Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San. Roger Hewitt
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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 se punn a.
we will go behind him.)
The Ichneumon:
!Khe, !khe, ng !koing !arruxu, kwa: ka |ne di ts-a de
‘Tse, ‘tse, ng tshuing tsarruxu, kwa: kan dje djit ts-a de
(Oh, oh, what has my grandfather !arruxu done
hing e !e e: hi k”auki se ||khwai?
hing e tse e: hi k”auki tse tswai?
so that these people will not chew (meat) ?)
(B. XXIV, 2266f; B. XIV,
1365; B. XXIV, 2251).
These distortions of ordinary speech represent, as Bleek says, observations on the shape and position of the mouths of various animals.4
Here the texts provide one of the few insights into the nature of live performances, where the vitality and imitative powers of the |Xam narrators had consequences in the language itself. Other indications of the style of performance, such as the use of song and chant are, perhaps, more predictable, although not without interest.
Songs in narrative, like most of the songs collected by Bleek and Lloyd, tend to be brief, unelaborated statements repeated several times. Thus in the story of the young woman who disobeyed her mother, and later trapped her breast in a cleft rock, the woman in question returned home singing:
Ng !khwai-tu si tauna-taunu,
Ng !khwai-tu si tauna-taunu,
Ng !khwai tu si tauna-taunu.
(My nipple will grow into shape again.) (ibid., L. VIII, (32) 8821–42)
Very occasionally songs will tell more of the story, as in this song from an old woman whose family had been forced by drought and hunger to abandon her and who had escaped from the hyena which came to kill her:
!Gwãi tara,
!gwãi tara,
|kammang |kammang ho |nu tara au ||kau:.
|Nu tara i kykui,
hangǂko: shing sha;
hang koang |hing
hang !kuarre !gwãi,
!gwãi ||e
!gwãing |ki !gwãi.
(The old she-hyena, the old she-hyena, was carrying off the old woman from the old hut. In this way the old woman sprang aside: she got up, she beat the hyena. The hyena killed herself.) (Bleek &Lloyd 1911: 228)
There is no record of musical instruments of any kind being used to accompany kukummi so it must be assumed that songs such as these arose naturally in the course of narration with no special break or other circumstance introducing them.
Often in the texts, short chants and reiterated phrases are used. These, like the songs quoted above, are put into the mouths of the characters and are part of the dramatic materials used by the narrator to maintain the energy of the performance and keep the attention of his audience.
The extensive use of dialogue mentioned above is a distinctive feature of many of the narratives in the collection. Some narratives employ dialogue much more than others, but all use it a great deal. It occurs naturally during the action of narratives, but, when the action is over, events may be endlessly discussed by the characters, argued about, seen from different points of view and told from the perspectives of even quite peripheral characters. Often narratives will not return to the narrator’s own voice but conclude in mid-discussion in the voice of one of the characters. A very strong sense of the actors as a community, rather than a collection of inter-acting individuals, is conveyed by this emphasis on discussion. Its presence in the narratives seems to be a reflection of real |Xam life where, as Dorothea Bleek said in the passage quoted above, people were ‘talking – always talking’ and ‘every event … was told and retold’.
Occasionally, whole stories are recounted from the point of view of one character, whose special view of things colours our comprehension of events. Long discourses by certain animals also conclude or form a substantial part of kukummi. In the narratives about the trickster, |Kaggen, |Kaggen’s grandson, the Ichneumon, is the one who characteristically engages in this kind of thing. In another small group of narratives, the Anteater and the Lynx lay down at great length the rules by which the animals should make appropriate marriages. Again, elsewhere, the ‘Dawn’s Heart star’ (Jupiter), personified, is given a speech, lasting several hundred columns of text, which discusses not only his own family and history, but also deals with the sun, moon and stars and the habits of various animals. A few narratives were also collected which consist almost entirely of dialogue. Speech was, as it were, the formal protagonist of narrative; an extension into fiction of that ever-present surface of |Xam life.
While it is true that many kukummi do have a strong educational flavour, it is very rarely the case that a moral is overtly drawn from a narrative by a narrator