Wilhelm Bleek Research Articles

Historically informed performance: songs embedded in ǀXam stories

ABSTRACT This study examines songs incorporated into stories that were collected by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd from their ǀXam-speaking consultants in late nineteenth century South Africa. Although many of the stories in the Bleek–Lloyd corpus have been discussed by scholars in the fields of literature, anthropology, and history, no evidence exists that any of the songs have been performed since they were transcribed in 1879. This study aims to re-introduce several songs in the ǀXam language formerly spoken by small communities of San people from the northernmost sector of South Africa. We hope that these songs will be adopted by South African choirs to enrich their repertoires. Moreover, we aim to present ǀXam songs as the earliest examples of transcribed music in South Africa based on the melodic possibilities of the musical bow. We attempt to contextualise the songs through descriptions of the !Ui languages, music making of !Ui-speaking people, and influence of pitch production of the musical bow on the song melodies. Finally, we compare two sets of notated melodies of ǀXam songs separated by several years and present them as examples of music influenced by the musical bow in South Africa.

Four female Khoisan language translators across three centuries of Cape history: a morphogenetic analysis

Female translators are highly atypical in South African colonial history. Yet four important female translators appear on the scene who, interestingly, all translated or interpreted into or from Khoesan languages. Therefore, apart from their marginalised position as women, these translators are also linked to marginalised languages. These translators are Krotoa, a Khoe interpreter employed by colonial administrator Jan van Riebeeck, Zara Schmelen, a Nama mission assistant and Bible translator, and Lucy Lloyd and Dorothea Bleek, so-called Bushman researchers and relatives of the famous philologist Wilhelm Bleek. This article is interested in the ways in which the work of these early female translators expressed social conditioning and in the characteristics of their agency within a restrictive social space. The hindering and enabling factors involved in these women’s practice of translation and interpreting is analysed and particular attention is paid to the ideological characteristics of their work. In the analysis of the social characteristics of translation, Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach is employed. Archer’s approach involves an investigation of structure, culture and agency and the ways in which these contribute to cycles of social change (morphogenesis) or maintenance (morphostasis). With regard to agency, the analysis is guided by Archer’s terms primary agency (which results from social rank), corporate agency (which results from social organisation) and social actorship (which results from the unification of personal identity with social roles). The research finds that chance and male sanctioning were present in these women’s involvement in translation, but that a strong exercise of agency was present which was personally motivated. Agency involved no organisation, however, and neither sought nor achieved social change. Yet, three of the four translators were able to achieve social actorship, whereby their role as translators was successfully united with their personal identity.

‘van die oorspronklike lippe’ (‘from the original lips’): The 19th-Century Cape Colony, Holographic Archaeology and the Historicity of Gideon von Wielligh’s /xam–Afrikaans Collection

This article investigates the historicity of Gideon von Wielligh’s collection of /xam folklore, history, and observational accounts published predominantly in Afrikaans during the early 20th century. Von Wielligh’s collection is often portrayed as suspect in relation to the ‘great’ /xam archive, namely that of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd – with accusations of plagiarism a common charge. Through a holographic archaeological reading, an approach conceptualised by drawing on linguistic archaeology and philology specifically, and the holographic paradigm and archaeology of knowledge in general, the article analyses the traces of /xam in Von Wielligh’s otherwise Afrikaans texts. The reading focuses on Von Wielligh’s texts on the one hand and Specimens of Bushman Folklore (1911) on the other. Since Specimens was the only selection from the Bleek and Lloyd archive to which von Wielligh had access when he published his collection between 1919 and 1921, it is, within holographic archaeological terms, the ‘urtext’ or ‘source of certainty’. In contrast, von Wielligh’s texts are regarded as the ‘source of suspicion’, with the /xam linguistic data within it ‘dated’ in relation to Specimens. The analysis leads to the following three conclusions: first, von Wielligh’s command of /xam linguistic data validates the authenticity of the collection; second, we can use von Wielligh’s recordings to change the idea of the extant /xam archive in a way that challenges the fixation on Bleek and Lloyd; third, the politics of intellectual history, such as the defaming of von Wielligh, is tied not simply to ideas but to the history of the book as a material object. This acknowledgement and changed perspective on the /xam and the available records could, in turn, lead to deeper and more generative research on the /xam specifically, Khoesan studies generally and South (and southern) African studies more broadly.

