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Introduction

This new edition of Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San comes some 20 years after its initial printing and 30 after the text, with few differences, was presented as a doctoral thesis to the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Since then there has been a great deal of excellent scholarship that has explored the Bleek and Lloyd collection of |Xam texts, housed mainly in the library of the University of Cape Town (UCT), or has added substantially to what we know of the historical context of that collection and its content. At the time of my thesis, however, not only was the location or, indeed, the continued existence of Lucy Lloyd’s |Xam transcriptions – the largest part of the collection – unknown, but the content of Bleek’s own notebooks also remained unexplored and the notebooks themselves barely catalogued. Thus it was with something of a gamble that I embarked on a thesis designed to be based alone on those as yet ‘undiscovered’ notebooks. Luckily for me my optimistic digging was rewarded¹ and the work that produced this book was able to commence. Naturally the existence of the notebooks did not remain a secret for long, and much useful scholarly work, largely by South African researchers, started to flow.

Much has changed in the intervening years. Even between the presentation of the thesis in 1976 and 1986, when editors from Helmut Buske publishers in Hamburg approached me to ask if they might publish the work, there had grown a greater sensitivity around nomenclature applied to peoples customarily studied by anthropologists. For many years the term ‘Bushmen’ had been used to describe the hunter-gatherers whose click language was closely related to that of the Khoi herders with whom they also shared much of the Cape. Both Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd referred to theirs as a collection of ‘Bushman folklore’. By the late 1970s, however, the Khoi word ‘San’ became widely adopted to describe the various language groups evident amongst the hunter-gatherers, as well as the people themselves. While anthropologists familiarised the reading public with the specific names of some of these – principally the !Kung, made internationally famous by the Marshall expeditions to the Kalahari desert in the 1950s – the term ‘San’ became preferred by many in seeming not to have the derogatory connotations that ‘Bushmen’ might be thought to possess. It was not long, however, before it was pointed out that ‘San’ itself was often a derogatory term applied to the hunter-gatherers and was often used simply to mean ‘thief’. The best nomenclature was clearly not to be found in these terms for the general category, but those used by each specific group to refer to itself. For this reason, as most of the texts collected by Bleek and Lloyd were from one large group of hunter-gatherers, the |Xam, it was possible to use that term in accounts of that people and their language. However, for anyone except for a very small circle of academics, the name ‘|Xam’ meant nothing. Hence the general terms were often attached, giving ‘the |Xam Bushmen’ or ‘|Xam San’ and it has not been until very recently that ‘|Xam’ has acquired greater popular currency – certainly within South Africa if not elsewhere – so that it can now be used without explanation. Too late, alas, for the title of this book, which, being republished more or less as it stood, has for the sake of transparency to carry its original title. Similarly, the text throughout uses both ‘San’ and ‘|Xam’ in different contexts, reflecting the initial academic need to identify the people within the widest anthropological frame and at the same time be specific. The need to do so continues to be shared with most authors today, and we find the words ‘Bushmen’ and ‘San’ in common use alongside ‘|Xam’ in even the most recent texts.

It would be very time-consuming and possibly pointless in the end also to allow the text of this book now to benefit from all the scholarship that has followed – tempting though that might be. This is particularly so because the work is fundamentally an analysis of narratives in relation to their specific ethnographic context insofar as that context is reconstructible from the ethnographic record in many of the texts collected by Bleek and Lloyd and from writings by early travellers, missionaries, local officials and so on. There is a strong argumentative thread – heavily structuralist – to this book, and its virtues – if virtues it has – will not lie in the comprehensiveness of its scholarship, but in the persuasiveness of its analysis and the logic of its arguments. Furthermore, that scholarship that has emerged since it was written speaks for itself.

Hardly in mitigation of the slow genocidal process by which the |Xam had ceased to exist, but in a miraculous parenthesis to its final stages, the written record of |Xam culture, belief and oral tradition was constructed by the co-operative efforts of several |Xam people – five men and one woman – and the two Europeans, Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek. The constructed texts were subsequently explored, written about and partially published by Lucy Lloyd herself, then Dorothea Bleek, but by few others (see below). Between 1936 and 1973 they more or less disappeared from view. From the 1980s onwards, however, there was a gradual scholarly awakening to the power and uniqueness of the collection. The most important work to appear at that time was by archaeologist Jeanette Deacon, whose scrupulous research produced an outstanding paper that identified the exact location of the homes of Bleek and Lloyd’s collaborators: ‘“My place is Biterpits”: The home territory of Bleek and Lloyd’s |Xam San informants’.² Other papers by Deacon followed, culminating in a milestone edited book with T.A. Dawson in 1996.³

