principally related to girls’ puberty rituals. He was a threatening force and was believed to cause death by lightning or transformation into non-human forms to girls who did not observe the correct ritual practices during and immediately following menstruation, and to other members of the group as a consequence of this. The beliefs concerning !Khwa and menstruation rituals are discussed in Chapters 4, 7, and 10. !Khwa was never requested to cause rain but was requested by certain men to stop thundering and lightening during particularly heavy storms (D.F. Bleek 1931–36, Part V, 304; 1929a: 307).
The powers of |Kaggen and !Khwa were discrete and concerned only with specific areas of activity. This is typical of all |Xam beliefs in the supernatural. What the texts collected by Bleek and Lloyd display is a complex of beliefs in which different things are credited with various powers which might be tapped or avoided depending on their nature. The new moon and Canopus were addressed at certain times in the belief that they could influence favourably both the gathering of ants’ chrysalids and the abundance of game (D.F. Bleek 1929a: 305ff). The spirits of dead !giten were prayed to for rain on some occasions (D.F. Bleek 1931–36, Part V, 383; Part VII, 37ff). On the other hand a large number of beliefs concerned the sympathetic bond which was thought to obtain between hunters and game animals, and many ritualistic strategies were employed to maintain, exploit, or avoid undesirable consequences of that relationship (ibid., Part VIII, 146ff; Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 67ff, 271ff, 353ff).
The concept known amongst the Zu|wasi as n!ow was also held by the |Xam, although many details collected by Lorna Marshall (1957a) on this subject are absent from the |Xam accounts, and no |Xam word was recorded which referred to it. The belief as held by the |Xam may be summarised as follows. Each male8 had a wind associated with him, cold and harsh or warm and pleasant, easterly, westerly, etc. This wind was said to blow when a hunter had killed an animal. ‘The wind is one with the man’, one informant expressed it (D.F. Bleek 1931–36, Part IV, 338). Certain game animals and certain stars also had winds associated with them and these were believed to interact with a hunter who had killed an animal. The nature of this interaction is unclear but in some way the man’s wind was affected by the animals wind, and the star’s by his. Different kinds of rain, mild or hard, were also believed to be linked to individuals in the same manner. A man’s wind and rain was a permanent attribute. When a person died his wind blew, removing his footprints from the ground. What kind of wind and rain a man had might influence his deployment in the hunt or whether or not he could address !Khwa. There is no textual evidence to suggest that the |Xam regarded this force as supernatural or magical. Indeed it appears to have been thought of more as a physical attribute than a spiritual one (ibid., 328f, 336; Part V, 303f; Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 397).
The most commonly invoked supernatural power was known as !gi, the power possessed by !giten who were responsible for curing illness, making rain and, in some cases, influencing the movements of specific animals. The !giten who were curers could be either men or women, as could game !giten but rain-makers seem to have been exclusively men. These three offices frequently overlapped. !Giten often went into a state of trance during curing and, hidden under a kaross made a heavy snoring noise close to the patient’s body. By this means the illness was taken into the !gi:xa’s nose and was then expelled by repeated sneezing.
Malignant !giten were believed to be able to cause illness and death to those who displeased them in some way, and to take the form of various animals. !Gi was transmitted to !giten at the special initiation dance during which an initiator would snore each of the initiates in turn. This power was capable of diminishing over a period of many years and it was possible for a !gi:xa to lose his or her power completely. !Giten were greatly respected and feared by the |Xam and represented one of the most dominant aspects of |Xam belief in the supernatural.9
Two distinct beliefs about the after-life were collected. One informant described how the spirit of a dead person travelled along an underground path leading from the grave to a vast hole where it then lived. The spirits of all San went to this place, so did the spirits of animals and the spirits of Afrikaners (B. VI, 699 rev.; see also Stow, op. cit., 129). Another belief concerning the dead was that the cavity in any new moon which had the appearance of horns was the ‘catching place’ for people who had recently died. As the moon grew full by this means, the corpses inside were revived by the ‘moon-water’. When no more room was left, the people were tipped out onto the earth and lived again until they died again when the whole process was repeated. These two apparently conflicting accounts are all that is known of beliefs about the after-life, although it was also believed that a spirit might haunt the area of the grave briefly following death because the dead person was reluctant to leave his friends and still thought about them (Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 399; von Wielligh, op. cit., Vol 3, 43f).
The extermination of the |Xam
The gradual extermination of the San by European settlers and others is well documented.10 By the early 20th century only a small remnant remained alive. Commando raids, first by the military and, soon after, by civilian farmers, were made upon the San, initially as reprisals for cattle stealing and with increasing frequency. This activity soon assumed the character of a sport, farmers going out to shoot San in large numbers ‘for the fun of the thing’ (Anthing 1563:11).
The area from which Bleek and Lloyd’s informants came became subjected to an intensification of such events after about 1850. In a lengthy official report of 1863, horrific details of the atrocities committed against the San of the northwestern Cape, L. Anthing (ibid., 4f) states that
The evidence I had obtained respecting the past and existing state of things was, that the colonists had intruded into that part of the country which borders on the Hartebeest and Orange [Gariep] rivers some years before, and that they had from time to time killed numbers of Bushmen resident there; that in some cases the latter had stolen cattle from the intruders, but that the killing of the Bushmen was not confined to the avenging or punishing of such thefts, but that, with or without provocation, Bushmen were killed, – sometimes by hunting parties, at other times by commandos going out for the express purpose. That in consequence of the colonists having guns and horses, and their being expert hunters (the pursuit of game being their daily occupation), the wild game of the country had become scarce, and almost inaccessible to the Bushmen, whose weapon is the bow and arrow, having a comparatively short range. That ostrich eggs, honey, grass-seed, and roots had all become exceedingly scarce, the ostriches being destroyed by hunters, the seed and roots in consequence of the intrusion of the colonists’ flocks. From these various causes, the Bushman’s subsistence failed him, and, in many cases they died from hunger. Those who went into the service of the newcomers did not find their condition thereby improved. Harsh treatment, an insufficient allowance of food, and continued injuries inflicted on their kinsmen are alleged as having driven them back into the bush, from whence hunger again led them to invade the flocks and herds of the intruders, regardless of the consequences, and resigning themselves, as they say to the thought of being shot in preference to death from starvation.
Such is the immediate historical background to the texts collected by Bleek and Lloyd, although as Dorothea Bleek (1923: vi) points out:
Their narrators were all Colonial Bushmen, who lived on the rolling plains south of the Orange [Gariep] river in the Prieska, Kenhardt and northern Calvinia districts. They had themselves seen their country invaded by white men for permanent settlement, but not so the parents from whom they heard the stories.
The dreadful conditions under which the |Xam lived at the time of collection impinges only infrequently on the collected texts, and in only one narrative are the settlers even mentioned (Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 254ff). Within a few years, however, the |Xam were to vanish completely.
Notes
