Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San. Roger Hewitt
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about a hundred miles east of Katkop. There were very slight differences in dialect in the language spoken in these two areas. In terms of custom, belief and narrative tradition, however, there were no major differences between the |Xam in these areas that can be detected from the information given in the texts.
All of the informants had had some contact with Europeans since the northwest of the Cape was penetrated by settlers after 1850, and most of the men had worked for European farmers at times. Indeed, it is clear from various comments in the texts that the old patterns of |Xam life had been considerably eroded by the settlers, who simultaneously took much of the land and carried out violent raids on the |Xam. The lives led by these informants were only partially traditional as they were increasingly forced to seek employment on farms. In consequence of European settlement they were also greatly endangered both by starvation and by the violence of the settlers.18
Beside the researches of Bleek and Lloyd, little work was done on the |Xam language. M.H.C. Lichtenstein, who travelled in the northern Cape in the years 1803–06, published a fragment on the language (Lichtenstein 1930: Vol. II, 463–475) and in 1888 Fr. Müller’s brief paper ‘Die sprache der |Kham Buschmänner’ (Müller 1888) appeared, the material for which was given further scrutiny by W. Planert in ‘Ober die sprache der Hottentotten und Buschmänner’ (Planert 1905). In 1929 P. Meriggi’s ‘Versuch einer grammatik des |Xam-Buschmannischen’ (Meriggi 1929) examined the texts published by Lloyd in Specimens of Bushman Folklore. These and Dorothea Bleek’s own ‘Bushman grammar’ (D.F. Bleek1929c) comprise the bulk of the earliest work concerning the language. The best recent overviews are to be found in Traill.19
A large collection of |Xam narratives collected by Gideon Retief von Wielligh in the late 19th century was published in four volumes between 1919 and 1921 (von Wielligh 1919–1921). Many of these were collected from |Xam speakers north of Calvinia, and this collection represents an often illuminating supplement to the Bleek and Lloyd collection. However, von Wielligh was a popular writer who sought to encourage poor Afrikaners to read. His simplified stories, published in Afrikaans, were remodelled by him to these didactic ends and, unfortunately, cannot be taken as reliable versions of |Xam narratives.
This book examines the narratives at several levels, analysing the ways in which the organisation of narrative materials (plots, themes, motifs, etc.), together with the values and norms expressed through them, was frequently influenced by conceptual templates traceable in other aspects of the culture, including belief and ritual.
The collection is described in groups distinguished by content; plots, themes and motifs being related to their ethnographic context and situated as deeply with |Xam culture as the data allow.20 Particular versions of narratives are also discussed in terms of the tradition that they display and as examples of the way in which common narrative materials were moulded by the personal interests and skills of individual narrators.
The group of narratives concerning the trickster and supernatural being, |Kaggen, constitute by far the largest thematically and structurally definable group in the collection. As such it is of special interest and particularly amenable to a wider range of analytical procedures than can be applied to other groups. Its discussion forms the largest part of the study and relates the beliefs and ritual practices concerning |Kaggen to the narratives and to |Kaggen’s character and actions in them. In this way the associations that this character had for |Xam audiences are probed and his role qua trickster elucidated within a very specific ethnographic context.
By situating individual narratives within their narrative tradition, and that tradition within a cultural context extending from the material world to the conceptual frameworks evinced in custom and belief, this book attempts to demonstrate some of the many levels at which |Xam narratives were capable of having significance for their audiences, and to provide a basis for the comparative study of the oral literature of other San groups. Published texts have been referred to wherever possible. For the most part, summaries of narratives are employed, although important discrepancies between different versions of the same story are noted in every case.21
Orthography
Because the spelling in the manuscripts often varies considerably, the spelling of the texts quoted in this book has been standardised in accordance with the Bushman Dictionary (D.F. Bleek, op. cit.). As |Xam is a dead language it is impossible to know how accurately the texts represent the spoken language. Dorothea Bleek’s statement that:
Bushmen do not open their mouths much in speaking, it is therefore not easy to distinguish the vowels clearly. Slurred indefinite vowel sounds are in the majority and often vary slightly with individual speakers (D.F. Bleek 1929c: 82)
may account for many of the differences in spelling encountered in the manuscripts.
Long vowels are represented by a colon following the vowel. All vowels and diphthongs may be nasalised and this is indicated by ~. Where two vowels that occur together are sounded separately, ̈ is placed over the second.
Of the consonants, only few require a comment. A glottal closure is often encountered with k and g and is represented thus: k’, g’. The letter r is slightly rolled and nasalised.
A glottal stop is indicated by ?; and a ‘very loud plosive croak’ (D.F. Bleek, 1929c: 83), often found as an initial sound, is represented by k’, as in the Bushman Dictionary. Likewise, the five clicks found in |Xam are indicated by the following conventional signs: |, the dental click; !, the cerebral click; ||, the lateral click; ǂ the alveolar click; and ʘ, the labial click.
Some |Xam words are distinguished from each other only by the tone in which they are uttered. There are three tones, high, middle and low. The middle tone is unmarked in the texts. The high tone is indicated by – placed before a syllable; the low tone by _. Words are usually accented on the first syllable, and always when the word begins with a click.
Finally, a brief note on the unabashed structuralism of the body of the analysis that follows. At the time of its writing the assault on structuralism was already under way – even if its consequences in deconstructionism were not yet apparent. My analytical choices were made in full awareness of available approaches, and although I am now a little alarmed by the monologic energy of my own argument in places, I reluctantly still find it persuasive and am happy to stand by it in republication.
Endnotes
1See Pippa Skotnes. 2007. Claim to the Country: The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek. Cape Town: Jacana and Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 160–167.
2J. Deacon, ‘“My place is Biterpits”: The home territory of Bleek and Lloyd’s |Xam San informants’, African Studies, 45 (2), 1986, 135–155.
3J. Deacon and T.A. Dawson. 1996. Voices from the Past: |Xam Bushmen and the Bleek and Lloyd Collection. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.
4Pippa Skotnes (ed.). 1996. Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen. University of Cape Town.
5Anthony Traill. 1996. ‘!Khwa-Ka Hhouiten-Hhouiten: The linguistic death of the |Xam’, in Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen, edited by Pippa Skotnes, pp. 161–182. University of Cape Town.
6Skotnes, 2007.
7David Lewis Williams. 1981. Believing and Seeing: Symbolic Meanings in Southern San Rock Painting. London: Academic Press.
8David Lewis Williams (ed.). 2000. Stories that Float from Afar: Ancestral Folklore of the San of Southern Africa. Cape Town: David Philip.
9Mathias Guenther. 1989. Bushman Folktales: Oral Traditions of the Nharo of Botswana and the |Xam of the Cape. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.
10Nigel Penn. 2005. The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the 18th Century. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press and Cape Town: Double Storey Books.
11Andrew Bank. 2006. Bushmen in a Victorian World: The Remarkable Story of the Bleek-Lloyd Collection of Bushman Folklore. Cape Town: Double Storey