That publication followed on from an important conference on the collection at UCT in the previous year, and also coincided with an exhibition of art, artifacts and other materials curated by Pippa Skotnes – now director of the Lucy Lloyd Archive, Resource and Exhibition Centre at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, UCT – that confronted the difficult moral and political dimensions of the relationship between the |Xam and the other inhabitants of South Africa and was entitled: ‘Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen’. It also involved the production of a book of the same name.⁴ One of the most important chapters in that book was the one by Tony Traill on the condition of the |Xam language in the last quarter of the 19th century.⁵ Given the inherent problems of the socio-linguistic reconstruction of that period and place, this was a deeply insightful and scholarly account that has, thankfully, been reproduced in Skotnes’ more recent, lavishly illustrated book on the collection, Claim to the Country.⁶

There has been much work that made excellent use of the collection. Amongst the earliest was David Lewis-Williams’ ground-breaking book Believing and Seeing: Symbolic Meanings in Southern San Rock Paintings,⁷ as well as his more recent popular edited reproductions of many of the |Xam texts: Stories that Float from Afar.⁸ His early knowledge of the published work originally derived from the collection and subsequently of the collection itself was second to none, and his contribution to scholarship in the field has been immense. Mathias Guenther also drew on the collection in his comparative study of Nharo and |Xam oral traditions.⁹ Creative writers too have made use of the |Xam texts, and amongst these Alan James’ beautiful and informed engagement in The First Bushman’s Path stands out above the rest. It is, perhaps, the historians who have recently shed the most light on the important context of the |Xam texts. Firstly, there is Nigel Penn, whose excellent theorisation of the economic and social relations between the |Xam and the colonists in his The Forgotten Frontier¹⁰ provides a frame within which to understand the larger processes that brought about the ugly realities of |Xam extinction. Secondly, there is Andrew Bank’s brilliant and painstaking research into the minutest details of the relations between Bleek and Lloyd and each of the |Xam individuals who also brought the texts into being. His book, Bushmen in a Victorian World,¹¹ is a masterpiece of detection and exposition.

Perhaps the greatest contribution to the future investigation of the |Xam, however, has been made by the tireless efforts and commitment of Pippa Skotnes and her staff at UCT. Thanks to their work, the entire Bleek and Lloyd collection is available on the Web as well as on DVD,¹² permitting a whole new generation of researchers to explore this extraordinary and unique archive.

■ ■ ■

In 1855 Wilhelm Bleek arrived in Natal to compile a Zulu grammar for J.W. Colenso, first Anglican bishop of Natal. A few years earlier Bleek had received his doctorate from the University of Bonn for a thesis on grammatical gender in African languages (W.H.I. Bleek 1851). Bleek remained in Natal for nearly two years and during that period began to develop an interest in the San and their language. This interest persisted for many years, but it was not until 1870, while he was employed as curator of the library of Sir George Grey in Cape Town, that he was presented with an opportunity to study a San language in depth.¹³ In that year 28 |Xam prisoners were sent to work on the breakwater in Cape Town harbour. By then Bleek had published two volumes of his Comparative Grammar of South African Languages, but, interrupting further work on this grammar, he turned his attention to the study of |Xam. His daughter, Dorothea Frances Bleek, has reported:

Father asked whether he might work among the Bushmen kept prisoners at the Breakwater. He had discovered, however, that the surroundings of prison were by no means helpful in persuading these people to talk. He asked whether it might be possible to allow some of the Bushmen to work for our family, so that he could interview them in the peace of our own home at Mowbray. This was approved by Sir Philip [Wodehouse, the governor], and we then had a few of them as servants. You can imagine that a Bushman, who has not even learnt to live in a house, and who knows nothing about cultivating soil, did not make a particularly good house-boy, but this did not worry Father. What he wanted was to hear their language (Rosenthal & Goodwin 1953:12f).

Bleek’s first informant was a young man called |A!kungta, who was soon joined by ||Kabbo, a much older man. In the ‘Report of Dr. Bleek concerning his researches into Bushman language and customs, presented to the ... House of Assembly ...’ of 1873, Bleek wrote of these informants:

Both are still with me. Their term of penal servitude expired in the middle of the year 1871 and they have since remained of their own free will. In order to achieve the object of these enquiries (a thorough knowledge of the Bushman language and literature) the presence of these men (or other Bushmen) is necessary for several years; at least four; two and a half of which have already expired.

What has been written down from the lips of the Bushmen, consists of more than four thousand columns (half pages quarto) of text, besides a dozen genealogical tables, and other genealogical, geographical, and astrological, &c, notices (Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 443f).