Philological Reversion in Post-Apartheid South Africa: The Sand Writing and Alternate Alphabets of Willem Boshoff

Abstract This article focuses on the conceptual implications of specific works of contemporary artist and wordsmith Adriaan Willem Boshoff. Boshoff uses his creations to challenge the terms of the current debate around indigenous languages in southern Africa through artworks such as Blind Alphabet and his Sand Writing Series. These works call viewers to an emphatic return to an understanding of scripts (and the worlds they produce) as embodied systems of tradition that occupy the central place not only in the groups they serve, but indeed in a larger vision of a culturally tolerant and affirmative nation. The article tracks key South African educational policies such as the Apartheid era Bantu Education Act of 1953, and the Corrective Language Act of 1998 after the first democratic elections to contextualize the politics of legislative development in South Africa as related to indigenous scripts and languages. Beyond this bureaucratic history, the article foregrounds partisan agency that individuals such as Wilhelm Bleek, Lucy Lloyd and Magrieta Jantjies displayed as custodians of endangered scripts and languages, culminating in a discussion of the provocative works Boshoff created to stimulate critical thought on contemporaneous philological concerns in South Africa.

Peter Klatzow’s Words from a Broken String: two cultures meet in the distant past

Peter Klatzow’s short opera focuses on the figure of the English woman, Lucy Lloyd, in his portrayal of the interaction between the Victorian and ‘Bushman’ cultures in Southern Africa in the late 19th century. Apart from concentrating on Klatzow’s use of melodic gestures to represent the cultural interaction between two very different groups, this article looks beyond the relationship between music and libretto, discussing Lloyd’s involvement with the ‘Bushmen’ (the San, who refer to themselves as the |xam). The short survey of Lloyd’s and Wilhelm Bleek’s ‘Bushman’ research deals with four men whose narratives in the opera describe their daily existence and the folklore that represents the psyche of the |xam. The empirical section of the article shows how the composer shaped the musical material in order to represent the interaction between people of two different cultures. The search for musical signification finally promotes a better understanding of the mind and soul of the |xam.

Smoking Around the Campfire: A San Encounter with the Colonial

ABSTRACTIn 1873 Joseph Orpen, resident of Nomansland, engaged a San1 man Qing to guide a combined force of levies and mounted police through the Maloti mountains in present-day Lesotho where they hoped to intercept a group of reluctant Hlubi rebels under chief Langalibalele. Orpen was not only a colonial official but also a keen scholar. In response to his questions Qing commented on some of the rock paintings they saw on their short journey and recounted folklore. A year later Qing’s narratives and his comments on rock art were published along with Orpen’s account of the journey and ‘remarks’ by the celebrated linguist and collector of |Xam narrative, Wilhelm Bleek in an article in the Cape Monthly Magazine (CMM). Orpen’s piece has enjoyed a seminal position in San studies ever since, especially in the field of rock art. The encounter between Qing and Orpen occurred in a context of colonial violence. Not only was the campaign that was being pursued against Langalibalele and his men unnecessary but the San had been subject to genocidal attacks by both regular and irregular colonial forces for a considerable period of time, and the studies of San rock art and narrative at the time were largely carried out in an intellectual climate that saw the extinction of the San as inevitable. This article will locate the CMM article more firmly in its colonial context by combining a close reading of elements of the CMM article itself with a consideration of a wider body of writing that relates to Orpen’s piece.

