of the appearance

and behaviour of certain moths and positioned these on the rock face in certain ways in an attempt

to create an ambience in which the balance, usually loaded in the hunted animal’s favour, is in the

direction of the hunters instead.



PAPER ABSTRACTS

Jill Weintroub

The Rock Art and Linguistic Researches of Dorothea Bleek

How has history treated Dorothea Bleek? In general, when she features at all on the stage of the past,

it is as an enigmatic igure who lacked the insight that her father displayed towards the subjects of

his “bushman researches”. She is often dismissed as racist, and without the empathy that Lucy Lloyd

showed towards the informants domiciled at Charlton House. This presentation begins to combat that

view by offering a close and situated reading of one of Dorothea Bleek’s earliest forays into the ield insouthern Africa. The surviving written record of Dorothea Bleek’s 1913 trip to Kakia (now Khakhea)

in the then Bechuanaland Protectorate (now Botswana) provides a brief moment of rare personal

narrative in an archive comprising a much greater proportion of general material.

The diary of Bleek’s trip to Kakia together with the two research notebooks she produced there

provides a nuanced record of Bleek’s emerging ieldwork practice and method. It shows Bleek

engaging with the landscape and the people she found therein in complex and contradictory ways.

One can see her on one hand as the genteel colonial traveller “on safari” through conquered territories

surveying, framing and domesticating surrounding landscapes using language and metaphor

drawn from the painterly tradition of Western art. On the other hand, she is the intrepid female

explorer celebrating her escape from domesticity and suburbia, indulging in solitary walks and inconventionally male escapades like target practice against a tree. She is also the Western scientist

investigating African bodies with her measuring instruments and camera, deploying colonial authority

to gain access to intimate spaces of other bodies, but at certain times exhibiting sensitivity to the

invasion of personal space thus signiied, and to the limits of power she could exert. At one moment,

she is the expert who brings the comfort of Western medicine to the suffering native. At another, she

appears fully engaged in the ritual practices she is observing, and inds her research subjects both

attractive and amusing. Based on notes made in the ield, this view of Dorothea Bleek’s emerging

research practice shows the production of knowledge from the ield as a fractured and haphazard

process.

José de Prada Samper, University of Cape Town

The pictures of the |xam people are in their bodies’: presentiments, landscape and rock art in ||kabbo’s

country

The testimony by ||kabbo known as “Bushman presentiments” was published by Lucy Lloyd, in a

shortened version, in *Specimens of Bushman Folklore*.

It is one of the most often quoted and commented on segments of the Bleek and Lloyd Collection,

but its interpretation has been marred by the fact that its very irst sentence has always been assumedto draw a parallel between the |k”umm (“presentiments”) described in the text and the European

notion of letters which are posted and “take a message or an account of what happens in another

place”.



PAPER ABSTRACTS

In the paper it is argued that ||kabbo did not use the term !gwe: (“picture”) as an approximation to

the English concept of postal letters and had had it in mind when dictating the text, but rather that,

when translating the testimony with Lloyd, he pointed out to her the similarity of the |xam’s !gwe:

with posted letters.

If that is correct, ||kabbo’s testimony establishes a direct connection between the |k”umm and the

rock-engraving, very likely having in mind those found in the two hills to which he makes reference in

his narrative.

The paper offers textual evidence in support of this interpretation and suggests that, at least in

those two hills, the engravings could have served as a vehicle for “channeling” the “k”umm that peoplefelt in their bodies, and in this way inluence the movements of the game.

Marlene Winberg, University of Cape Town

Silent children of the archive: reading Lucy Lloyd and the !kun boys’ visual archive

(1879-1881)

The four !kun children’s collection forms part of the celebrated Bleek and Lloyd Collection and

comprises more than 570 paintings and drawings, as well as Lucy Lloyd’s 17 !kun notebooks, collected

between 1879 and 1881.