In October 1873 these informants returned to their homes near the Strontbergen in the northern Cape (lat. 30 S., long. 22 E.), but in the following months were replaced by ǂKasing and Dia!kwain from the Katkop Mountains north of Calvinia. In June 1874 !Kweiten ta liken, ǂKasing’s wife and Dia!kwain’s sister, and her children also came to Bleek’s house at Mowbray. In 1875 Bleek wrote in his second report:

The amount of native Bushman literature collected, has increased since our last report from more than 4,000 to about 6,000 half-pages or columns (in seventy-seven volumes of quarto); of which more than one-third has been written down by myself. A large portion of these Bushman texts has been translated with the aid of the narrators.

In a footnote Bleek added:

As the printing of this report (handed to the Government in February last) has, through press of business been delayed to the present month (May), we are able to state that the total amount of Bushman native literature collected is now about 7,200 half-pages, in eighty-four volumes (W.H.I. Bleek 1875b: 5).

During this period, Bleek was still working at the Grey Library and leaving the collection of |Xam oral literature mainly to Lucy C. Lloyd, his wife’s sister. Indeed, the major part of the total collection was made by Lloyd, while Bleek worked on compiling a dictionary of the language and studying the grammar.

In August 1875 Bleek died, at the early age of 48, having been troubled with very poor health for many years. Lloyd was then appointed to the staff of the South African Public Library, Cape Town, editing material collected by Bleek. However, with the aid of other informants, she continued the work of collecting San texts until 1884. In 1887 she retired to North Wales and later Berlin. In 1889 a ‘Third report concerning Bushman researches, presented to both Houses of the Parliament of the Cape of Good Hope ...’ was published by Lloyd under the title, A Short Account of Further Bushman Material Collected (Lloyd 1889). This report followed the format of Bleek's second report and contained, in fact, a very detailed account of everything that had been collected since that date. This, like Bleek’s report, provided an inventory not only of the oral literature, but also of the very many texts that dealt with customs and beliefs, and other matters of ethnographic interest. Together, Bleek’s report of 1875 and Lloyd's of 1884 form a published index to all of the material collected between 1870 and 1884, a collection that amounts to some 13,000 pages of text and folio sheets.¹⁴

In 1911 Lloyd published a selection of the collected material in a volume entitled Specimens of Bushman Folklore (Bleek & Lloyd 1911) which contained |Xam texts and translations. An appendix to Specimens of Bushman Folklore also contains a few !Kung texts gathered by Lloyd between 1879 and 1882 from two adolescents from the northeast of Damaraland. This volume was the first major publication of the collected material. Lucy Lloyd died in 1914, after which Bleek’s daughter, Dorothea Bleek, who had been only two years old when her father died, took up the task of publishing parts of the collection, as well as carrying out fresh research into other San groups and their languages.

In 1910 Dorothea Bleek made the first of her many expeditions when she visited the surviving |Xam living near Prieska. She later wrote:

In 1910 and 1911 when I travelled through Prieska and Kenhardt districts, I found just a handful of old people left here and there, some of them relatives of our former men. From them and from the farmers whose parents had settled here in the sixties, I received corroboration of what our Bushmen had told long before (D.F. Bleek 1923: viii).

She had already studied |Xam life and languages under her aunt, Lucy Lloyd, and helped in the preparation of Specimens of Bushman Folklore. In 1923 she published Mantis and His Friends (ibid.) containing translations of a number of narratives collected by her father and Lucy Lloyd concerning the trickster |Kaggen. Other original works were also published by her in the following years, but between 1931 and 1936 she edited a series of texts entitled ‘Customs and beliefs of the |Xam Bushmen; from material collected by Dr. W.H.I. Bleek and Miss L.C. Lloyd between 1870 and 1880’, which appeared in the journal Bantu Studies.¹⁵

In 1936 she also published, in the same journal, a further selection of the material, this time of narratives and fragments of narratives with texts, entitled ‘Special speech of animals and moon used by the |Xam Bushmen’.¹⁶ Apart from these publications of the collections, Dorothea Bleek also published part of a |Xam grammar (D.F. Bleek 1929c); an account of |Xam kinship terms (D.F. Bleek 1924); a volume of copies of rock paintings made by G.W. Stow together with a commentary by her containing interpretations and comments on the copies by her father's informants (Bleek & Stow 1930); and a good but brief sketch of |Xam oral literature in a paper called ‘Bushman folklore’ (D.F. Bleek 1929a). Finally, A Bushman Dictionary by Dorothea Bleek was published in 1956, eight years after her death, based on the work of many writers, including her father, Lucy Lloyd and her own researches (D.F. Bleek 1956).