Debating Darwin at the Cape

This paper focuses attention on the fortunes of Darwin's theory among the English-speaking community in Cape Colony during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The paper begins with a review of early encounters with Darwin dwelling particularly on the response of figures like Roderick Noble - professor and editor of the Cape Monthly Magazine, the geologist John Shaw, and Sir Henry Barkly, governor of the colony. Besides these more theoretical responses, Darwin's ideas were also mobilised in a range of scientific inquiries on such subjects as birds and butterflies. But most conspicuous was the use of evolutionary thought-forms in the work of the eminent philologist Wilhelm Bleek, cousin of Darwin's leading German apologist, Ernst Haeckel. The prevailing sense is of a liberal intelligentsia calmly interacting with a novel theory with all due deference. During the 1870s, an address by Langham Dale at the South African Public Library injected new energy into the Darwin discussion. Dale expressed disquiet over some of the anthropological implications of evolution as well as its apparent reductionism, and this stimulated a range of reactions. Several anonymous commentators responded but the most sustained evaluation of Dale's position emanated from the Queenstown physician and later politician, Sir William Bisset Berry. Then, in 1874, copious extracts from John Tyndall's infamous 'Belfast Address' were printed in the Cape Monthly and this added yet further impetus to the debate. Tyndall's seeming materialism bothered a number of readers, not least Hon William Porter, former attorney-general of Cape Colony. To figures like these the materialist extrapolations of radical Darwinians such as Haeckel were deeply disturbing, not just for religious reasons, but because they seemed to destabilise the moral and pedagogic progressivism that lay at the heart of their civilising credo. While reservations about Darwin's proposals were certainly audible, taken in the round Darwinian conversations among the English-speaking literati at the Cape were conducted with liberal sentiments, not least when evolutionary science approached questions of race. For Darwin's writings were seen to confirm a monogenetic account of the origin and unity of the human race, and could readily be called upon to justify the paternalistic ideology that governed colonial affairs.

Performing the archive and re-archiving memory: Magnet Theatre's Museum and Reminiscence Theatre

In this article I examine the performance of Magnet Theatre's Tears Become Rain and also make reference to several other performances by the same company. My major thrust is to evaluate Magnet Theatre's Clanwilliam Art Project against its set objectives, using Tears Become Rain as a starting point. Tears Become Rain was a single performance of one of the stories of //Kabbo. Every year the creative collective comprising Magnet Theatre, and the University of Cape's Departments of Fine Art and Archaeology chooses a narrative from one of the 2000 notebooks containing 13,000 pages of oral stories transcribed by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. These oral narratives are verbatim accounts of the San ex-prisoner, //Kabbo, and a small number of informants who temporarily lived with the writers in Cape Town between 1870 and 1884. This creative collective has been working with close to 700 learners of Clanwilliam aged between five and 18 for eight days each year to produce a performance that gets to be watched by the broader Clanwilliam community including parents, friends and family. One of the objectives of the creative collective is to attempt to reclaim the heritage of the /Xam by reconnecting story and landscape by putting that heritage to work in the Clanwilliam community. It is this performance of the past, its curation and archiving in the present that I want to problematize in this article. I argue that the archive is both a repository filled with random survivals of the past and also a closet that erases or closes out other knowledges. I problematize the notion of preservation of heritage seeing that the San in their nineteenth-century phenotype have completely disappeared in Clanwilliam together with their language and repertoire of embodied acts.