Lucy Lloyd’s publication of parts of the !kun children’s stories and images as an ‘appendix’ to

Specimens of Bushmen folklore relected a number of events in her lifetime and set up a reaction that

kept the !kun children’s material in the shadow of the larger collection, causing it to be largely ignored

by contemporary scholars. This paper asks why the !kun children’s collection has laid in silence for so

long.

It places the children centre stage and examines a selection of their paintings and drawings in

relation to the fragmented text and words in Lucy Lloyd’s notebooks. This exploration remembers the

oldest boy, !nanni, and his family in the context of their home in the Namibian wilderness. The broader

socio-economic and political landscape of the late 19th century casts further light on the children’s

lives and those dynamics that gave rise to their abduction from their homes - and eventual departure

for the Cape.

This exploration places Lucy Lloyd’s own childhood alongside the children’s and examines the

parallel sense of loss that deined both her and the children’s youth. This view illuminates the

powerful acts of storytelling and image making in Lucy Lloyd’s drawing room where the boys were, for

those moments, at the centre of the world they found themselves in, rather than marginalised by it.

In conclusion, this presentation fast-forwards 130 years and asks what sense contemporary !kun

speakers may make of their ancestral collection – if given the opportunity to do so.



PAPER ABSTRACTS

Mary Elizabeth Lange, University of KwaZulu-Natal

Storytelling and engravings, past and present: Biesje Poort, Northern Cape

Stories, associated with images represented in rock engravings and those still incorporated today

on Kalahari crafter’s ostrich eggs, are recorded as part of a collaborative research team led by The

Centre for Communication, Media and Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal. The stories are recorded

in line with my multiple intelligence approach to research that inluences both my encounter with the

research area and community as well as the presentation of the research material. The oral recordbuilds on my prior participatory research in the Southern Kalahari that resulted in the use of water

stories to interpret some of the rock engravings on the site and subsequent applied storytelling

in a museum setting in KwaZulu-Natal. This paper includes the challenges and advantages of an

indigenised participatory communication approach that calls for dialogue and empowerment through

not only participation and representation but also the inclusion of research content that is relevant to

the participating KhoiSan descendant community.

Mathias Guenther, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada

Dreams and Stories

While not recognized as much as it perhaps should, it is evident from the /Xam corpus that dreams

and dreaming constitute elements of the stories told by //Kabbo–“Dream”--and some of the other

story tellers. This is the case especially with respect to stories about /Kaggen/Mantis–“a sort of

dream Bushman”, to Dorothea Bleek–which feature the trickster-protagonist dreaming and gaining,

through his dreams, magical powers and access to the mystical world beyond. Dreams and dreaming

may also provide the imaginative and expressive framework for story telling, underscoring, thereby

the surreal, luid and fantastical nature of First Order, the mythological landscape of so many of the

kukummi of the /Xam story tellers. Does dreaming provide them with inspiration and creativity? Do

dreams provide some of the motifs and plots for their stories (as they arguably do for rock artist, some

of whose pictures may be representations of dream imagery, as recently suggested by the Australian

rock art researcher Ben Watson)? Do dreams and dreaming provide the key for the understanding

of /Xam–and San- myth and lore, which its students have variously referred to as “surreal”, “luid”,

“fantastical”, “ineffable”, “incoherent”–and “dreamlike”? These are the questions that will guide this

tentative exploration of /Xam ancestral folklore.



PAPER ABSTRACTS

Megan Biesele, University of Texas, Austin

||kabbo’s Legacy: San Heritage Conservation and Language Development Today

Community and scholarly activism in regard to indigenous languages, especially endangered ones,

is increasing around the world. There exist at least a dozen heritage conservation and language

development projects involving San languages of southern Africa. This presentation will contain

an inventory of current San language-development projects and textual/cultural heritage projects,

whether they are community-based, scholar-initiated, or NGO-run. This inventory—from South Africa,Namibia, and Botswana—is intended to provide a 2011 baseline to increase awareness and support

for ALL such projects. It is undertaken to honor //Kabbo

and all the /Xam people who undertook the irst such project in Cape Town over a century ago.

