On Biography and Archive: Dorothea Bleek and the Making of the Bleek Collection

Abstract

This article describes the making of the Bleek Collection, its formation into a coherent, scientific archive over decades, and the particular role of Dorothea Bleek (Wilhelm's daughter) in this process. It draws on the theoretical writings of Michel Foucault and Anne Laura Stoler to elaborate notions of ‘archive’ as process and product of history, and to complicate its meanings in regard to the making of knowledge about the past. In interrogating the making of the Bleek Collection, I seek to offer additional layers of nuance that can be gleaned from situating the making of the collection within time. I describe how the collection has been fragmented and consolidated over years through a range of archival interventions, and the ways in which the particular life and scholarship of Dorothea Bleek has directed this process of archive making.

Keywords:

• Biography
• practices of archiving
• collection making
• Bleek family
• Dorothea Bleek
• San
• bushman

Notes

¹The name given to the collection of notebooks recorded by Bleek and Lloyd and associated materials accrued over subsequent years, has been the subject of debate for a number of years. University of Cape Townlibrarians Leonie Twentyman Jones and Etaine Eberhard chose the name The Bleek Collection for their catalogue published in the early 1990s. See E. Eberhard and L. Twentyman Jones, The Bleek Collection, A List (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Libraries, 1992). More recently, the name of Lucy Lloyd has been added and the collection is referred to as the Bleek and Lloyd Collection in a number of contexts including published works such as J. Deacon and T. Dowson, eds, Voices from the Past: /Xam Bushmen and the Bleek and Lloyd Collection (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1996). See also P. Skotnes, Claim to the Country: The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2007). To reverse a trend in which she perceived Lloyd’s contribution to be ‘ignored or cast into the role of sister-in-law assistant’, and as tribute to Lloyd’s achievements as a scholar in her own right, Skotnes set up the UCT-based Lucy Lloyd Archive, Resource and Exhibition Centre (Llarec) in 1996. See P. Skotnes, Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1996), 21; also http://www.michaelis.uct.ac.za/research/centresunits#llarec, accessed 2 June 2011.

²I use the term ‘bushman’ in quotation marks to signal an awareness of its contested meanings, and to foreground the shifting interpretations which have accrued to the term in the history of its usage, first in early records of colonial contact, and more recently in nationalising and post-transitional settings in South Africa. I have chosen to follow Dorothea Bleek in using the word ‘bushman’ (though I dispense with her use of the capital ‘B’). My reason for this is to foreground how Bleek’s application of the word to disparate groups of people in the landscape implied a specific understanding of a racial, physical, linguistic and cultural type. I have likewise chosen to follow Dorothea Bleek’s usage in regard to other names given to groups such as, for instance, Naron (Nharo) or !Kung (!Kun). I do this in order to locate my research within the particular epistemic and geographical milieu that it is concerned to both describe and interrogate.

³There are also four Korana notebooks by Lucy Lloyd in the Maingard collection at the University of South Africa’s Library. In addition, a digital version of the entire notebook collection as well as all of the drawings and watercolours produced by the !Kung children is available online at http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/. The ‘Digital Bleek and Lloyd’ is a Llarec project and part of the Michaelis-based Centre for Curating the Archive directed by Pippa Skotnes. See www.cca.uct.ac.za, accessed 12 January 2012.

⁴Copies of some of the cards from the lexicon are on display at the Iziko South African Museum in the exhibition ‘Rock Art Made in Translation: Framing Images of and from the Landscape’ (opened December 2010). See also Skotnes, Claim to the Country.

⁵For two book-length studies, see A. Bank, Bushmen in a Victorian World, The Remarkable Story of the Bleek-Lloyd Collection of Bushman Folklore (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2006), and N. Bennun, The Broken String; The Last Words of an Extinct People (London: Viking, 2004).

⁶For insight into the maturing South African academic landscape and scientific institutions during this period, and the personalities involved in this growth, see S. Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge, Science, Sensibility and White South Africa 1820–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

⁷See M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1989), and J. Derrida, Archive Fever – A Freudian Impression (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995) for two seminal texts on deconstructing the archive. See also J. Derrida, ‘Archive Fever in South Africa’, in C. Hamilton, V. Harris, M. Pickover, G. Reid, R. Saleh, and J. Taylor, eds, Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), 38–54.