Myths for Survival: Elias Canetti’s Masse und Macht

Myths for Survival:Elias Canetti’s Masse und Macht David D. Kim (bio) In den Märchen der Nationen kehrt dieVerwandlung von Menschen in Tier alsStrafe wieder. In einen Tierleib gebanntzu sein, gilt als Verdammnis. Kindernund Völkern ist die Vorstellung solcherMetamorphosen unmittelbar verständlichund vertraut. —Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung I On 10 December 1981, the polyglot Bulgarian-born Austrian-Jewish writer Elias Canetti had the rare honor to give a speech at the Nobel Banquet. Having been awarded the eminent prize in literature, he used this special occasion to reflect on his indebtedness to Europe despite its “grosse Schuld” (“Elias Canetti—Banquet Speech”). Even after the two World Wars, he said, he stood on the shoulders of four Austrian literary giants—Karl Kraus, Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch, and Robert Musil—whose oeuvres had taught him to resist war, oppression, and death. At a particularly vexed time for Europe, their works had shown him the arts of survival. Perhaps this encomium was not unexpected from a writer who had remained loyal to the German language through more than forty years of living abroad. In addition [End Page 623] to German, Canetti spoke Ladino, English, Bulgarian, and French, but it was those German-speaking modernists from the bygone Habsburg Empire who had helped him understand how to escape from violent death on a profoundly troubled continent. According to Canetti, Kraus had immunized him “gegen Krieg,” while Kafka was opening his eyes to the imaginative possibility of “sich ins Kleine zu verwandeln und sich so der Macht zu entziehen.” Broch was a close friend of his who had illustrated the value of “Atmen,” while Musil’s “Waghalsigkeit” to dwell on a single work without knowing whether it would ever be completed had impressed him greatly. For Canetti, these writers had sustained his life through the Great Wars. At first glance, this homage seems perfectly sensible, but upon closer examination it raises questions that cultural and literary scholars have not addressed thus far: why doesn’t Canetti consider any of their works to be “das wichtigste Buch” in his life (Nachträge 32)? How is it possible that Die Verwandlung or Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften does not claim this distinction? Canetti admits that it actually goes to an ethnographic work, a large reservoir of exotic Bushmen myths in English translation. It is called Specimens of Bushman Folklore (1911). In Nachträge aus Hampstead (1994), a collection of Canetti’s earlier writings published in the year of his death, the book is described as follows: Dieses Buch befindet sich seit 1944, seit 16 Jahren, in meinem Besitz. Ich habe oft geglaubt, daß es das wichtigste Buch ist, das ich kenne. Wenn es auf die Konzentration von Unbekanntem in einem Buch ankommt, so ist es mein wichtigstes Buch: ich habe am meisten daraus gelernt, und es ist noch immer nicht erschöpft. (32) Without being specific about what he means by the unknown or the unfamiliar, Canetti celebrates the work of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd as an unexhausted source of foreignness. He goes so far as to call himself “ein Lehrling der Buschmänner” (162). And in Masse und Macht (1960), a work he considers his magnum opus, this ethnography is again celebrated as “das kostbarste Dokument der frühen Menschheit” (385). This tribute is remarkable, even startling; for how can an ethnographic text, then little known and now long forgotten, trump every other book in Canetti’s bibliophilic collection? The peculiar role that Bushman mythology plays in Canetti’s writing has recently attracted much attention, and this article contributes to the interdisciplinary debate by examining a particular set of representations in Specimens of Bushman Folklore as the principal foundation [End Page 624] for his distinctly literary imagination of politics and society.1 My claim is that Canetti arrives at reading Bushman mythology as a cultural imaginary of survival in ‘cruel modernity and the task of uncovering thsi work. requires a systematic inquiry into sedimented layers of interpretation, as Canetti moves between poetic language, political philosophy, and ethnographic narrative.2 More specifically, the text takes readers to Bushman myths about porcupines via theoretical...

The boer and the jackal: satire and resistance in Khoi orature

In the context of considerable scholarly and popular attention focused on Bushman narratives over the last 30 years, much of it centred on analyses and retellings of the Bleek and Lloyd archive, there has been much less attention paid to Khoi story-telling and the comparative insights made possible by such a study. The monumental work on the ∣Xam carried out by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd in the 1870s and 1880s has overshadowed Bleek's own earlier studies of Khoi folklore. Soon after his arrival in Cape Town and his appointment as Lord Grey's librarian, Bleek had started to solicit Bushman and Khoi folktales from missionaries stationed in the remoter areas of the colonies, and in 1864 a collection of 42 of these translated oral narratives was published in London as Reynard the Fox in South Africa; or Hottentot fables and tales. The book is South Africa's earliest publication of indigenous literature, and it remains one of the most important collections of Khoi orature. This article has two interrelated interests: first, drawing attention to the largely neglected area of Khoi orature, and second, developing an argument about the similarities and differences between Khoi story-telling and Bushman narratives. It is in this context that the contradistinctive idea of satire will be explored which is, in Khoi orature, associated with the transgressive trickster figure of the wily jackal. In Khoi stories the jackal is an attractive, roguish figure who is able to outwit the powerful – in particular, predators such as lions. In ∣Xam story-telling on the other hand, the jackal did not function as a trickster but was associated with negative connotations such as cunning, cowardice and selfishness, qualities that did not allow him to become a figure of identification. Such a bifurcation, this article will suggest, was not without political consequence in the often violent 19th-century Cape frontier.

