‘He Who is a Devourer of Things’: Monstrosity and the Construction of Difference in |Xam Bushman Oral Literature

Abstract

Representations of hunter-gatherer pasts are often stymied by the difficulties of escaping colonial depictions. Explorations of hunter-gatherer historicity require an understanding of their axes of social differentiation, deployed in processes of persuasion, coercion, and judgement. This article discusses the presentation of the ‘monstrous’ in the oral literature of the |Xam Bushmen, nineteenth-century hunter-gatherers of the Northern Cape (South Africa). Drawing on the Bleek–Lloyd archive, it examines the characteristics that these people considered emblematic of the grotesque, and discusses the ways in which these figures were deployed to create social pressures enjoining people to behave in particular ways. The article looks at how these notions were used by |Xam individuals to characterize and understand their interactions with an internally differentiated |Xam society, and with non-|Xam groups.