The information on the various projects will be, of necessity, uneven, since all are at different stages

of development. Yet because of recent advances in technology, even the smallest projects can send

and receive information and post archives on the Internet. To be foregrounded in the presentation is

the Ju/’hoan Transcription Group (JTG) that has been active in Namibia since 2002, using Ju/’hoan-

language materials recorded in Botswana and Namibia between 1970 and the present. Also presented

will be a history of the JTG and how it solved many practical problems common to such projects in

remote areas. The presentation will suggest ways in which, in the future, members of the JTG andother functioning San language projects can mentor San communities wishing to start and carry out

their own heritage documentation.

Menán du Plessis, University of Cape Town

One hundred years of the Specimens - a hundred years of academic neglect.

The Specimens of Bushman Folklore provides samples of two Khoesan languages, one being the

variety known as |xam, which belongs to the !uI family, and one being a !xun (!xũ or !xuŋ) dialect of

the JU family. Our knowlege of the JU languages in general has been greatly expanded since the work

of Bleek and Lloyd in the 1880s. By contrast, very little attention has been paid to the !UI languages,

apart from currently ongoing work by foreign linguists on the /Nuu varieties discovered just over a

decade ago to be spoken still by a few elderly people of the #Khomani San. This paper will be conined

to a discussion of /xam, and after a brief survey of existing studies will itemize the numerous aspects

of the language that remain to be analysed and systematically described. The implications of these

still great gaps in our knowledge - for projects in translation and lexicography - will be pointed out.

Lastly, an attempt will be made to identify the underlying reasons for the lack of attention given by

contemporary South African linguists to this work.



PAPER ABSTRACTS

Michael Wessels

The irst |xam man brings home a young lion: the story of a narrative

Michel Foucault argues in The Order of Things that the constellations of ideas and discourses that

underlie different forms of knowledge at particular periods in time, which he calls epistemes,

constitute a rupture with, rather than a development of, the ways of ordering knowledge and

generating meaning that precede them.

In later work, such as The Use of Pleasure, he maintains that apparently similar discourses fromdifferent periods can operate within very different structures of meaning. He also acknowledges that

different epistemes can co-exist at the same time and that the borders between them might be less

absolute than his earlier work would suggest. What he describes as an archaeological approach to

the study of ideas and cultural expression seeks to understand the discursive conditions that make

particular meanings possible at certain times. This paper considers what such an archaeology might

mean in relation to the collection of /Xam narrative that was assembled in the nineteenth century by

Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. While the paper recognises the importance of detailed textual analysis,

this is not the project it sets itself. Rather it aims to discuss the different epistemic formations in

which a particular narrative has signiied, recognising that most of them are, to a signiicant degree,

unknowable. It takes as its example the story that David Lewis-Williams calls “The First /Xam ManBrings Home a Young Lion” in his selection of materials from the Bleek and Lloyd Collection, ‘Stories

That Float From Afar: Ancestral Folklore of the San of Southern Africa.’ The paper explores the

intricate textual and discursive contexts that both antedate and accompany the publication of the

story in Lewis-Williams’ collection. It examines the narrative from the perspective of the discursive

formations in which it has been articulated, by both /Xam narrators and scholars, rather than the

“meaning” of the story itself. While the kind of performative and social contexts which produced the

narrative in the irst place no longer attend its reproduction and reception, it nevertheless is still

staged in different ways and its meaning has to be discerned, sought and contested in particular social

spaces. A contemporary reading of the narrative, in the form in which it appears in Lewis-Williams’

book, it is argued, has to take into account a series of interventions that include editing, categorization,

reproduction in print and the framing of the story by both the general introduction at the beginning

of the book and the introductory comments which immediately precede it. Taken together, these

constitute a particular type of performance and staging of the narrative. Lewis-Williams’ interventions

have, in turn, to be placed alongside a chain of earlier events: the performance and reception of the

narrative in various real and virtual spaces, its recording and transcription, its translation and various

comments about it. When all these events are considered, along with the story’s formal and discursive

features, such as its circulation of signiiers, its systems of address and its intertextual relationship

with the rest of the /Xam corpus, it becomes clear that a /Xam narrative, as it appears before the

reader in print, is a complex, hybrid mode of discourse that requires a detailed critical response. The

paper concludes that such a response can be greatly enhanced if it includes a consideration of the

“archaeological” dimension of /Xam narrative.