Wilhelm Bleek and the Khoisan Imagination: A Study of Censorship, Genocide and Colonial Science

In 1864, Wilhelm Bleek published a collection of Khoi narratives titled Reynard the Fox in South Africa, or Hottentot Fables and Tales. This article critically examines this foundational event in South African literary history, arguing that it entailed a Victorian circumscription of the Khoisan imagination, containing its libidinal and transgressive energies within the generic limits of the naïve European children's folktale. Bleek's theories of language and race are examined as providing the context for his editorial approach to Khoi narratives in which the original ‘nakedness’ was written out. The extent of Bleek's censorship of indigenous orature becomes visible when comparing his ‘fables’ to a largely unknown corpus of Khoi tales, collected by the German ethnographer Leonhard Schultze during the Nama genocide in the early twentieth century. The article compares these collections of oral narratives, and suggests that this has implications for the way the famous Bleek and Lloyd /Xam archive was subsequently constituted in the 1870s. Wilhelm Bleek's interventions in civilising the Khoisan imagination marks a move away from a potentially Rabelaisian trajectory in South African literature through which the Khoisan could be represented and represent themselves. In admitting a sanitised indigenous orature into the colonial literary order, it is argued that Bleek helped to create a restrictive cultural politics in South Africa from which the country is yet to emerge fully.

Notes towards a history of Khoi literature

This article puts forward a revisionist history of Khoi literature, and also presents a number of translated Khoi narratives that have not been available in English before. Compared to the large volume of Bushman literature and scholarship, there has been very little Khoi literature and engagement with it, and an argument is presented to account for this gap in South African cultural history. Until now, the major source of Khoi literature was Wilhelm Bleek's Reynard the Fox in South Africa (1864. London: Trübner), and this text is critically interrogated as a limiting version of Khoi orature. An alternative corpus of Khoi narratives is presented that was originally published in Leonhard Schultze's Aus Namaland und Kalahari (1907. Jena: Gustav Fischer).

Notes towards a history of Khoi literature

This article puts forward a revisionist history of Khoi literature, and also presents a number of translated Khoi narratives that have not been available in English before. Compared to the large volume of Bushman literature and scholarship, there has been very little Khoi literature and engagement with it, and an argument is presented to account for this gap in South African cultural history. Until now, the major source of Khoi literature was Wilhelm Bleek's Reynard the Fox in South Africa (1864. London:Trübner), and this text is critically interrogated as a limiting version of Khoi orature. An alternative corpus of Khoi narratives is presented that was originally published in Leonhard Schultze's Aus Namaland und Kalahari (1907. Jena: Gustav Fischer).

Writing San Histories: The /Xam and ‘Shamanism’ Revisited

The oral narratives and personal accounts given by the /Xam of the northern Cape, and recorded by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, have played a key role in interpretations of rock art and of southern San culture, recent and ancient, generally. However, the validity of the account that relates the /Xam texts to supposed shamanic practices is an issue requiring attention. The texts are open to other readings that do not support the notion that ‘altered states’ are central in the thought of diverse San groups. Insofar as its methods and ‘neuropsychological’ foundations produce an account of a unified and largely uniform San cultural identity, the shamanistic reading sacrifices historicity and a more nuanced understanding of San pasts and lived experiences. As an alternative to positivist and structuralist accounts, phenomenology is an approach that is of relevance to under-explored issues regarding the writing of San (cultural) histories by archaeologists, anthropologists and other scholars.

Representing Bushmen: South Africa and the Origin of Language (review)

