The Khoisan Heritage Series
Series Editor: David Lewis-Williams
Other titles in the Khoisan Heritage Series, published by Wits University Press
Contested Images: Diversity in Southern African Rock Art Research
Edited by Thomas A Dowson and David Lewis-Williams
Customs and Beliefs of the |Xam Bushmen
Edited by Jeremy C. Hollman
Rock Engravings of Southern Africa
by Thomas A Dowson
Voices from the Past: |Xam Bushmen and the Bleek and Lloyd Collection
Edited by Janette Deacon and Thomas A Dowson
Women Like Meat: The Folklore and Foraging Ideology of the Kalahari Ju|’Hoan
by Megan Biesele
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg
2001
South Africa
© Roger Hewitt 1986
First published 1986 by Helmut Buske Verlag, Hamburg, Germany.
This second edition published 2008 by Wits University Press.
ISBN 978-1-86814-470-9
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express permission, in writing, of both the author and the publishers.
Cover photograph by Anthony van Tonder, The Media Bank, africanpictures.net Cover design by Hybridesign
Layout and design by Acumen Publishing Solutions, Johannesburg.
Printed and bound by Creda Communications
For Georgia
Contents
2Introduction to the narratives: their context, performance and scope
3Legends and the stories of !Khwa
4Sidereal narratives: the story of the Dawn’s Heart and his wife the Lynx
7The |Kaggen narratives (1): characters and content
8The |Kaggen narratives (2): sequence and structure
9|Kaggen in belief, ritual and narrative: a synthesis
10Two |Kaggen narratives: compositional variations
11The verbal surface: a note on the narrators
Appendix A Girls’ puberty observances of the |Xam
Appendix B The shamans of the |Xam
Acknowledgements
My first thanks are, undoubtedly, to Pippa Skotnes, who managed to blow a trumpet in my ear from what seemed a very long way away to wake me up and let me know about the developments in the Bleek and Lloyd Archive in recent times and to invite me to Cape Town. She gave me such positive encouragement to re-publish this book, and pointed me in exactly the right direction. She is a very special person to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude.
I would also like to take this opportunity to make an acknowledgement that would have been in the first edition, had its birth not been such a casual and chaotic affair. David Lewis Williams was a fellow at Cambridge working on his earliest ideas concerning the San rock paintings he had been so meticulously recording and analysing when we somehow came into contact at the start of my doctoral research. We had many fascinating conversations and debates in London over the published Bleek and Lloyd materials at a time when it was hard to find a soul who even knew of their existence. He also gave very ungrudgingly of his time to translate from the Afrikaans for me a number of the von Wielligh texts of |Xam narratives, the whole four volumes of which I had somehow assembled myself a photocopy version but could not read. I would like to thank him, somewhat belatedly, for his generosity and company at that time.
Others who were the effective dramatis personae of that period and with whom I had really fruitful dialogue were Megan Biesele, Sigrid Schmidt and Alan Barnard who started his doctoral research at the London School of Oriental and African Studies in exactly the year I started there. I still have some of the letters he sent me, somewhat sandy, from the Kalahari, while he was doing his fieldwork. Each of these scholars was all in different ways important to me in the development of my own thinking.
Finally, of course, I would like to