PAPER ABSTRACTS

Nigel Crawhall

Understanding the !Ui-Taa language family’s sociolinguistic history in South Africa:

putting the |xam informants in context

The purpose of the paper is to give specialists in the oral history of the |xam more context to

understand the full distribution of this language family and unpacking in a more systematic manner

the different terminology (ethnographic and linguistic) which were applied to San language speakers,dating back to the very earliest settler references. The causality of language loss is often assumed

to be the result of the violent force of colonial expansion, but it does not explain why Bantu/ Niger-

Congo languages survived but Khoe-San languages did not. This has to do with different land-use/

natural resource subsistence patterns and changing social relationship due to economic and ecological

changes.

Nigel Penn, University of Cape Town

Child captives, ‘Bushman Labour’ and the destruction of the Cape San

From as early as the 18th century it was acceptable colonial practice for commandos to take San

children captive in order to utilise their labour. Far from diminishing, this practice actually increased

under British rule during the 19th century. The scale and impact of ‘Bushman’ child labour has

been greatly under-estimated in the historical accounts. This paper seeks to redress this neglect by

emphasising the magnitude and signiicance of San child labour during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Robert Thornton, University of the Witwatersrand

Bleek, ||kabbo, and the debate about the origin of language

In Europe, at the time that Bleek began to work with transcribing and translating the Xam texts,

Bushman languages were believed to be the most primitive languages known. Bleek’s cousin, the

German evolutionist and biologist Ernst Haeckel, among other evolutionists at the time, believed that

these languages might be more like animal communication than human speech. If this were true,

the Bushman languages would provide key evidence in the debate about the origin and evolution of

language. This topic was hotly debated in late 18th century and the19th century.

Bleek’s research proved, however, that Bushman languages were fully and complexly human, and

that they were as ‘advanced’ or ‘evolved’ as any other human languages. This profoundly affectedthe theory of language, since it appeared to show that there was no evidence of evolution in human

languages. This is, still today, a profoundly puzzling result, but spoke strongly for a single common

origin for all humans ‘out of Africa’, a position that Bleek himself asserted against Haeckel’s polygenist

(multiple origins) proposals.



PAPER ABSTRACTS

Robyn Loughnane and Tom Güldemann, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

The Bleek and Lloyd Collection: ||kabbo’s linguistic legacy

In addition to an invaluable legacy in other disciplines, Specimens of Bushman Folklore and the entire

Bleek and Lloyd collection must also be recognized as a great scientiic achievement in the ield of

linguistics. The quality and detail of the phonetic transcriptions can only be admired, even by modern

standards; the depth of the collection, in terms of the sheer number of texts, is an exceptional feat

by any modern ield linguist’s standards. One can only describe Wilhelm and Dorothea Bleek andLucy Lloyd as gifted and hard-working scientists, through whose writings we can now glimpse the

uniqueness and linguistic importance of |xam, the native language of their teacher ||kabbo.

|xam is a member of the !Ui branch of the Tuu family, one of three major non-Bantu language

families indigenous to southern Africa, collectively often referred to as ‘Khoisan’. Dorothea Bleek

(1927) herself proposed an internal classiication of ‘South African Khoisan’ (Tuu), a hypothesis later

supported through modern analyses by Hastings (2001) and Güldemann (2005). The only other

surviving member of the !Ui branch of the Tuu family is the moribund N||ng, with less than a dozen

remaining speakers. The endangered Taa language complex, with only a few thousand speakers

remaining, is the only additional known surviving member of the Tuu family.

