Endnotes
1See Pippa Skotnes. 2007. Claim to the Country: The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek. Cape Town: Jacana and Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 160–167.
2J. Deacon, ‘“My place is Biterpits”: The home territory of Bleek and Lloyd’s |Xam San informants’, African Studies, 45 (2), 1986, 135–155.
3J. Deacon and T.A. Dawson. 1996. Voices from the Past: |Xam Bushmen and the Bleek and Lloyd Collection. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.
4Pippa Skotnes (ed.). 1996. Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen. University of Cape Town.
5Anthony Traill. 1996. ‘!Khwa-Ka Hhouiten-Hhouiten: The linguistic death of the |Xam’, in Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen, edited by Pippa Skotnes, pp. 161–182. University of Cape Town.
6Skotnes, 2007.
7David Lewis Williams. 1981. Believing and Seeing: Symbolic Meanings in Southern San Rock Painting. London: Academic Press.
8David Lewis Williams (ed.). 2000. Stories that Float from Afar: Ancestral Folklore of the San of Southern Africa. Cape Town: David Philip.
9Mathias Guenther. 1989. Bushman Folktales: Oral Traditions of the Nharo of Botswana and the |Xam of the Cape. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.
10Nigel Penn. 2005. The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the 18th Century. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press and Cape Town: Double Storey Books.
11Andrew Bank. 2006. Bushmen in a Victorian World: The Remarkable Story of the Bleek-Lloyd Collection of Bushman Folklore. Cape Town: Double Storey Books.
12Pippa Skotnes (ed.) (2005–2007), Lloyd and Bleek online, LLAREC: <http://www.lloydbleekcollection.uct.ac.za>, and on DVD in: Claim to the Country.
13Biographical details concerning W.H.I. Bleek can be found in Bank (2006).
14The collection is now contained in the UCT Library, the National Library and the Iziko South Africa Museum.
15‘Part I: Baboons’, Vol. 5 (1931), 167–179; ‘Part II: The Lion’, ‘Part III: Game Animals’, ‘Part IV: Omens, Windmaking, Clouds’, Vol. 6 (1932), 47–63, 233–249, 323–342; ‘Part V: The Rain’, Vol. 7 (1933), 297–312; ‘Part VI: Rainmaking’, Vol. 8 (1933), 375–392; ‘Part VII: Sorcerors’, Vol. 9 (1935), 1–47; ‘Part VIII: More about Sorcerors and Charms’, Vol. 10 (1936), 132–162. Much of this is reproduced in J.C. Hollman (ed.). 2004. Customs and Beliefs of the |Xam Bushmen. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.
16Bantu Studies, Vol. 10 (1936), 163–203.
17Neil Bennun. 2004. The Broken String: The Last Words of an Extinct People. London: Viking.
18See Skotnes (1996) and Penn (2005).
19Traill, 1996; Anthony Traill. 2002. ‘The Khoisan language’, in Language in South Africa, edited by R. Mesthrie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
20While an ethnographic background to the texts is given in Chapter 1, further ethnographic data are contained throughout the book where this illuminates aspects of the narratives discussed. Further ethnography may also be found in Appendix A, which gives an account of girls’ puberty observances, and Appendix B, which deals with the shamans of the |Xam.
21In the following chapters, frequent reference is made to Bleek and Lloyd’s manuscript notebooks. Reference takes the following form: the collector’s name is indicated by the initial letter, B for Bleek or L for Lloyd, which is followed by a Roman numeral indicating either a particular notebook, in the case of the texts collected by Bleek, or a particular informant, in the case of the texts collected by Lloyd. The Roman numerals assigned to the six main informants were: I, |A!kungta; II, ||Kabbo; III, ǂKasing; IV, Dia!kwain; V, !Kweiten ta ||ken; VIII, |Hang ǂkass’o. Where Lloyd’s notebooks are referred to, this Roman numeral is followed by two Arabic numerals, the first, in brackets, indicating the initial notebook, the second indicating the page. In the case of Bleek’s notebooks, the Roman numeral is the notebook number and the Arabic numeral that follows is, therefore, the page reference.
1
Ethnographic background
The |Xam once occupied much of the Calvinia, Prieska and Kenhardt districts of the Republic of South Africa. Their language, with only slight regional differences, was spoken in many parts of the country west of Port Elizabeth and south of the Gariep River. It is likely, but not certain, that all of the speakers of this language called themselves the |Xam.1
All of these |Xam-speakers are now extinct; many thousands were killed off by white farmers and others, between the early 18th and late 19th centuries. By the first decade of the 20th century numbers were so depleted and their culture so eroded that extinction became inevitable. In the northwestern Cape this process had begun much later than elsewhere because the inhospitable climate and poor farming conditions discouraged white settlement. The northwestern Cape, therefore, formed a pocket in which the San survived longer than they did further to the east and south. However, after the mid-19th century, penetration by the farmers into even this arid country caused severe reductions in the numbers of game animals as farmers hunted with firearms. At the same time the farmers’ cattle broke up the soil crust which supported the plant-life upon which the |Xam relied for much of their food. The livelihood of the |Xam was threatened and many were forced to seek employment on the farms.
By the 1870s the process of cultural disintegration was well under way. There is, unfortunately, no information of the extent to which traditional life in this area was maintained under the pressure of European penetration. The texts collected by Bleek and Lloyd often make reference to the beliefs and customs of the informants’ parents, as though these were no longer current. On the other hand, some accounts of rituals, beliefs and social customs are also described as part of contemporary life. This may indicate that while the life of the |Xam in the Cape was being rapidly destroyed, much still remained intact at the time of collection.
By being both a record of current practices and beliefs, and also containing ethnographic data relating to the period before European settlement in the northwestern Cape, the Bleek and Lloyd texts are the primary source of ethnographic information relating to the |Xam. A number of official papers, and the writings of various missionaries and travellers also provide additional information on these and other |Xam-speaking San; most of this was written in the late 18th century and the first half of the 19th century. As the Bleek and Lloyd collection was made in the 1870s, the time-span covered by this body of data is approximately 100 years.
The area which was inhabited by |Xam-speakers consists, in the main, of semi-desert with a mean annual rainfall of below 5 inches in the northwest, to 15 inches in the east. The period of heaviest rainfall is between January and April when the monthly mean ranges between 0.5 to 3 inches from west to east. In the northwest the dominant vegetation is largely short bushes, grasses and occasional thorn trees poking from the pebbles, rock fragments and sand, which cover a thin layer of sandy loam. Dry river-beds, which flow for a few days during some rainy months, course this region in places but the main water sources are the 11 ‘pans’
