Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San. Roger Hewitt

       Introduction

      This new edition of Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San comes some 20 years after its initial printing and 30 after the text, with few differences, was presented as a doctoral thesis to the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Since then there has been a great deal of excellent scholarship that has explored the Bleek and Lloyd collection of |Xam texts, housed mainly in the library of the University of Cape Town (UCT), or has added substantially to what we know of the historical context of that collection and its content. At the time of my thesis, however, not only was the location or, indeed, the continued existence of Lucy Lloyd’s |Xam transcriptions – the largest part of the collection – unknown, but the content of Bleek’s own notebooks also remained unexplored and the notebooks themselves barely catalogued. Thus it was with something of a gamble that I embarked on a thesis designed to be based alone on those as yet ‘undiscovered’ notebooks. Luckily for me my optimistic digging was rewarded¹ and the work that produced this book was able to commence. Naturally the existence of the notebooks did not remain a secret for long, and much useful scholarly work, largely by South African researchers, started to flow.

      Much has changed in the intervening years. Even between the presentation of the thesis in 1976 and 1986, when editors from Helmut Buske publishers in Hamburg approached me to ask if they might publish the work, there had grown a greater sensitivity around nomenclature applied to peoples customarily studied by anthropologists. For many years the term ‘Bushmen’ had been used to describe the hunter-gatherers whose click language was closely related to that of the Khoi herders with whom they also shared much of the Cape. Both Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd referred to theirs as a collection of ‘Bushman folklore’. By the late 1970s, however, the Khoi word ‘San’ became widely adopted to describe the various language groups evident amongst the hunter-gatherers, as well as the people themselves. While anthropologists familiarised the reading public with the specific names of some of these – principally the !Kung, made internationally famous by the Marshall expeditions to the Kalahari desert in the 1950s – the term ‘San’ became preferred by many in seeming not to have the derogatory connotations that ‘Bushmen’ might be thought to possess. It was not long, however, before it was pointed out that ‘San’ itself was often a derogatory term applied to the hunter-gatherers and was often used simply to mean ‘thief’. The best nomenclature was clearly not to be found in these terms for the general category, but those used by each specific group to refer to itself. For this reason, as most of the texts collected by Bleek and Lloyd were from one large group of hunter-gatherers, the |Xam, it was possible to use that term in accounts of that people and their language. However, for anyone except for a very small circle of academics, the name ‘|Xam’ meant nothing. Hence the general terms were often attached, giving ‘the |Xam Bushmen’ or ‘|Xam San’ and it has not been until very recently that ‘|Xam’ has acquired greater popular currency – certainly within South Africa if not elsewhere – so that it can now be used without explanation. Too late, alas, for the title of this book, which, being republished more or less as it stood, has for the sake of transparency to carry its original title. Similarly, the text throughout uses both ‘San’ and ‘|Xam’ in different contexts, reflecting the initial academic need to identify the people within the widest anthropological frame and at the same time be specific. The need to do so continues to be shared with most authors today, and we find the words ‘Bushmen’ and ‘San’ in common use alongside ‘|Xam’ in even the most recent texts.

      It would be very time-consuming and possibly pointless in the end also to allow the text of this book now to benefit from all the scholarship that has followed – tempting though that might be. This is particularly so because the work is fundamentally an analysis of narratives in relation to their specific ethnographic context insofar as that context is reconstructible from the ethnographic record in many of the texts collected by Bleek and Lloyd and from writings by early travellers, missionaries, local officials and so on. There is a strong argumentative thread – heavily structuralist – to this book, and its virtues – if virtues it has – will not lie in the comprehensiveness of its scholarship, but in the persuasiveness of its analysis and the logic of its arguments. Furthermore, that scholarship that has emerged since it was written speaks for itself.

      Hardly in mitigation of the slow genocidal process by which the |Xam had ceased to exist, but in a miraculous parenthesis to its final stages, the written record of |Xam culture, belief and oral tradition was constructed by the co-operative efforts of several |Xam people – five men and one woman – and the two Europeans, Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek. The constructed texts were subsequently explored, written about and partially published by Lucy Lloyd herself, then Dorothea Bleek, but by few others (see below). Between 1936 and 1973 they more or less disappeared from view. From the 1980s onwards, however, there was a gradual scholarly awakening to the power and uniqueness of the collection. The most important work to appear at that time was by archaeologist Jeanette Deacon, whose scrupulous research produced an outstanding paper that identified the exact location of the homes of Bleek and Lloyd’s collaborators: ‘“My place is Biterpits”: The home territory of Bleek and Lloyd’s |Xam San informants’.² Other papers by Deacon followed, culminating in a milestone edited book with T.A. Dawson in 1996.³

      That publication followed on from an important conference on the collection at UCT in the previous year, and also coincided with an exhibition of art, artifacts and other materials curated by Pippa Skotnes – now director of the Lucy Lloyd Archive, Resource and Exhibition Centre at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, UCT – that confronted the difficult moral and political dimensions of the relationship between the |Xam and the other inhabitants of South Africa and was entitled: ‘Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen’. It also involved the production of a book of the same name.⁴ One of the most important chapters in that book was the one by Tony Traill on the condition of the |Xam language in the last quarter of the 19th century.⁵ Given the inherent problems of the socio-linguistic reconstruction of that period and place, this was a deeply insightful and scholarly account that has, thankfully, been reproduced in Skotnes’ more recent, lavishly illustrated book on the collection, Claim to the Country.⁶

      There has been much work that made excellent use of the collection. Amongst the earliest was David Lewis-Williams’ ground-breaking book Believing and Seeing: Symbolic Meanings in Southern San Rock Paintings,⁷ as well as his more recent popular edited reproductions of many of the |Xam texts: Stories that Float from Afar.⁸ His early knowledge of the published work originally derived from the collection and subsequently of the collection itself was second to none, and his contribution to scholarship in the field has been immense. Mathias Guenther also drew on the collection in his comparative study of Nharo and |Xam oral traditions.⁹ Creative writers too have made use of the |Xam texts, and amongst these Alan James’ beautiful and informed engagement in The First Bushman’s Path stands out above the rest. It is, perhaps, the historians who have recently shed the most light on the important context of the |Xam texts. Firstly, there is Nigel Penn, whose excellent theorisation of the economic and social relations between the |Xam and the colonists in his The Forgotten Frontier¹⁰ provides a frame within which to understand the larger processes that brought about the ugly realities of |Xam extinction. Secondly, there is Andrew Bank’s brilliant and painstaking research into the minutest details of the relations between Bleek and Lloyd and each of the |Xam individuals who also brought the texts into being. His book, Bushmen in a Victorian World,¹¹ is a masterpiece of detection and exposition.