Despite the incredible corpus of the |xam language left behind thanks to ||kabbo, Bleek and Lloyd,there remains no full-length grammatical description of the language to date, although Dorothea Bleek

(1928–30) and Meriggi (1928/29) published grammatical sketches, and there are a few important

commentary notes in Bleek and Lloyd (1911). A modern grammatical sketch, incorporating our

increased knowledge of ‘Khoisan’ languages and the advanced methods of the discipline, can be

found in Güldemann (forthcoming a., b. and c.), although more work remains to be done, especially

phonological and morphosyntactic description based on the statistical analysis of as much of the

corpus as possible.

Now, while there are still remaining speakers of other Tuu languages, is a critical time to undertake

such a thorough modern linguistic analysis of the |xam corpus, both to gain insights into the |xam data

from living Tuu languages, and, conversely, for the |xam data to inform the ongoing analysis of the Tuu

languages.

In this talk we discuss in further detail the above linguistic legacy of the Bleek and Lloyd collection and

present aspects of the current ongoing analysis of the |xam corpus and its implications for ‘Khoisan’

language studies and the discipline of linguistics as a whole.

References

Bleek, Dorothea F. 1928–30. “Bushman grammar: A grammatical sketch of the language of the |xam-ka-!k’e.”

Zeitschrift für Eingeborenen-Sprachen 19: 81-98/20: 161-174.

Bleek, Dorothea F. 1927. “The distribution of Bushman languages in South Africa.” In Boas, F. et al. (eds.),

Festschrift Meinhof. Hamburg: L. Friederichsen, 55-64.

Bleek, Wilhelm H. I. & Lucy C. Lloyd. 1911. Specimens of Bushman Folklore. London: George Allen.Güldemann, Tom. forthcoming a. “Phonology: Other Tuu languages.” In Voßen, Rainer (ed.), The Khoisan

languages. Routledge Language Family Series. London: Routledge.

Güldemann, Tom. forthcoming b. “Morphology: |Xam of Strandberg.” In Voßen, Rainer (ed.), The Khoisan

languages. Routledge Language Family Series. London: Routledge.



PAPER ABSTRACTS

Güldemann, Tom. forthcoming c. “Syntax: |Xam of Strandberg.” In Voßen, Rainer (ed.), The Khoisan languages.

Routledge Language Family Series. London: Routledge.

Güldemann, Tom. 2005. “Tuu as a language family.” In Güldemann, Tom, Studies in Tuu (Southern Khoisan)

(= University of Leipzig Papers on Africa, Languages and Literatures 23). Leipzig: Institut für Afrikanistik,

Universität Leipzig, 11-30.

Hastings, Rachel. 2001. “Evidence for the genetic unity of Southern Khoesan.” In Bell, Arthur & Paul Washburn

(eds.), Khoisan: syntax, phonetics, phonology, and contact. Cornell Working Papers in Linguistics 18. Ithaca:

Cornell University, 225-246

Meriggi, Piero. 1928/29. “Versuch einer Grammatik des |Xam-Buschmännichen.” Zeitschrift für Eingeborenen-

Sprachen 19: 117-153, 188-205.

Sam Challis, Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand

Bushman herders of the Drakensberg: mixed raider-pastoralists in the 19th century.

Recent investigation into mixed, or creolised, raiding bands in the eastern Cape of the nineteenth-

century has uncovered various underlying cultural phenomena which enabled such groups to form.

Drawing on ethnographic material from the supposed constituent cultures – San-, Khoe- and Bantu-speaker (not least the Lloyd/Bleek archive), it is put forward that members of mixed groups found

shared beliefs on which they could build new identities. Beliefs in certain categories of plant roots

and animals associated with them had become shared during the many centuries of pre-colonial

interaction. These shared beliefs then helped to inform new beliefs concerned with the arrival of new

concerns on the colonial frontier, such as the horse. Beliefs, behaviour and tradition all combine to

explain why so-called ‘Bushmen’ kept cattle, horses, sheep and goats in the Maloti-Drakensberg, and

why they painted them in their rock shelters.

