Читать книгу Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San - Roger Hewitt - Страница 11

2

Introduction to the narratives: their context, performance and scope

Like many other San groups, the |Xam had a highly verbal culture. Indeed, speech was almost a continual social activity. In Dorothea Bleek’s words:

Men hunted for a few hours or a few days then had nothing to do as long as the game lasted. A woman’s daily task of gathering roots and wood and fetching water was soon finished except in times of scarcity. Half or more than half of each day was spent lounging about watching bird and beast, and talking – always talking. Every event of a hunt was told and re-told. Every phase of a meeting with other people, the action of each person and animal being described and acted, the voice and gesture admirably imitated (Bleek & Stow, op. cit., xxiiif).

It is easy to see how such a culture should be rich in narrative, how narrative would be part of daily living to an extent unknown in literate societies where leisure time is limited.

It is difficult for us to realise how large a part talking, and hence storytelling, makes in primitive man’s life. Where a man’s only labour is hunting which occupies only a few hours of a day, and probably not every day, there is an amount of leisure unparalleled among civilised people … There are many hours at midday under a bush and in the evening round a fire, when all sit and talk and listen. Stories mingled with songs accompanied by mimicry are the chief daily recreations (D.F. Bleek 1929a: 311).¹

Such is the verbal context of the one hundred or so narratives collected by Bleek and Lloyd and indeed they show the impress of that context very clearly – particularly in their heavy use of dialogue, exploring narrative events now from one character’s perspective, now from another. Even in the difficult conditions under which they were recorded, these narratives are alive with speech.

The |Xam employed only one term for narrative, kum, (plural kukummi). There is no record of their making distinctions between kinds of narrative such as myth, legend or fable. All narratives were kukummi whether they related the activities of supernatural beings, humans or animals. The word also appears in the titles of narratives, for example: ||khã:ka kum – ‘the lion’s story’, or !gã ka kum – ‘the frog’s story’. The same word, however, was also occasionally used simply to mean conversation and news, although there is no doubt from the texts that narratives were formally structured and constituted a distinct mode of expression. Verbal formulae are often encountered as is the stylised treatment of certain familiar episodes in some of the narratives, and the use of song. By contrast, conversation amongst the |Xam does not appear to have been formal in any respect and not one example of a proverb or similarly structured discourse was recorded by either Bleek or Lloyd.

The great majority of kukummi are concerned with animal characters, although set in a time when the animals were human. These narratives may be simple fables or very complex and semantically dense – more suggestive of myth than fable. The characters in these narratives were the !Xwe-||na-s'o !kʔe,² ‘people of the first or early race’ – a term similar to that used by the Zu|wa of today who refer to their stories of people long ago as Nǂwasi o n!osimasi, ‘stories of the old people’ (Biesele, op. cit., 96). The term was not exclusively applied to animal characters however: some kukummi which we might classify as legends – featuring human beings and often appearing to be set in an immediate historical past – were also said to refer to the !Xwe-||na-s'o !kʔe, as were those portraying the stars, the sun and the moon as people. These !Xwe-||na-s'o !kʔe were not regarded with any special reverence. Indeed they were said to be often stupid and lacking in understanding – hence their actions in the narratives are generally extraordinary and rarely correspond to what the |Xam would have regarded as normal or proper behaviour. This fictive early period seems to have been thought of as a formative one for the San race, where the raw materials of life – both cosmological and social – were constantly interacting, rearranging themselves, revealing social truths and the natural order of things. How the sun, moon and stars came into being; how death came into the world; how correct marriages were to be made; how the sharing of food resources was to be conducted; how young people should behave; where the sources of danger lay in social life, these and many other things are laid bare by the activities of the !Xwe-||na-s'o !kʔe.