⁸For a penetrating critique of the role of biography in South African history making and writing, see C. Rassool, ‘The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa’ (PhD thesis, University of the Western Cape, Bellville, 2004). For more on the intersection between biography and archive-making, see M. Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press, 2000); and for an interrogation of the use of biography in the social sciences and history, see M.J. Maynes, J, Pierce, J. and B. Laslett, Telling Stories, The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2008).

⁹C. Doke, Bushman Dictionary Review, African Studies, 16, 2 (1957), 124, 125. See also D. Bleek, A Bushman Dictionary (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1956).

¹⁰Hamilton et al., Refiguring the Archive.

¹¹But see V. Harris, ‘The Archival Sliver: A Perspective on the Construction of Social Memory in Archives and the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy’ in Hamilton, Refiguring the Archive, 135–142, for discussion of possible inadequacies in the ‘transformed’ archive of the ‘post-apartheid’ South Africa.

¹²A. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 1.

¹³A. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 2.

¹⁴A. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 21.

¹⁵A. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 49.

¹⁶A. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 59, 50.

¹⁷M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1989) 128, 129.

¹⁸M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1989), 6–7.

¹⁹Eberhard and Twentyman Jones, The Bleek Collection.

²⁰A. Bank, ‘Anthropology, Race And Evolution: Rethinking The Legacy Of Wilhelm Bleek’ http://scnc.ukzn.ac.za/doc/SOC-cult/Race-Racism/Bank-A_Anthropology_race_evolution_Wilhelm_Bleek.pdf (n. d.), accessed 15 February 2012.

²¹ A. Bank, ‘Anthropology, Race And Evolution: Rethinking The Legacy Of Wilhelm Bleek’, 2–5.

²²A. Bank, Bushmen in a Victorian World, Ch. 1. See also Bleek, ‘Anthropology, Race and Evolution’, 2–10; and A. Bank, ‘Evolution and Racial Theory: The Hidden Side of Wilhelm Bleek’, South African Historical Journal, 43 (2000), 163–178.

²³Bank, Bushmen in a Victorian World, 18–19; Bank, ‘Anthropology, Race and Evolution’, 6–8. Some of these ideas and methods can be detected in the later scholarship of Dorothea Bleek.

²⁴Bank, ‘Anthropology, Race and Evolution’, 7.

²⁵For romantic readings of Wilhelm Bleek’s scholarship that concentrate on his Mowbray research, see, for example, Bennun, The Broken String; J. Deacon, ‘A Tale of Two Families: Wilhelm Bleek, Lucy Lloyd and the /Xam San of the Northern Cape’, and M. Hall, ‘The Proximity of Dr Bleek’s Bushmen’, both in Skotnes, Miscast, 93–113; 143–159. For a rather more nuanced reading of Bleek’s project situated within the intellectual traditions in which he studied in Europe, see R. Thornton, ‘“This Dying Out Race”: W.H.I Bleek’s Approach to the Languages of Southern Africa’, Social Dynamics, 9, 2, 1–10.

²⁶But Michael Wessels argues for a ‘fresh approach’ to the reading of the /Xam texts in which they are interpreted in their own terms and contexts, rather than in terms of external hermeneutic traditions. See M. Wessels, Bushman Letters, Interpreting /Xam Narrative (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2010).

²⁷A. Bank, Bushmen in a Victorian World, 26–32.

²⁸See Bank, Bushmen in a Victorian World, 26–32. Grey had returned to New Zealand in November of 1861, taking many of his bibliographic collection along with him. For a fascinating perspective on the Grey Library and its contents and meaning in post-colonial Cape Town, see H. Twidle, ‘From The Origin of Language to a Language of Origin: A Prologue to the Grey Collection’, presented to The Courage of //Kabbo and a Century of Specimens Conference (Cape Town, University of Cape Town, August 2011). See also D. Varley, ‘The Grey Collection’, in C. Pama, ed., The South African Library, Its History, Collections and Librarians (Cape Town: A.A. Balkema, 1968), 35–40.

²⁹For more on Bleek’s time in Natal and his relationship with Sir George Grey, see Bank, Bushmen in a Victorian World, 22–32. See also O. Spohr, ed., The Natal Diaries of Dr W.H.I. Bleek 1855–1856. (Cape Town: A.A. Balkema, 1965).

