Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San. Roger Hewitt
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been apocryphal for it implicitly warns against obstinacy and over-confidence when communal safety is concerned and commends the protagonist for speaking her mind forcefully in the face of the complacency of her fellow band members. The heroine, |Kamang, spies a !Korana war party while she is out collecting veldkos. She returns to her people and warns them but they do not heed her warning. One man insists that the place where she saw the !Koranas is a feeding-ground for young ostriches and that it was these that she had probably seen. They argue but the man is adamant and patronising. ‘My, my, why is the old woman so obstinate?’ he says. When the sun sets the !Koranas surround the camp and slaughter everyone. Only |Kamang escapes (she was also a fast runner) but not before she had exchanged words with the man who had rejected her warning. She says, ‘Now you can see that I was speaking the truth’, and he admits that he ought to have listened to her (L. VIII, (26) 8269–85).
Here the virtues of independent judgement and social responsibility are counterposed to an over-confidence in ‘what everybody knows’, and linked to physical prowess in the form of |Kamang’s ability to run fast.
One indication that the narrator believed the story to be literally true is his comment that he did not actually know the place where these events took place – although he names it – because he did not have first-hand knowledge of the case. The fact that both protagonist’s name and the place name is preserved might be taken as some evidence of the truthfulness of the story but |Kamang’s independence of mind and fleetness of foot are stereotypical of a certain kind of |Xam fictional character and again the vindication motif is employed. However, she may well have been a real person who was attributed with recognisable qualities by successive narrators.
It is apparent from these !Korana stories that to some extent the social resonance and value of certain types of behaviour and attitudes may be traced in the manner of oral composition, where what is of significance in a story was emphasised by the employment of traditional elements that had long been established as conveyors of fundamental values. On the other hand purely imaginative traditional elements – such as Kotta koë’s egg-eating – can completely dominate the basic tale in the hands of a narrator disposed to make them do so. The traditional elements which provide the narrator with the materials for his embellishments or, indeed, frameworks for new plots do not, therefore, owe their survival exclusively to their place in the matrix of social value though this may often be an important factor. The purely imaginative or – in case of the lion stories described below – the purely exciting, also have a resilience and attraction of their own which can guarantee perpetuation without help from elements of more clear-cut social relevance. However, the very subject matter of these legends is frequently didactic and recurring motifs, such as the vindication scenes, do generally function to recommend types of behaviour.
Another kind of didacticism may be seen in those narratives which describe the extremely foolish actions of people who fail to make the fundamental connections which form the basis of common sense. The story of the man who commanded his wife to cut off his ears is of this kind; another is the story of a man who cut open his wife’s stomach to see what she had been eating and found that she was pregnant. He tried to sew her up again when he realised his mistake, thinking that she would come alive again. Finally he was told that women do look as if they are full of food when pregnant and asked if his own people had not educated him to understand such things. This kind of stupidity was often attributed to the !Xwe ||na s’o !kʔe, although it appears only infrequently in quite this unmitigated form. Such stories, like many of the animal stories and the |Kaggen trickster narratives, seem to show a world where even the most basic truths of social life remain unlearned by many, even though there are also often sensible and well-socialised people around to point out the true nature and order of things. It is a world not unlike that of a child where parents loom out of the mists of incomprehension to admonish and point the way towards maturity.
There remain, however, several legends where the didactic element is almost completely absent. They can be purely adventure stories and where they do attribute foolishness to their protagonists it is never as blatant as it is in the narratives referred to immediately above. Two such narratives were published in Specimens of Bushman Folklore (pp. 174ff, 260ff) while von Wielligh gives an entire volume to narratives of this kind (op. cit., Vol 4).
Two lion stories were collected which show some traces of purposeful didacticism, one concerning a man who brought home a lion cub and insisted that it was a hunting dog (L. II, (26) 2320–2504, 2597–2873) and another describing the fate of two men who hunted lions with clubs made from bone (L. VIII, (18) 7551–88). Neither narrative contains any non-naturalistic elements and both are told very vividly. ||Kabbo, who gave the story of the lion cub, took several months to complete his narration, yet the story is very coherent and its plot sections well balanced. It describes the reaction of the man’s wife to her obstinate husband’s insistence that the cub was a dog given to him by his brother; her warnings to her children; the man’s increasingly dangerous hunting expeditions as the cub grows bigger; and the man’s eventual death. The narrative concludes with the eldest son taking his uncles to the scene of the accident and showing them where he had stood watching when his father was attacked. There they see the man’s bow and arrows lying on the ground and the clump of bushes to which the lion dragged him. Finally the whole family move to another mountain where they can live in safety from the lion and its parents, which it has rejoined.
Certain parts of the narrative lend themselves to repetition – especially in the early part of the story where the father is described hunting with his son and his ‘dog’ on successive occasions. In each repetition the same phrases tend to recur and the same details are given. After the death of the man, however, the reiterations of descriptive passages give way to a more free-flowing style. It is very expansively told with many small, but telling details. There is a lengthy vindication passage in which the wife recalls her repeated warnings and her observations on the physical appearance of the cub, and the eldest son is commended by his uncles for his bravery and wisdom but the centres of interest in the narrative are uncharacteristically greatly enriched by careful description.
The story itself appears to have been well known, for Dia!kwain (who came from the Katkop area) on having it read to him some three years after its collection commented that he had heard the story both from his mother and his paternal grandfather. W.H.I. Bleek (1875: 14) describes this version as a ‘legend told with great epic breadth’, as indeed it is. Much of this is due to ||Kabbo’s facility with creating dialogue which simultaneously promotes the action of the narrative while reflecting the specific viewpoint and character of the speaker.
Another narrative, given by |Hangǂkass’o, concerning two brothers who hunted lions, opens with a brief description of how the men went out together, followed the lions’ spoor, waited until charged and threw heavy bones, thus killing the lion which they cut up and carried home. The description is given four times in succession with only minor changes in the phrasing. Then the younger brother goes hunting alone; the assegais he uses are not made of sufficiently heavy bone and he, failing to kill the lion, is himself killed. The story then focuses on the man’s children and his elder brother waiting for his return. The children believe their father to be dead but the elder brother does not. While the children and their mother move away from the place where they have been living, the elder brother remains, waiting for his brother’s return and singing alone in his hut. The lion which had killed his brother eventually retraces the dead man’s spoor to his home. There in the darkness the man sings:
Ng ||ka-ʘpwawe
Ng ||ka-ʘpwa ka !khwe
ta |kwẽi:da
Au ng ||ka-ʘpwa s’o
|khã: ||kwamma.
(My little brother! My little brother’s wind [see Chapter 1] feels like this wind when he has killed a lion.)
but his singing is interspersed with questions directed to his absent brother about the little lights which he is seeing in the darkness outside his hut. He asks, ‘Brother, brother can these be stars?’ In reality they are the eyes of the approaching lion. He sings his song again and calls out to his brother about the stars but within moments he is dragged from