Perhaps for this reason there is often a strong educational strain in many of the narratives. Lessons were drawn from them and explanations for customs and beliefs were to be found there too. The instruction of the young was very important to the |Xam and many narratives involving disasters, particularly to young people, conclude with the assertion that the characters who acted foolishly, and thus brought about disaster, had not received proper instruction from their parents. The importance of the education of young children is also frequently to be seen in the texts outside of the narratives or in the occasional asides of the narrators. Apart from their function as entertainments, therefore, kukummi were also regarded as the residuum of the social and practical knowledge which constituted an essential code of |Xam life – something to be learned by all. Through the naiveté and foolishness, as well, on very rare occasions, as the bravery and competence of the !Xwe-||na-s'o !kʔe, this knowledge was revealed.

There is no record of any specialised or socially recognised group of story-tellers in |Xam society, professional or otherwise. Story-telling seems to have been something which anyone might do, although Bleek wrote of |Ak!ungta, the youngest of his |Xam informants, that he could ‘relate hardly any of the numerous tales and fables which are met with in the traditionary literature of this nation’ (Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 443), and it may have been the case that younger people lacked the knowledge of their elders and did not engage in narration very often.

The informants frequently attributed their knowledge of narratives to members of their family. Thus, for example, |Hangǂkass'o would tell a story that he said he had heard from his mother, |Xabbi-ang, perhaps adding that she in turn had heard it from her mother or some other relative. Informants attributed the great majority of their narratives to their mothers, although, as one would expect, no original authorship was ever indicated by this. However, several of Bleek’s male informants were not only familiar with a large number of kukummi but were clearly themselves also very used to performing. It cannot be construed from the predominance of mothers in the attributing of sources, therefore, that story-telling was primarily the province of women. While it was undoubtedly the women who usually told stories to children, when kukummi were performed to adult audiences the evidence is that this might be by any mature man or woman. No doubt some narrators were more skilled than others – although no mention is made in the texts of any narrator well known for his excellence – but it would seem that most people could perform if called upon to do so.

There is very little evidence relating to when kukummi were performed. |Hangǂkass'o speaks only of two separate occasions on which his mother comforted him as a child by telling him stories (ibid., 317ff; L. VIII, (17) 7519). The only account of story-telling by and to adults comes from ||Kabbo. In a well-known passage in Specimens of Bushman Folklore, ||Kabbo, speaking of his release from captivity, has this to say:

You know I sit waiting for the moon to change for me so that I can go back to my own place. I will listen to everyone’s stories when I visit them. I will listen to the stories that they tell. They listen to the stories of the Flat people³ from the other side of the place and re-tell the stories with their own – when the sun gets a little warm. I will sit listening to the stories that come from far away. And I will have their story when the sun feels a little bit warm and I feel that I must go on visiting. I must be talking with my men friends, for I work here at women’s work. My men friends listen to stories which travel from a long way away. They listen to stories from other places. But I am here. I don’t get stories because I don’t do any visiting to let me get the stories which come along … The Flat people go to each other’s huts to sit smoking in front of them. So they get stories because they often visit. They are smoking people (Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 298ff).

Story-telling appears from this to have been part of sociability. As well as spending their leisure time in their own camps, |Xam frequently visited friends and relatives and so an occasion for story-telling was never far away.

Amongst !Kung speakers today the same kind of emphasis on story-telling as an adult pastime is also found. Megan Biesele (op. cit., 97) writes:

It has been my pleasure to discover not only that the number of (non-farm) Bushmen who tell stories competently is quite large but that virtually every old person (among the ju|wasi every man or woman who carries the appellation ‘n!a’ after his or her name – perhaps 45 and older) is able and usually willing to tell stories. In fact of the many old people from whom I requested stories there were only a scant handful who could not tell stories of the old time with confidence and vigor.

So much is this the case that the telling of stories specifically to children is of little concern to the Zu|wasi.

The story-telling groups I observed consisted much more frequently of a small group of old people getting together for some real grown-up enjoyment. The telling of stories among Bushmen is no watered-down pastime but the substantial adult pleasure of old cronies over a bawdy or horrific or ridiculous tale (ibid., 97f).

This seems to be very much the sort of thing which ||Kabbo has in mind when he speaks of sitting during the day, talking and telling stories with his friends.