³⁰See J. Weintroub, ‘Images and the Archival Trace: Tracking Colonial Ethnographic Photography at the NLSA’, postamble, 1, 2 (2005), 73–78. For an online bibliography and annotated inventory of the photographic albums, go to http://www.africanstudies.uct.ac.za/postamble/vol1-2.htm.

³¹For background on Huxley’s photographic project, see E. Edwards Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001).

³²For more on Bleek’s role in facilitating the photographic project, see M. Godby, ‘Images of //Kabbo’, in P. Skotnes, ed., Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1996): 115–128, Bank, ‘Anthropology, Race and Evolution’, 22–27, and Bank, Bushmen in a Victorian World, Ch. 4.

³³Bank, Bushmen in a Victorian World, 229–231.

³⁴On Dia!kwain’s presentiments of death, see Bank, Bushmen in a Victorian World, Ch. 10. See also W. Bleek and L. Lloyd, Specimens of Bushman Folklore (London: George Allan & Co, 1911), xv, where Lucy Lloyd’s preface relates Dia!kwain’s story of the owl visiting the bereaved child.

³⁵Bank, Bushmen in a Victorian World, 343. See University of Cape Town Libraries, Manuscripts and Archives Department, Bleek Collection, hereafter BC 151, A2.2.

³⁶For more on the !Kung children’s ancestral territories, their journeys to Cape Town, and their interactions with Lucy Lloyd, see M. Winberg, ‘Annotations of Loss and Abundance’ (MFA thesis, University of Cape Town, 2011).

³⁷M. Szalay, ed., The Moon as Shoe: Drawings of the San (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2002). The boys also produced clay objects some of which are on display at the Iziko South African Museum as part of the exhibition ‘Rock Art Made in Translation: Framing Images of and from the Landscape’ (opened December 2010).

³⁸Bank, Bushmen in a Victorian World, Ch. 15. For more on Lucy Lloyd’s acquisition of the Stow manuscript and reproductions, see K. Schoeman, ed., A Debt of Gratitude: Lucy Lloyd and the ‘Bushman Work’ of G.W. Stow (Cape Town: South African Library, 1996).

³⁹See W. Bleek and L. Lloyd, eds, Specimens of Bushman Folklore (London: George Allen & Co, 1911).

⁴⁰P. Scott Deetz, Catalog of the Bleek-Lloyd Collection in the Scott Family Archive (Williamsburg: Deetz Ventures, 2007), 73–78. Mabel (May) married and settled in Germany. Two other sisters achieved tertiary qualifications. Margarethe (Margie) attended medical school in Zurich while Wilhelmina (Helma) studied music and trained as a concert pianist.

⁴¹Scott Deetz, Catalog, 25, 73.

⁴²See Bleek and Lloyd, Specimans of Bushmen Folklore, xvi, for Lloyd’s acknowledgement of Dorothea Bleek’s help with ‘copying many of the manuscripts and making the Index to this volume’.

⁴³Its full title reads G. Stow, The Native Races of South Africa, A History of the Intrusion of the Hottentots and Bantu into the Hunting Grounds of the Bushmen, the Aborigines of the Country (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1905).

⁴⁴Bank, Bushmen in a Victorian World, 386.

⁴⁵The record of these trips can be found in M. Tongue, Bushman Paintings (London: Clarendon Press, 1909).

⁴⁶For details of some of these excursions, see A. Bank, ‘Anthropology and Fieldwork Photography: Dorothea Bleek’s Expedition to the Northern Cape and the Kalahari, July to December 1911’, Kronos 32 (2006), 77–113; J. Weintroub, By Small Wagon with Half Tent; Dorothea Bleek’s journey to Kakia, June to August 1913 (Cape Town: Llarec, 2011); and T. Güldemann, The //ŋ!ke or Bushmen of Griqualand West; Notes on the Language of the //ŋ!ke or Bushmen of Griqualand West by Dorothea F. Bleek (Köln: Institut für Afrikanistik, 2000).

⁴⁷G. Stow and D. Bleek, eds, Rock Paintings in South Africa from Parts of the Eastern Province and Orange Free State (London: Methuen, 1930).

⁴⁸For a contemporary account, see M. Finkel, ‘The Hadza’, National Geographic, 216, 6 (2009), 94–119. See also D. Bleek, ‘The Hadzapi or Watingdega of Tanganyika Territory’, Africa, 4, 3, 273–285.

⁴⁹See D. Bleek, A Comparative Vocabulary of Bushman Languages (London: Cambridge University Press, 1929).