Reviewed by: Representing Bushmen: South Africa and the Origin of Language Hedley Twidle Representing Bushmen: South Africa and the Origin of Language. By Shane Moran. (Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009). "We move upon a giddy height when we attempt to know the direction of the world's development" - so runs the opening line of an 1868 monograph by the Prussian-born philologist Wilhelm Bleek, Über den Ursprung der Sprache (On the Origin of Language). With a preface by the fervent Darwinist Ernst Haeckel (Bleek's cousin), it was just one of a flood of nineteenth-century exercises in comparative philology which attempted to map evolutionary theory onto the study of language and to divine linguistic origins as a master-key to human history: "the living and speaking witness of the whole history of our race", as Friedrich Max Müller put it in 1862, "an unbroken chain of speech" carrying one back beyond cuneiform and hieroglyphics to "the first utterances of the human mind."1 Bleek's unusual career would take him from the universities of Bonn and Berlin to southern Africa and from such rarefied (and now obsolete) theorising to a much more practical encounter with a specific language community. In 1870, following a request to the governor of the Cape Colony, he obtained permission to have an inmate from Cape Town's Breakwater Convict Station transferred to his villa. Over the next fourteen years, he and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd would accommodate a succession of individuals from four extended families of |Xam-ka !ei: a people descended from one branch of the indigenous inhabitants of southern Africa who had no collective name for themselves, but were known to the Dutch as Bosjemans, to the English as Bushmen, and to the cattle-owning Khoekhoen as Sonqua, Soaqua or San. In colonial suburbia, individuals like Diä!kwain (David Hoesar), |Han≠kass”o (Klein Jantje) and ||Kabbo (Oud Jantje Tooren) were received first as convicts on parole, servants and “native informants” for Bleek’s abstruse philological enquiries, yet increasingly as valued teachers, storytellers, artists and (in Lloyds phrase) “givers of native literature.”2 The Bleek and Lloyd Collection now comprises the most important written record of the earliest expressive cultures of southern Africa: some 150 notebooks filled with phonetic notations of the languages once spoken by southern Africa's Xam and !Kung peoples with English translations alongside that run to some 13,000 pages.3 Its rediscovery has been one of the major events of South African scholarship in the last decades, bringing together archaeology, linguistics, literature, museum display, rock art studies and cultural politics, often controversially, in an attempt to explicate an archive that is by turns mythical and autobiographical, violent and comic, digressive, impenetrable, poetic and greatly moving. That, at least, is how the story is most often told, and it is precisely this narrative that Shane Moran sets out to contest. Following a series of articles in which he recast titles from the collection in order to reverse the ethnographic gaze - offering accounts of "Specimens of 'Bushman' Studies" and "Customs and Beliefs of Bleek and Lloyd Scholarship" within the contemporary academy - we now have a dense and wide-ranging work that is bracingly impatient with the atmosphere of piety, melancholia and veneration that surrounds the archive.4 In the received, optimistic narrative, Bleek, a man ahead of his time, sets aside his philological endeavours and his unfinished Comparative Grammar of South African languages to devote his attention to a culture that is fast disappearing. In so doing, he performs a valuable service to the future, multiracial nation state; after all, the national Coat of Arms unveiled by President Thabo Mbeki on 27 April 2000 carries as its motto a sentence written in Xam, preserving the nineteenth-century orthography of the notebooks to record its various clicks.5 Morans approach, however, is suspicious of the "historically sedimented figuration" of the Bushmen as "exemplary indigenes" (8), and much of his book seeks to show Bleeks "contribution to, and appropriation by, racial thinking" (15), suggesting that this feted scholar of African languages (and populariser of the descriptor "Bantu") should also be seen as the country's first...

The Universal and the Local: the Trickster and the /Xam Narratives

Not surprisingly, considering that they comprise so rich a record of the language and orature of a culture that has all but disappeared, the materials that resulted from the combined efforts of Wilhelm Bleek, Lucy Lloyd, and /Xam informants such as //Kabbo, Dia!kwain and /A!kungta in the 1870’s, have generated growing scholarly, artistic and popular interest. Among the body of academic work that has been produced in response to the collection is some that seeks to closely analyse the materials themselves as texts. The study of the figure of /Kaggen, the Mantis, has been central to the project of interpreting the /Xam narratives. Although critics differ about his role in /Xam narratives and /Xam culture, the characterisation of /Kaggen as the /Xam trickster is reproduced in all the writing on him. This article seeks to question this reading of /Kaggen. Instead of an approach that identifies /Kaggen as the local representative of a universal type, I will argue for an interpretation that locates /Kaggen within /Xam discourse itself.