It is, inevitably, very difficult to discover much about story-telling as live performance. Because the narratives were collected outside of their native context everything is lost to us in the way of dramatic presentation, gesture, facial expression, narrator/audience interaction – indeed most of what characterises narrative in performance. However, a little is known of the |Xam which can give an indication of how narratives were performed. It may be seen from many of the texts – both narrative and non-narrative – what keen powers of observation the |Xam had for their natural environment. Not only are the habits and physical characteristics of animals observed in great detail but many pages of close description of plants and insects were collected, which bear witness to an attention to detail far beyond that needed for daily survival. Furthermore some |Xam at least also felt an attunement to their environment which reached almost mystical proportions. ||Kabbo, for example, speaks of powerful premonitions which he had while out hunting and which created in him actual physical sensations connected with his quarry. He reports that such sensations were common for people who understood them. A man may feel

a tapping at his ribs; he says to his children, the Springbok seem to be coming for I feel the black hair (on the sides of the Springbok). Climb the Brinkkop over there and look around because I feel the Springbok sensation (Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 332).

Or again he reports that

We have a sensation in our feet as the Springbok come rustling the bushes. In the same way we have a sensation in our heads 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 himself and when it is done it is not presented in any way which might suggest a formal mode of conclusion. Characters in the narratives are often given to making explicitly didactic statements and it is here, embedded in a drama of socially situated characters, that the narrators tended to place such lessons as their audiences were expected to draw. Here again, just as speech of a community provides one of the primary surfaces of |Xam narrative, so social education is continuous with the lives of people living together, seen in fictional constructs and separate from any directly asserted view of the narrator himself.

This is not to say that a narrator’s guiding voice is absent. There are certainly cases where irony is employed, plainly intended to influence the audience’s perception of characters. In several of |Hangǂkass’o’s |Kaggen narratives there is also a visible attempt on the part of the narrator to interpret the protagonist in a special light (see Chapter 7). Such acts of interpretation, however, are only engaged in tentatively and always with reference to well-established and communally owned values. As is so often true in oral literature, the individual narrator puts his own stamp on what is communally held, just as any individual speaker of a language draws on that language in his own characteristic way expressing simultaneously both his distinctiveness and his membership of the community.⁵

Turning to the subject matter of the narratives, a number of distinctions can be made for purposes of description on the basis of content even though, as was pointed out above, the |Xam themselves did not distinguish between kinds of narrative. Besides a substantial amount of material concerning the beliefs and customs of the informants, a few accounts of the personal experiences of the informants were also collected. These represent a simple form of narrative and provide a useful source of contrast to the purely fictional narratives in the collection. These accounts relate both ordinary and extraordinary events in the lives of the informants and are often of great ethnographic interest. Of more concern as oral literature are a few accounts, some quite extensive, of events which had occurred apparently during the lifetime of the narrators but which were not personally witnessed by them. Such narratives were not said to be about the !Xwe-||na-s’o !kʔe and involve no magical happenings. They are, however, quite similar in theme to other narratives which do purport to be about this early race and it must be said that the distinction between these narratives and what might be termed ‘historical legends’ possibly only resides in the embellishment of the latter.

The historical legends, which the narrators did claim recounted events in the lives of the !Xwe-||na-s’o !kʔe, do not involve animals in human form, or even humans with animal names but simply human beings in a context which could be that of |Xam life contemporary with the time of collection. These narratives often involve mysterious or magical events but this was by no means a necessary condition for a narrative being said to be concerned with the !Xwe-||na-s’o !kʔe. Such a narrative is the simple tale of the man who ordered his wife to cut off his ears because his wife had shaved his brother’s hair so closely that he believed his brother had been skinned; wishing himself to have a similarly unusual appearance, he told his wife, against her protestations, to perform the operation and naturally ended up screaming with pain. This short narrative contains nothing magical, but the man’s foolishness may have been the aspect which marked him out as one of the !Xwe-||na-s’o !kʔe as far as the narrator was concerned. Other narratives of this kind concern dangerous encounters with lions and even conflicts with the !Korana which may well have had some foundation in actual events in recent history (see Chapter 3).

