when kukummi were performed to adult audiences the evidence is that this might be by any mature man or woman. No doubt some narrators were more skilled than others – although no mention is made in the texts of any narrator well known for his excellence – but it would seem that most people could perform if called upon to do so.
There is very little evidence relating to when kukummi were performed. |Hangǂkass'o speaks only of two separate occasions on which his mother comforted him as a child by telling him stories (ibid., 317ff; L. VIII, (17) 7519). The only account of story-telling by and to adults comes from ||Kabbo. In a well-known passage in Specimens of Bushman Folklore, ||Kabbo, speaking of his release from captivity, has this to say:
You know I sit waiting for the moon to change for me so that I can go back to my own place. I will listen to everyone’s stories when I visit them. I will listen to the stories that they tell. They listen to the stories of the Flat people3 from the other side of the place and re-tell the stories with their own – when the sun gets a little warm. I will sit listening to the stories that come from far away. And I will have their story when the sun feels a little bit warm and I feel that I must go on visiting. I must be talking with my men friends, for I work here at women’s work. My men friends listen to stories which travel from a long way away. They listen to stories from other places. But I am here. I don’t get stories because I don’t do any visiting to let me get the stories which come along … The Flat people go to each other’s huts to sit smoking in front of them. So they get stories because they often visit. They are smoking people (Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 298ff).
Story-telling appears from this to have been part of sociability. As well as spending their leisure time in their own camps, |Xam frequently visited friends and relatives and so an occasion for story-telling was never far away.
Amongst !Kung speakers today the same kind of emphasis on story-telling as an adult pastime is also found. Megan Biesele (op. cit., 97) writes:
It has been my pleasure to discover not only that the number of (non-farm) Bushmen who tell stories competently is quite large but that virtually every old person (among the ju|wasi every man or woman who carries the appellation ‘n!a’ after his or her name – perhaps 45 and older) is able and usually willing to tell stories. In fact of the many old people from whom I requested stories there were only a scant handful who could not tell stories of the old time with confidence and vigor.
So much is this the case that the telling of stories specifically to children is of little concern to the Zu|wasi.
The story-telling groups I observed consisted much more frequently of a small group of old people getting together for some real grown-up enjoyment. The telling of stories among Bushmen is no watered-down pastime but the substantial adult pleasure of old cronies over a bawdy or horrific or ridiculous tale (ibid., 97f).
This seems to be very much the sort of thing which ||Kabbo has in mind when he speaks of sitting during the day, talking and telling stories with his friends.
It is, inevitably, very difficult to discover much about story-telling as live performance. Because the narratives were collected outside of their native context everything is lost to us in the way of dramatic presentation, gesture, facial expression, narrator/audience interaction – indeed most of what characterises narrative in performance. However, a little is known of the |Xam which can give an indication of how narratives were performed. It may be seen from many of the texts – both narrative and non-narrative – what keen powers of observation the |Xam had for their natural environment. Not only are the habits and physical characteristics of animals observed in great detail but many pages of close description of plants and insects were collected, which bear witness to an attention to detail far beyond that needed for daily survival. Furthermore some |Xam at least also felt an attunement to their environment which reached almost mystical proportions. ||Kabbo, for example, speaks of powerful premonitions which he had while out hunting and which created in him actual physical sensations connected with his quarry. He reports that such sensations were common for people who understood them. A man may feel
a tapping at his ribs; he says to his children, the Springbok seem to be coming for I feel the black hair (on the sides of the Springbok). Climb the Brinkkop over there and look around because I feel the Springbok sensation (Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 332).
Or again he reports that
We have a sensation in our feet as the Springbok come rustling the bushes. In the same way we have a sensation in our heads when we are about to chop the Springbok’s horns. We have a sensation in our face because of the blackness of the stripe on the face of the Springbok (ibid., 334).
Such close identification with animals must find its way into narrative presentation, and indeed the |Xam, like other San groups were well known for their great capacity for imitation (Currlé 1913: 114). Dorothea Bleek (1929a: 310f) writes:
Most stories are long drawn out, an evening’s entertainment interspersed with scraps of poetry or songs. All are told with great imitation of animal voices and the tones of anger, disappointment, triumph and so on.
The fact that the characters in most of the narratives are animals presented story-tellers with a special challenge to their powers of observation and imitation. It was a challenge to which they responded in one very unusual way. As W.H.I. Bleek (1875: 6) observed after a short period of collection:
A most curious feature in Bushman folklore is formed by the speeches of various animals, recited in modes of pronouncing Bushman, said to be peculiar to the animals in whose mouths they are placed. It is a remarkable attempt to imitate the shape and position of the mouth of the animal to be represented. Among the Bushman sounds which are hereby affected, and often entirely commuted, are principally the clicks. These are either converted into other consonants, as into labials (in the language of the Tortoise), or into palatals and compound dentals and sibilants (as in the language of the Ichneumon) or into clicks unheard in Bushmen (as far as our present experience goes), – as in the language of the Jackal, who is introduced as making use of a strange labial click, which bears to the ordinary labial click ʘ, a relation in sound similar to that which the palatal click ǂ bears to the cerebral click !. Again, the moon – and it seems also the Hare and Anteater – substitute a most unpronounceable click in place of all others, excepting the lip click … Another animal, the Blue Crane, differs in its speech from ordinary Bushmen, mainly by the insertion of a tt at the end of the first syllable of almost every word.
A number of examples of this special mode of speech have been published by Dorothea Bleek (1936), and a small sample will, therefore, suffice here. In the phrases which follow the conventional |Xam form is given on the top line, the altered speech is given on the line below and a translation below that.
Blue Crane:
Ng kang ka ng se ||na hi u,u se ||a twaja ke
Ng katten katt ng sett ||natt hi ut,ut sett ||at twatatt kett
(I wish I could be with you so that you could louse me
ta ʘmwing doa tsi: |ki ng |na.
tat ʘmwoatten doatt tsitt |kott ng |natt.
because the lice hurt my head with their biting.)
The Tortoise:
A se !kenn |na hi, ha !kwi a: !kwi:ja.ha ko:a ||kuwa,
A se penn mha hi, ha pi a: pi:ja. ha ko:a puwa,
(You shall take out that big man for us. He will be fat,
I se !kung ha.
I