Outposts: Literary Landmarks & Events

outposts LiteraryLandmarks& Events Bubanza, Burundi Withgratitudeto the Honorable Etienne Ndayishimiye, Evariste Ndikumana, and Claude Nikondeha. Editorial note:Towatch a video demonstration of the grass-oven firingof pots, and toviewadditional photos of traditional Batwa dances, visit theonlineversion of this Outpost on our website (www. worldliteraturetoday.com). To read moreof the/Xam poetry byDi?lkwain,see TheStarsSay "Tsau" (2004), ed. Antjie Krog. David Shook isfinishing his graduatethesisat theUniversity ofOxfordunderthesupervision of Jamie McKendrick. His work has appeared in PEN International Magazine, Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angelesbuttravels frequently through Africaand Latin America. He isa frequent contributor to World Literature Today. Composing less than 5 percent of Burundi's totalpopulation, theBatwa were itsorigi nal inhabitants, colonized and displaced since the turnof the first millennium by theHutus, and later by the Tutsis as well. Originally a for est-dwelling culture, theBatwa survive today as a landless people, their forcedmigrations across the region subject to thewhims of theBurundian gov ernment.The Batwa are related to other communi ties throughout theCongo, commonly referred to as Pygmies, a term theBatwa reject as derogatory. The community experiences routine tribaldiscrimi nation at all levels of society, especially within the educational system.Many were murdered indis criminately during the ethnic conflicts that have plagued the region, culrninatingmost recently in the 1990s. Their permanent exile from theirhome forests is a crucial influenceon their identityas a commu nity, and it is reflected in their art and literature. The Batwa continue to produce their traditional pottery, despite decreasing economic incentives to do so.With imported plastic replacing most of thepottery's domestic uses, most Twa potters earn well under a dollar per pot, which can take up to a week to produce. The coiled pots aremade from local clay, fired in grass-fed, open-air pits. These self-incineratingkilns harden the clay and temper it with a slight smokiness. Although nowritten Batwa literatureyet exists, theBatwa storyand song traditions thrive.Though seldom recognized, Batwa music and dance has deeply influenced Tutsi and especially Hutu tradi tions. "We like somuch todance. Itgives us peace/' says Evariste Ndikumana, one of a handful of Twa students to successfully complete postsecondary education. "We put on the leg-bells and play the ingoma drums, we wear special clothes and a cap with longhair, and we sing and dance." In Batwa culture, dance is considered less per formance than ritual. Characterized by rhythmic foot stomping, hopping, and shoulder swaying, the contemporary dance tradition is centuries old. It connects the Batwa to the forests fromwhich they'vebeen expelled. It is an expression of longing fora homeland no longer theirown. Their situation echoes thatof the /Xam bush men from South Africa, who were displaced to thepoint of theirdisappearance in the late 1870s. German philologist Wilhelm Bleek and his sister in-law Lucy Lloyd collected /Xam poetry and art, including thework ofDi?!kwain, who wrote of the homeland thatno longerbelonged tohim: theplace does not feel to me as theplace used to feel to me ... theplace feel strange to me The Batwa have chosen to continue to create and survive inexile; both their physical and cultural survival depends on theirresourceful responses to exile, and theyare succeeding. - David Shook ...

Claim to the country: the archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek

Claim to the country: the archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek

‘Stories like the wind’: Recontextualising /Xam narratives for contemporary audiences

For the San, stories inhabited the landscape. They floated on the wind, coming from a distance, behind the backs of mountains and along well-travelled tracks. They drifted towards those who were alert to them, those who sat waiting for them to float into their ears. We know these things because they were told by //Kabbo, a /Xam elder, to the German-born linguist Wilhelm Bleek in the 1870s. //Kabbo's words were written down in a phonetic script devised by Bleek and translated into English.

Caring for a South African Treasure: Preserving the Bleek and Lloyd Collection at University of Cape Town Libraries

In the papers of Dr Wilhelm Bleek, Lucy Lloyd and Dorothea Bleek we have a unique record of the San peoples, in particular the /Xam people, of whom none now remain. The importance of the collections held at University of Cape Town Libraries (UCT), the National Library of South Africa and the South African Museum is recognised by their listing in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. Increasing use of the records by scholars, as well as the need to preserve this valuable South African heritage demands that we find ways both of making it more easily accessible and of preserving it. The collection includes notebooks (over 12,000 pages of the stories and histories of the /Xam and /Kung informants), artworks, photographs and correspondence. A project has recently been completed at UCT Libraries to digitise an album of photographs taken by Dorothea Bleek on several expeditions between 1910 and the late 1920s. While a selection of the photographs has been made available on the web, a major advantage in having the album accessible in electronic form is that the originals no longer have to be handled. The paper deals with the digital imaging project, as well as other work that has been done or is planned regarding preservation of the collection. ESARBICA Journal Vol.22 2003: 37-42