The majority of |Xam kukummi concern the !Xwe-||na-s’o !kʔe as animals – or rather people who were said to have later become the animals whose names they bear and who often also have at least some of the attributes of those animals. Apparently any living creature, from an elephant to the lava of a caterpillar, could be regarded as having once been one of the !Xwe-||na-s’o !kʔe. Many varieties of birds feature in these narratives, as do insects, burrowing animals, reptiles, large and small antelopes and beasts of prey. All are described as the !Xwe-||na-s’o !kʔe who preceded the |Xam in their country and, apparently, no special distinction was made between these characters and those, not identified with animals, who were the subject of historical legends. Nor were either of these groups of narratives regarded as more true than the other. Like the !Kung tales of today both seem to have been regarded as equally true or untrue with no clear distinction being made either way.

The themes of these animal narratives are various but often involve inter-family relations, the consequences of bad marriages and the conflicting interests of in-laws. Many of the problems which form their subject are caused by the fact that although the characters are in human form they are essentially animals. As such, difficulties inevitably arise if marriages take place between people who in their animal form would be incompatible. Such is the case of the Jackal who married a Quagga and was persuaded by his family that his wife was food and therefore should be killed. The Anteater and the Lynx are also both involved in the problems of making inappropriate alliances although here both creatures come to realise the order of things and articulate the need for proper marriages between animals and proper (i.e. animal-like) life-styles. The Lynx marries another lynx and lives as a lynx lives, while the Anteater becomes an actual anteater and lives in a hole.

All collections of San oral literature contain the notion that the animals were once people and were later changed into the animals we know. In the Bleek and Lloyd collection, narrators credited this change to the Anteater and the Lynx who commanded the animals to take their real form and henceforth live as animals – which they did (see Chapter 5).

Beside the animals, the sun, moon and stars were also said to have once been numbered amongst the !Xwe-||na-s’o !kʔe and the narratives concerning their lives on earth at that time often account for the existence and movements of celestial bodies. Such a narrative is the well-known account of the man whose armpit glowed with light while everywhere else was in gloom. While he slept a group of children, on the instructions of their mother, threw him up into the sky where he became the sun. The moon was also said to have once been a man, as was the ‘Dawn’s Heart Star’ Jupiter, while several stories describe two lions, !Haue ta ǂhou and !Gu, who, according to one narrative, are now the two pointers on the Southern Cross. Some narratives speak of whole families becoming groups of stars. In some instances such transformations were said to be caused by the disobedient actions of girls subjected to puberty observances, while some fragmentary narratives given by ||Kabbo simply describe the appearance of certain constellations as families of people moving across the sky, the children being the smaller stars, the parents the larger ones.

Many of the stars were given animal names. W.H.I. Bleek (1874: 102) comments:

With regard to the constellations, – it is especially worthy of remark that their names in Bushman seem, generally speaking, to be unconnected with their shapes in the sky, – and that many of them seem only to be named from the fact of their being seen at certain times when the animals, or other objects, whose names they bear, come into season, or are more abundant.

This led Bleek (loc. cit.) under the influence of Max Müller’s theory of myth,⁶ to the following speculation:

Of course, when such names as steinbok, hartebeest, eland, anteater, lion, tortoise, etc., had once become attached to certain stars or constellations, fancy might step in, and try to discover the shapes of those animals (or other objects) in the configuration of the stars; whilst at the same time, mythological personification would begin its work, and make the heavens the theatre of numberless poetically conceived histories.

While there is some evidence for this being the case in certain minor instances, there are only a few narratives where animals named are actually associated with those stars possessing animal names. However, there is no doubt that explanations for the presence of the sun, moon and stars were taken up into narrative form.

Apart from these narratives of animals and celestial bodies there are, finally, those concerning the supernatural beings who were part of |Xam religious belief. These narratives relate the activities of !Khwa (the Rain) and |Kaggen, the trickster associated with the mantis. The narratives involving !Khwa are mainly to do with the consequences of failure to observe the rules relating to girls during puberty. !Khwa 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.