⁵⁰See for example, D. Bleek, ed., The Mantis and his Friends; Bushman Folklore Collected by the Late Dr. W.H.I. Bleek and the Late Dr. Lucy C. Lloyd (Cape Town: Maskew Miller, 1923); D. Bleek, The Naron, A Bushman Tribe of the Central Kalahari (London, Cambridge University Press, 1928); D. Bleek, ‘Bushman Folklore’, Africa 2, 3 (1929), 302–313; and D. Bleek, ‘Bushman Grammar: A Grammatical Sketch of the Language of the /Xam-ka-!k’e’, Zeitschrift fürEingeborenen-Sprachen, 19 (1928–1930), 81–98, 20, 161–174.

⁵¹Bleek published a series of themed excerpts from the notebooks in the journal Bantu Studies during the 1930s. These have been republished in an edited collection in J. Hollmann, Customs and Beliefs of the /Xam Bushmen (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2005).

⁵²D. Bleek, A Bushman Dictionary (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1956).

⁵³This German medical doctor and anthropologist studied and photographed the ‘native races’ of southern Africa during a scientific expedition early in the 1860s. See K Dietrich and A. Bank, eds, An Eloquent Picture Gallery: The South African Portrait Photographs of Gustav Theodor Fritsch, 1863–1865 (Cape Town: Jacana, 2009).

⁵⁴This exchange of materials is recorded in a typescript bearing the title Inventory of The Papers of W H I Bleek [at the South African Library] drawn up by A. Burman in September 1985. It is stored in archivists' working files related to BC 151, MSC 57, ii.

⁵⁵Karel Schoeman was Special Collections librarian at the NLSA for many years. He retired soon after this book appeared.

⁵⁶At the same time, Bleek sent ‘curios’ collected at Sandfontein to her colleague and friend Maria Wilman at the McGregor Museum in Kimberley. See Bleek to Wilman, 14 March 1921. McGregor Museum, Documents and Manuscripts Collection, MMKD 2591/6. For more on Dororthea Bleek’s collecting activities at the SAM, see the exhibition ‘Sounds and Silences from a San Archive’ (Bertram House, Cape Town, 18 August 2011–15 May 2012).

⁵⁷For more on the ‘bushman diorama’ see P. Davison, ‘Typecast – Representations of the Bushmen at the South African Museum’, Public Archaeology 1 (2001), 3–20. See also P. Davison, ‘Material Culture, Context and Meaning: A Critical Investigation of Museum Practice, with Particular Reference to the South African Museum’ (DPhil thesis, University of Cape Town, 1991).

⁵⁸See Lloyd to SAM director, 1 May 1878, SAM correspondence files. See also J.D. Lewis-Williams, ed., Stories that Float from Afar: Ancestral Folklore of the San of Southern Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 2000), 26.

⁵⁹See Bleek & Lloyd, Specimens: 352–355.

⁶⁰Lloyd to SAM director, 1 May 1878, SAM correspondence files. See also Lewis-Williams, Stories that Float from Afar, 26.

⁶¹The charcoal rubbings can be viewed online at http://www.sarada.co.za/people_and_institutions/researchers/dorothea_bleek/, accessed 12 January 2012. Bleek’s field photographs went into the South African Museum’s large generic collection of ethnographic images where they remain classified by region and physical ‘type’ rather than by the researcher’s name. An ‘edited’ collection of Bleek’s field photography is included in an album in the Bleek Collection at UCT at J2.1. For a digital version of the collection, see http://www.lib.uct.ac.za/mss/existing/DBleekXML/website/, accessed 2 February 2012.

⁶²D. Bleek, Comparative Vocabularies of Bushman Languages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), 1–3.

⁶³Later correspondence and notes made after leaving the field suggest that Bleek was not impressed by the efficacy of the Ediphone. She complained that the gramophone did not record the clicks, and therefore her interviewees struggled to hear and confirm what they had just spoken into the recorder. This meant that her transcriptions could not be verified. See University of Cape Town Libraries, Manuscripts and Archives Department, Percival Kirby Collection, hereafter BC 750, Bleek to Kirby 7 May 1936, also Bleek to Kirby 17 May 1936, also BC 151, E5.1.17 to E5.1.21.

