‘The Bushmen's Letters’: |Xam narratives of the Bleek and Lloyd Collection and their afterlives

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521199285.003

1 - ‘The Bushmen's Letters’: |Xam narratives of the Bleek and Lloyd Collection and their afterlives

from PART I - ORATURES, ORAL HISTORIES, ORIGINS

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2012

Hedley Twidle

Edited by

David Attwell and

Derek Attridge

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David Attwell: Affiliation:
University of York
Derek Attridge: Affiliation:
University of York

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Summary

In the special collections of the University of Cape Town library are over 150 notebooks filled with columns of Victorian handwriting: phonetic notations of the languages once spoken by southern Africa's |Xam and !Kung peoples with English translations alongside that run to some 13,000 pages. The record of a unique instance of cross-cultural interaction within the history of the Cape Colony, the Bleek and Lloyd Collection is widely considered to be one of the world's richest ethnographic archives, and the most important textual record of indigenous oral expression on the subcontinent. Indicative of the symbolic charge this particular culture has come to assume in contemporary South Africa, the national coat of arms unveiled by President Thabo Mbeki on 27 April 2000 carries as its motto a sentence written in |Xam, preserving the nineteenth-century orthography of the notebooks to record its various clicks. !ke e:|xarra ∥ke is officially translated as ‘Unity in Diversity’; glossed more carefully from a language no longer spoken by any living South African, it can be rendered as ‘people who are different come together’.

The disparate assemblage of texts, correspondence, photographs, watercolour sketches and other material traces that make up the collection resulted from the convergence of two very different groupings of people in late nineteenth-century Cape Town.

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Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of South African Literature , pp. 15 - 41

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521199285.003 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2012

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