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Acknowledgements

My first thanks are, undoubtedly, to Pippa Skotnes, who managed to blow a trumpet in my ear from what seemed a very long way away to wake me up and let me know about the developments in the Bleek and Lloyd Archive in recent times and to invite me to Cape Town. She gave me such positive encouragement to re-publish this book, and pointed me in exactly the right direction. She is a very special person to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude.

I would also like to take this opportunity to make an acknowledgement that would have been in the first edition, had its birth not been such a casual and chaotic affair. David Lewis Williams was a fellow at Cambridge working on his earliest ideas concerning the San rock paintings he had been so meticulously recording and analysing when we somehow came into contact at the start of my doctoral research. We had many fascinating conversations and debates in London over the published Bleek and Lloyd materials at a time when it was hard to find a soul who even knew of their existence. He also gave very ungrudgingly of his time to translate from the Afrikaans for me a number of the von Wielligh texts of |Xam narratives, the whole four volumes of which I had somehow assembled myself a photocopy version but could not read. I would like to thank him, somewhat belatedly, for his generosity and company at that time.

Others who were the effective dramatis personae of that period and with whom I had really fruitful dialogue were Megan Biesele, Sigrid Schmidt and Alan Barnard who started his doctoral research at the London School of Oriental and African Studies in exactly the year I started there. I still have some of the letters he sent me, somewhat sandy, from the Kalahari, while he was doing his fieldwork. Each of these scholars was all in different ways important to me in the development of my own thinking.

Finally, of course, I would like to acknowledge again the work of the staff at the University of Cape Town Library, who tolerated and then responded so well to my unexpected and at the time obscure request that they search to see if the Bleek and Lloyd notebooks were with them. Little were they to know at the time that that was just the beginning and that over 30 years later their office would be caught up in a tsunami of Bleek and Lloyd digitalisation.

In the production of this book, I have been fortunate to have the services of Fiona Potter as proofreader, Margie Ramsay as indexer, Karen Lilje of Hybridesign as cover designer and Acumen Publishing Solutions as book designers.