⁶⁴See University of Cape Town Libraries, Manuscripts and Archives Department, Kathe Woldmann Collection, hereafter BC 210, Box 4, Bleek to Woldmann 11 April 1927: ‘In terms of research, and in particular Bushman research, this takes place on a voluntary basis. As for example my work. Only twice I was given assistance for a few months for research trips.’

⁶⁵For more on the intimate and marginal associations in Bleek’s career, see J. Weintroub, ‘Sisters at the Rockface – the Van der Riet Twins and Dorothea Bleek’s Rock Art Research and Publishing, 1932–1940’, African Studies, 68, 3 (2009), 402–428.

⁶⁶See E. Eberhard, ‘Wilhelm Bleek and the Founding of Bushman Research’, in Deacon and Dowson, Voices from the Past, 49–65.

⁶⁷Eberhard, ‘Wilhelm Bleek’, 49. This early fragmentation of materials is now being reversed as UCT’s Rare Books librarian is working on a reconstruction of Wilhelm Bleek’s library. See T. Barben, ‘Gathering Wisdom: Re-Assembling Wilhelm Bleek’s Library’, paper presented at the Courage of //Kabbo and a Century of Specimens Conference (University of Cape Town, August 2011).

⁶⁸See E. Rosenthal and A. Goodwin, Cave Artists of South Africa, 48 Unpublished Reproductions of Rock Paintings Collected by the Late Dorothea Bleek (Cape Town: A.A. Balkema, 1956), 5–6, 14.

⁶⁹Tongue, Bushman Paintings, 17.

⁷⁰Tongue, Bushman Paintings, 17.

⁷¹Tongue, Bushman Paintings, 17.

⁷²Tongue, Bushman Paintings, 31.

⁷³D. Bleek, ‘A Survey of Our Present Knowledge of Rockpaintings in South Africa’, South African Journal of Science, 29 (1932), 77.

⁷⁴Lloyd’s empathy towards her research subjects, her talent for mastering the /Xam and !Kung languages, and her rich contribution to ‘bushman’ cosmology and lifeways have been well documented in contemporary scholarship. Lloyd extended Wilhelm Bleek’s narrow interest in grammar and folklore, and included in her notebooks a record of daily life covering hunting practices, use of the environment, harvesting of plants and making of poisons, as well as myths associated with the stars. See, for example, P. Skotnes, ‘Introduction’, in P. Skotnes, ed., Miscast; Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1996); Bank, Bushemen in a Victorian World, Chs 2 & 13; and Skotnes, Claim to the Country.

⁷⁵BC 210, Box 4, Bleek to Woldmann 20 May 1932, Käthe Woldmann was a German scholar of ‘bushman’ folklore and rock art. She lived in Dornach, near Basel, Switzerland, and enjoyed a long correspondence with Dorothea Bleek. Woldmann published a German translation of Bleek and Lloyd folktales in Basel in 1938. See W. Bleek and L. Lloyd, Das wahre Gesicht des Buschmannes in seinen Mythen und Märchen (Basel: Kommissionverlag Zbinden & Hügin, 1938).

⁷⁶I.e. the legends of Europe, specifically those of Lemuria and Atlantis which were propagated in terms of the anthroposophic ideas of ‘root races’ and the writings of Dr Richard Karutz, director of the anthropological museum at Lübeck, presumably dealing with anthroposophist-inspired myths and legends. See P. Staudenmaier and P. Zegers, ‘Anthroposophy and Ecofascism’, in Communalism (2007), http://www.communalism.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=193:anthroposophy-and-ecofascism&catid=42:fashion-beauty&Itemid=34, accessed 26 May 2010.

⁷⁷Bleek to Woldmann, 26 December 1930, BC 210 Box 4.

⁷⁸Bleek to Woldmann 21 February 1936, BC 210 Box 4. Bleek’s comment was made in response to an attempt by Professor Leo Frobenius to publish annotated excerpts from the notebook texts. It could be argued that Bleek’s view was that /Xam texts be understood within the context of the broader /Xam worldview as presented in the notebooks, rather than in terms constructed though an external (western) hermeneutic tradition. On this point, see the discussion in M. Wessels, Bushmen Letters: Interpreting /Xam Narrative, (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2010).

⁷⁹I. Schapera, The Khoisan Peoples of South Africa (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1930), vii.

