The Bleek and Lloyd Collection

Wilhelm Bleek, a philologist working in Cape Town, obtained permission in 1870 to take /Xam speakers serving sentences at the Breakwater convict station into his household so that he could learn and record their language. His sister in law Lucy Lloyd worked alongside him and, after his death in 1875, carried the project alone for a further nine years.

The result is roughly twelve thousand pages of /Xam narrative written in phonetic script with facing English translation, covering cosmology, the trickster figure Kaggen, rain making, the people of the early race, and the substance of daily life. It remains the only substantial record of the religion of any San community of the Cape.

The method has a feature that was unusual for its period and matters a great deal now. The notebooks record the narrators by name, //Kabbo, Dia!kwain, /Han=kass'o, /A!kunta and others, and treat them as collaborators whose words are being taken down rather than as anonymous informants supplying data. Their names are on the material. A selection was published as Specimens of Bushman Folklore in 1911, and the archive is held at the University of Cape Town and inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.

Most entries in this atlas that record an investigation record it as open, meaning that further work could settle what it left unsettled. This one is different, and the difference is absolute. The /Xam language has no speakers. The communities the narrators came from no longer exist as such. Nothing in the record can be checked against a living tradition, and no question the notebooks leave unanswered can be put to anyone.

The work also did not end at a conclusion. It ended when the last narrators went home and no further speakers could be found who were willing or able to continue. Whatever Bleek and Lloyd had intended to cover, the archive stops where the availability of people to record it stopped.

Nothing comparable was attempted with the neighbouring groups of the southern and eastern Cape, and their languages ended without record at all. That absence is the reason this collection carries so much weight: it is not one source among several but very nearly the whole of what survives. Later comparative work on San religion and society, such as Mathias Guenther's studies, draws on it as a foundation while working with living communities elsewhere in southern Africa. The atlas records the archive's standing and its limits together, because a source that cannot be supplemented has to be read with its own conditions of production in view.

Sources Specimens of Bushman FolkloreW. H. I. Bleek and L. C. Lloyd with Tricksters and Trancers: Bushman Religion and SocietyMathias Guenther