Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San. Roger Hewitt
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is not credited with a human personality and never appears in the narratives in human form. In one instance he appears as an eland but most often he is a bull. He also takes the form of actual water and is described as appearing on the ground as a long shallow pool in the shape of a bull. In other narratives he does not actually appear but transforms people into frogs, snakes, and porcupines. He is always represented as threatening and the narratives concerning him appear to have been an important support for the beliefs and practices concerning menstruation.
The largest single group of narratives in the collection, and no doubt the best known, is that concerned with the trickster |Kaggen whom Dorothea Bleek (1929a: 305) describes as ‘the favourite hero of all |kham folklore’. Like !Khwa he was also part of religious belief, and stories and beliefs about him have been recorded from many parts of the Republic of South Africa although, in some instances, with marked differences in his nature in both narrative and belief. The further east he is found, the more his religious nature resembles that of a deity credited with having created everything in the world and prayed to for food (Orpen, op. cit.; Stow, op. cit., 119f, 134; Arbousset & Daumas 1846: 253ff; Potgieter 1955: 29). Amongst the |Xam, however, this aspect of him was undeveloped and instead he is presented as primarily working against their interests. The stories about him for the most part situate him in a family context where his impish personality frequently brings him into conflict with others. Unlike !Khwa, he does have a distinctively human personality and in the majority of the narratives the action centres on what he does. !Khwa’s presence in narratives, however, is only ever consequential upon the actions of others.
These groupings of |Xam kukummi are too broad to do full justice to the richness of the collection, but they do provide a general framework within which particular narratives or clusters of narratives can be discussed. Unsurprisingly, the narratives which come closest to them in terms of themes, motifs and plots are those of other San groups but there are many points at which they overlap with and show the influence of the narrative tradition of the Khoe-khoen. Indeed, it has been argued that in narrative as in many other cultural aspects, the distinction between what is San and what is Khoe-khoe can be at best only vague (Wilson & Thompson, op. cit., ix, 41ff; Tobias 1957; Schmidt 1975). The famous story of the Moon and Hare, describing the origin of death, has been found widely distributed throughout both San and Khoe-khoe groups. Seven versions of this narrative were collected by Bleek and Lloyd, three of them from ǂKasing, whose father was a !Kora. Also in this collection is a version of the story of the woman who transformed herself into a lion, given by |A!kungta, which Bleek had acquired earlier from another source and published in his anthology of Khoe-khoen lore, Reynard the Fox in South Africa (1864). Similarly, a few narratives featuring the Khoe-khoe trickster, the Jackal, were collected from Bleek and Lloyd’s informants – three from ǂKasing and one each from ||Kabbo and Dia!kwain.
There are almost no signs of Bantu influence on |Xam kukummi. In only one case is it possible to discern the presence of Bantu oral tradition, and in that instance much modification has taken place in order to accommodate the narrative to the |Xam socio-cultural setting (see Chapter 10). Contact between the |Xam and the Bantu-speaking peoples was late and intermittent, whereas trading was carried out between the |Xam and the Khoe-khoen, inter-marriage was common and, as Shula Marks (1972) has pointed out, in situations where San acquired cattle the Khoe-khoen became devoid of them, cultural distinctions became blurred.
The long process of extermination to which the |Xam were subjected continued late into the 19th century. The few remaining San lived in fear of random attacks by ‘commandos’. Cultural extinction was also threatened ‘as the |Xam took to menial farm work for the white farmers. In 1929 Dorothea Bleek (1929a: 311f) wrote:
Fifty years ago every adult Bushman knew all his people’s lore. A tale begun by a person from one place could be finished by someone from another place at a later date.7 In 1910 I visited the northern parts of the Cape Colony and found the children, nephews and nieces of some of the former informants among the few Bushmen still living there. Not one of them knew a single story. On my reading some of the old texts a couple of old men recognised a few customs and said, ‘I once heard my people tell that’. But the folklore was dead, killed by a life of service among strangers and the breaking up of families.
The collection made by Bleek and Lloyd indeed represents an opportunity taken which was soon to disappear. In the chapters which follow, these narratives are discussed in several groupings: the legends and the narratives involving !Khwa are discussed together, these being the only narratives in which, with the exception of !Khwa himself, the characters are not associated either with animals or with celestial bodies. The sidereal and animal narratives are then discussed, and these chapters are followed by a detailed examination of the complex of beliefs and narratives concerning |Kaggen.
Notes
1This perhaps idealised version of hunter-gatherer life does have some support from recent studies. See Lee (1968b, 1969b) and Sahlins (1972: 1–39).
2Literally, ‘first-at-sitting-people’.
3The |Xam made distinctions between the San living in various areas. Those living on the plains were the ‘Flat People’, others were the ‘Grass People’, the ‘Mountain People’ and so on.
4Such observation also marks |Hangǂkass’o’s statement that ‘Bushmen talk with the body of their tongue, while Europeans are those who talk with the tip of their tongue’ (L. VIII, (20) 8528 rev.).
5This same aspect in another oral literature is discussed in Lord (1958: 14–29).
6In the same paper, p. 98, Bleek makes it clear that he had read Müller’s Comparative Mythology and his Introduction to the Science of Religion.
7Miss Bleek may have been thinking here of a particular version of the story of the Moon and the Hare (L. IV, (4), 3882–89) which was begun by ǂKasing and concluded later by Dia!kwain.
3
Legends and the stories of !Khwa
Contained in the Bleek and Lloyd collection are many narratives which are clearly fictional, and a few which are clearly factual. Between these categories there are a number of narratives which appear to be grounded in fact but which contain fictional elements which are elaborated to varying degrees in different narratives. It is evident from such narratives that factual accounts of real events were subjected to a fictionalising process taking place over a long period of time which could ultimately convert the account into pure fiction.
These remarks particularly apply to a small group of narratives which shall be here termed legends. These narratives frequently relate events which could, and probably did, have some foundation in historical fact. They recount the activities of human beings, and these humans, like the animals prior to their transformation into animal form, were said to be !Xwe ||na s’o !kʔe. In spite of the characters in these narratives being thus called the temporal setting of the stories cannot be regarded as mythological time for they are clearly set in a recent past which was not significantly different from the world of the |Xam in the 19th century. Furthermore, magic and other non-naturalistic elements are, if not totally absent, usually inessential features of the plot. Thus, as a group, they conform precisely to William Bascom’s classification of legends (Bascom 1965: 4f) while some evince those characteristics which Bascom further attributes to narrative material which has moved in the course of time from a factual base towards the fictive. He writes (ibid.):
Reminiscences or anecdotes concern human characters who are known to the narrator or his audience, but apparently they may be retold frequently enough to acquire the style of verbal art and some may be retold after the characters are no longer known at firsthand. They are accepted as truth and can be considered as a sub-type of the legend, or a proto-legend.
It would seem that at some stage during this process the characters described came to be regarded as !Xwe ||na s’o !kʔe and this designation may itself have legitimated further fictional elaborations.
These