The oral literature collected by Bleek and Lloyd comprises approximately one hundred different narratives, many of them in several versions; nearly eighty very short songs; and a few formal addresses to supernatural entities. Eleven of the songs were published in Specimens of Bushman Folklore, and a further selection, together with their melodies written down in musical notation, was published in ‘A study of Bushman music’ by Percival Kirby in 1936 (Kirby 1936a). Recent printed publications of parts of the collection include most notably David Lewis-Williams’ Stories that Float from Afar, mentioned above, and Neil Bennun’s The Broken String: The Last Words of an Extinct People.¹⁷

The texts were taken down by hand, sometimes by Bleek, more often by Lloyd. These were later roughly translated with help of the informants, most of whom spoke English and Afrikaans. In some cases the job of translation was left to a much later date, when other informants assisted in the translation, and a few of the texts were never translated. This process was excavated in detail in Andrew Bank’s Bushmen in a Victorian World. Bleek and Lloyd had six main informants, five men – |A!kungta, ||Kabbo, ǂKasing, Dia!kwain and |Hang ǂkass’o – and one woman – !Kweiten ta ||ken. In addition to these, a few other informants assisted the collectors for brief periods. |A!kungta was with Bleek and Lloyd from August 1870 until October 1873; ||Kabbo from February 1871 until October 1873; Dia!kwain from December 1873 until March 1876; and ǂKasing from November 1873 until January 1875, when he left with his wife, !Kweiten ta ||ken, who had been at Mowbray since June 1874. |Hang ǂkass’o assisted Miss Lloyd from January 1878 until December 1879.

With the exception of |A!kungta, these informants were from two families. Dia!kwain, his sister !Kweiten ta ||ken and her husband ǂKasing were all from the Katkop Mountains, while ||Kabbo and his son-in-law, |Hang ǂkass’o, lived near to the Strontbergen, 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 Books.

12Pippa Skotnes (ed.) (2005–2007), Lloyd and Bleek online, LLAREC: <http://www.lloydbleekcollection.uct.ac.za>, and on DVD in: Claim to the Country.

13Biographical details concerning W.H.I. Bleek can be found in Bank (2006).

14The collection is now contained in the UCT Library, the National Library and the Iziko South Africa Museum.

15‘Part I: Baboons’, Vol. 5 (1931), 167–179; ‘Part II: The Lion’, ‘Part III: Game Animals’, ‘Part IV: Omens, Windmaking, Clouds’, Vol. 6 (1932), 47–63, 233–249, 323–342; ‘Part V: The Rain’, Vol. 7 (1933), 297–312; ‘Part VI: Rainmaking’, Vol. 8 (1933), 375–392; ‘Part VII: Sorcerors’, Vol. 9 (1935), 1–47; ‘Part VIII: More about Sorcerors and Charms’, Vol. 10 (1936), 132–162. Much of this is reproduced in J.C. Hollman (ed.). 2004. Customs and Beliefs of the |Xam Bushmen. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

16Bantu Studies, Vol. 10 (1936), 163–203.

17Neil Bennun. 2004. The Broken String: The Last Words of an Extinct People. London: Viking.

18See Skotnes (1996) and Penn (2005).

19Traill, 1996; Anthony Traill. 2002. ‘The Khoisan language’, in Language in South Africa, edited by R. Mesthrie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

20While an ethnographic background to the texts is given in Chapter 1, further ethnographic data are contained throughout the book where this illuminates aspects of the narratives discussed. Further ethnography may also be found in Appendix A, which gives an account of girls’ puberty observances, and Appendix B, which deals with the shamans of the |Xam.

21In the following chapters, frequent reference is made to Bleek and Lloyd’s manuscript notebooks. Reference takes the following form: the collector’s name is indicated by the initial letter, B for Bleek or L for Lloyd, which is followed by a Roman numeral indicating either a particular notebook, in the case of the texts collected by Bleek, or a particular informant, in the case of the texts collected by Lloyd. The Roman numerals assigned to the six main informants were: I, |A!kungta; II, ||Kabbo; III, ǂKasing; IV, Dia!kwain; V, !Kweiten ta ||ken; VIII, |Hang ǂkass’o. Where Lloyd’s notebooks are referred to, this Roman numeral is followed by two Arabic numerals, the first, in brackets, indicating the initial notebook, the second indicating the page. In the case of Bleek’s notebooks, the Roman numeral is the notebook number and the Arabic numeral that follows is, therefore, the page reference.