Siyakha Mguni, Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand

The meerkats and ||kaggen’s arrows of fury: metaphors of sociality and antagonism in the southern

San mythology and paintings

This paper explores the conjoint tension between sociality and antagonism in San thought through

the investigation of loose notions of altruism and egoism from their mythology, ethnography and

rock paintings. Customarily, prevailing analytical canons and explanatory tropes focusing on various

aspects of Khoesan worldview(s) and related expressive forms present conclusions as overtly

indicating unity of purpose for the greater social good of San foragers. Yet, the common behaviour of

San deities, and ||kaggen himself included, reveals a curious contradiction between what may, on the

other hand, be considered ‘altruistic’ and, on the other, ‘egoistic’ behaviour in a complex of ideas whichplay out not only at the level of the individual, but also between and beyond social groups. In order to

explore these ideological deviations and related symbolic mediations, I will examine some paintings

from the south-western Cape.



PAPER ABSTRACTS

Sven Ouzman, Pre-colonial archaeology, Iziko South African Museum

The South African Museum as San Archive and as Artefact

We claim to know the past through archaeology, anthropology, ethnography, imagination and the like.

But we lack a well-developed archaeology of archive in which the collected, curated and researched

object or ‘specimen’ is not a straightforward metonym or fragment of a past reality, but a sentient

entity with both a history and a future. The ‘Bushman specimens’ collected by Wilhelm Bleek, LucyLloyd - and especially by Dorothea Bleek - between the 1870s and 1947 and archived in the South

African Museum, is here instructive. The Museum was an induction space for the Bleeks and Lloyd San

teachers – using natural history specimens of animals and geological specimens as lexical props and

prompts. Often the Museum would again be visited when these teachers departed Cape Town – a twist

on Geertz’s characterisation of the museum as a ‘contact zone’ and as a panopticon whose gaze can

be reversed, albeit imperfectly. The South African Museum was part of an intellectual extraction that

was followed by collecting the physical expressions of this intellect –archaeological and ethnographic

artefacts, wax cylinder sound recordings, drawing books, rock art copies and commentaries (some of

which will be on display in Bertram House during the conference) – and bodies. The latter comprised

both human remains and associated grave goods, and the (in)famous body casts made by JamesDrury from ‘pure’ San in the 1901/1911 Prieska expeditions of which Dorothea was a participant.

This collecting of husks became frantic in the early 1900s with the belief that San were a ‘dying race’;

prompting legal instruments like the 1911 Bushman Relics Protection Act, which set up museums

as hermetic, preservative spaces of colonial fantasy. In thinking the role of museums in post-colonial

contexts, these San specimens force us to consider why we ‘collect’ specimens at all, and how our

actions become an intrinsic part of collected specimens’ lives. The object biography approach

suggests specimens are sentient and even legal entities; a realisation that may go some way toward

transforming museums and archives from instruments of Foucaldian control to multivocal spaces in

which power relations, while never equal, may at last be allowed to shift in unpredictable ways.

Tanya Barben, University of Cape Town

Gathering wisdom: re-assembling Wilhelm Bleek’s library

Wilhelm Bleek not only collected languages and one of their products in the form of stories, but he

also acquired printed materials, assiduously gathering together his library which, as is generally the

case, reveals much about his life. Philology was his irst love, but his library contains so much more:

theological texts by his grandfather, the scientiic work of his cousin Ernst Haeckel, and George Grey’s

Australasian works (for he was an employer who shared Bleek’s philological interests) and manyothers. Books owned by members of his extended family such as his wife, daughters, curmudgeonly

father-in-law, and his sister-in-law and working companion, Lucy, were also added to it. Many books

contain textual annotations and marginalia in Bleek’s crabbed hand. This library is now housed in

R B k & S i l C ll ti f th U i it f C T Lib i

the courage of ||kabbo - conference abstracts

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