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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 legends number only about 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.

The only totally naturalistic narrative in this !Korana set may have 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 the hut and bitten to death.

By way of a coda, apparently for the benefit of the collector, |Hangǂkass’o explains that the !Xwe ||na s’o !kʔe called lions ||kwamma³ and frequently hunted them for food. The men in the story, therefore, were not doing anything unusual as such (although this may have been another example of the stupidity of this early race) but the younger brother had acted foolishly, firstly in hunting alone, and secondly by only using ostrich bones which were too light to kill a lion. According to |Hang ǂkass'o he should have used either an elephant’s thigh bone or the bone of a giraffe. There is no record of such bones being used by the |Xam in any way connected with lions⁴ (for example as defensive weapons) although they were commonly used for hunting and to this extent some educational value might be attached to the story. It remains, however, primarily a probably fairly hair-raising adventure story told for entertainment rather than instruction.

The range of socially motivated fictional accretions which narratives (both with and without factual foundations) may have is no doubt very large but one final example of the role which legends about human characters can perform is the story of the old woman whose family was forced to abandon her when their food and water supply could not support them all. Her success in killing the hyena which came to attack her, and in eating it and thereby gaining the strength to follow after her family, possibly represented a narrative expression of the fears connected with institutionalised geriatricide while offering an albeit far-fetched possibility for hope. A narrative which gives expression to the necessarily internalised feelings aroused by such practices obviously has a role to play in making them acceptable.