Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San. Roger Hewitt
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a dozen although a few of them are amongst the longest and most carefully told in the collection. They tend to be concerned with the responses of individuals to dangerous situations involving either beasts of prey – notably lions – or !Korana war parties. A few, such as the story of the man who ordered his wife to cut off his ears, are certainly apocryphal and are to do with the deeds of notably stupid people. Of those dealing with people in danger some warn against carelessness and describe what befell those who were insufficiently cautious; others describe resourceful or intelligent responses to dangerous events.
Dorothea Bleek (1929a: 310) has pointed out that the |Xam do not seem to have had legendary human heroes.
I think that their life in small family groups scattered over very wide spaces has tended to make the surrounding animal world and the heavenly bodies loom large in their sight, the human hero small.
Certainly this is the impression given by the Bleek and Lloyd collection. However, while individual human heroes are not celebrated, bravery, independent thinking and social responsibility often are. Indeed the value of these qualities is implicit throughout the entire range of |Xam narratives and it is possible that some of the narratives which had a foundation in historical fact were elaborated from news which specifically demonstrated the value of these qualities. In all cases what happened is of more importance than who performed the action.
What narrators made of their central core of fact illuminates much about the principles of |Xam oral composition. As soon as news became distanced from its immediate source it was open to special emphases, the introduction of motifs from existing stories, the recasting of dramatis personae, the employment of songs and, indeed, a host of traditional elements as well as the individual narrator’s personal shaping of his material. In the course of this process both the factual core and the human hero could become obscured and action qua action rise to predominance. In this way the social value of say, intelligence and bravery were displayed while attributable heroics were played down.
The narratives concerned with encounters with !Korana war parties are amongst those most likely to have been elaborated from real events1 and provide a useful insight into this fictionalising process. Of these only one contains a strongly stressed non-naturalistic element and this may well have been an extraneous introduction; the narrative also contains a number of stereotypical features which are worthy of note. The story is as follows.
!Kotta koë a young boy, goes out to collect ostrich eggs together with his younger brother. While the younger brother packs and carries his eggs in the customary manner, i.e. in a net on his back, !Kotta koë swallows his whole and in such numbers that his stomach sticks out in many places. The collection of eggs continues for several days, each day the boys returning home in the evening, the younger brother eating his eggs in the traditional manner, with a small brush of gemsbok tail hair. While collecting eggs one day, the younger brother notices a number of !Koranas and, it is implied, the !Koranas notice the boys. !Kotta koë and his brother take flight although !Kotta koë is impeded by his over-laden stomach. The boys come to a stream which the younger brother jumps with ease. !Kotta koë attempts the same feat but falls into the water where his stomach breaks open and the eggs pour out. A !Kora warrior then comes into view brandishing an assegai but !Kotta koë persuades him that, as he is already almost dead, the !Korana would do better to chase the younger brother. This the gullible !Kora does, whereupon !Kotta koë replaces the eggs in his stomach, stitches himself up with thorns, takes a short cut to where he knows his brother to be waiting and together they return home safely (L. VIII, (28) 8486–8506).
This narrative shows signs of being a naturalistic account of an escape from hostile !Koranas which has been merged with a more fanciful narrative about a foolish person who swallows eggs whole. The younger brother is typical of many younger siblings in |Xam narrative tradition in that he is more acute and able than his brother. It is he who first notices the !Koranas; he is fleet while his brother is slow, and he conforms to normal behaviour in everything which we see him do. In many |Xam narratives such bright, able and conformist young siblings are responsible for interventions in dangerous or otherwise abnormal situations, especially on behalf of their parents. In this narrative the younger brother has these attributes but they are not exploited in any way which fundamentally affects the plot. At the same time the ostrich eggs which weigh down !Kotta koë, while being the cause of his fall, do not constitute a necessary condition for his slowness. In naturalistic terms no cause as such need have been given, and as !Kotta koë appears to have been known outside of the context of this narrative (Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 309) it is possible that in other or earlier versions some other factual or fictional element may have been employed at this point in the plot if the central figure had indeed been added to a fundamentally factual account.
The full text of the narrative also contains a motif found in another narrative in the collection; reference is made to the !Kora leaving his assegai on the ground near to !Kotta koë while he goes to chase the younger brother. This he does on the advice of !Kotta koë who then uses it in his escape. The same motif occurs in the story of the girl whose breast is caught in a rock (L. VIII, (32) 8821–42). She is captured by two lions and is quite helpless. Like !Kotta koë and the assegai she persuades them to leave their arrows behind while they go away to drink before devouring her. She then makes use of the arrows to effect her escape. Both this narrative and the story about the boys were given by |Hang ǂkass’o and the motif is likely to have been part of a common stock of narrative materials available to him.
Here, where we find a narrative displaying several strands and motifs common to other narratives, the imprint of, no doubt, a line of narrators becomes visible and any actual event which may have formed the basis of the story is lost from view. It must also be borne in mind that once stories of bravery and cleverness in the face of hostile !Koranas had been established as traditional elaborated narratives, rather than simply as anecdotes or news, they too would be capable of contributing plot frameworks or motifs to the tradition.
Another, less fanciful, narrative of interest concerning the !Korana has been well summarised by Dorothea Bleek (1929a: 309) as follows:
A youth of the early race was sent to fetch water. Coming over a hill he saw a Korana war party at the water, and they saw him. He made himself small and went down to the water swaying about like a little child, so that the Korana called out: ‘Pity! Look! Why do the people send him to the water and not a grown-up person?’ The boy behaved so stupidly that the Koranas helped him fill his egg-shells and let him go, though one old man told them to kill the child lest he warn his parents. As soon as the youth was over the hill he resumed his normal size and went home to tell of the Koranas. The women went away to hide, the men made fires at the huts with large stumps which would burn long, then followed the women. The Koranas were deceived and surrounded the huts, only to find them empty.
Commenting on the possible veracity of this narrative Miss Bleek (ibid.) writes:
This sounds to me like the recital of a real event, in which a boy deceived the enemy by pretending to be more stupid than he really was; but in the course of time the boy’s identity had been lost and his clever acting been changed into magic transformation, whereupon the story has been ascribed to a youth of the Early Race.
Apart from the ‘magic transformation’ mentioned by Miss Bleek the obviously fictional elaborations are few. In the original text (L. VIII, (25) 8251–68) the boy returns home singing that the !Koranas had tied on their feathered headdresses for war. This kind of unextended song often occurs when individuals are described returning home alone, and, like the detailed dialogue, is clearly a narrator’s own contribution. The old man who, alone out of the !Korana party, thinks that the boy should be killed also returns at the end of the story to berate his fellows for not having listened to him. Again this kind of vindication motif is common to many |Xam narratives. Here, where a factual core seems more obvious2 than it was in the case of the !Kotta koë story, the undeniably fictive materials stand out plainly. This is not simply because the non-naturalistic elements are fewer but because the stereotypical features are less and there is no reliance on such narrative techniques as the repetition of figures – something which the !Kotta koë story employs in its opening phases where several egg-collecting excursions are described prior to the one on which they meet the !Koranas.
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