⁸⁰See Schapera, The Khoisan Peoples, 32–34. See also I. Schapera, ‘The Tribal Divisions of the Bushmen’, Man, 27 (1927), 68–73, where he draws on Bleek’s research in his rebuttal of Professor E.H.L Schwartz’s classification of ‘bushman’ groups.

⁸¹Maingard to Bleek, 5 April 1938, Bleek Collection, University of Cape Town Manuscripts and Archives Department, BC 151, C16.7.

⁸²O. Spohr, Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek – A Bio-Bibliographical Sketch (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Libraries, 1962), 34.

⁸³Personal communication, Etaine Eberhard, 19 April and 6 May 2005.

⁸⁴Spohr was responsible for tracking down the courtship letters between Wilhelm and Jemima as well as a series of letters that Bleek wrote to his mother and brother while recuperating at the French village of Pau between 1858 and 1860, and the letters he wrote to his cousin Haeckel. See O. Spohr, ‘Dr Bleek at Pau’, Quarterly Bulletin of the SA Library, 20, 1 (1965), 5–10. He found the leader articles Bleek had written for Het Volksblad as well as part of the diary recorded while in Natal, both of which had been languishing in disarray among the Bleek papers at UCT’s Jagger Library. See O. Spohr, ‘Bleek’s Het Volksblad Leaders’, Quarterly Bulletin of the SA Library 17, 4 (1963), 116–126; O. Spohr, ed., The Natal Diaries of Dr. W.H.I. Bleek, 1855–1965 (Cape Town, A.A. Balkema, 1965).

⁸⁵See J. Weintroub, ‘“Some Sort of Mania”: Otto Hartung Spohr and the making of the Bleek Collection’, Kronos, 32 (2006), 114–138.

⁸⁶See O. Spohr, ‘The First Special Librarian in South Africa; W.H.I. Bleek at the S.A. Library’, in C. Pama, ed., The South African Library: Its History, Collections and Librarians, 1818–1968 (Cape Town: A.A. Balkema, 1968), 57–65.

⁸⁷Spohr’s search for Bleek materials took him to archives in Jena and put him in contact with Bleek relatives in Germany. He also found Bleek material at the Killie Campbell Library in Durban and published a bio-bibliographical sketch on Bleek as well as a monograph. See O. Spohr, Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek – A Bio-Bibliographical Sketch (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Libraries, 1968). See also O. Spohr, ‘Librarians at Work – and At Leisure: Searching for data on Dr W.H.I Bleek’, The Jaggerite (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, n. d.).

⁸⁸See R. Hewitt, Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San (Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag, 1986).

⁸⁹See R. Hewitt, ‘Reflections on Narrative’, in Skotnes, Claim to the Country, 160–169.

⁹⁰See P. Scott Deetz, Catalog of the Bleek-Lloyd Collection.

⁹¹See P. Vinnicombe, People of the Eland – Rock Paintings of the Drakensberg Bushmen as a Reflection of their Life and Thought (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1976); J.D. Lewis-Williams, Believing and Seeing: Symbolic Meanings in Southern San Rock Paintings (London: Academic Press, 1981), and J. Deacon, ‘“My Place is the Bitterpits”: The Home Territory of Bleek and Lloyd’s /Xam San informants’, African Studies, 45 (1986), 135–155. For a genealogy of the use of notebook texts (and of the notion ‘bushman’) in South African literature, see A. Gagiano, ‘“By What Authority?”: Presentations of the Khoisan in South African English Poetry’, Alternation, 6, 1 (1999), 155–173.

⁹²See Deacon and Dowson, Voices from the Past.

⁹³Eberhard and Twentyman Jones, The Bleek Collection; see also Eberhard, ‘Wilhelm Bleek and the Founding of Bushman Research’.

⁹⁴See Skotnes, Miscast.

⁹⁵The /Xam phrase from the notebooks, ka ke karre xe (people who are different stay together) features on the Coat of Arms of the ‘new’ South Africa along with figures drawn from the Linton Panel of rock art. See A. Barnard, ‘Coat of Arms and the Body Politic: Khoisan Imagery and South African National Identity’, Ethnos, 69, 1 (2004), 5–22; also B. Smith, J. Lewis-Williams, G. Blundell, and C. Chippindale, ‘Archaeology and Symbolism in the New South African Coat of Arms’, Antiquity, 74 (2000): 467–468.

⁹⁶In this register, the collection is titled ‘The Bleek Collections of San (Bushman) Studies’. In 1997, when the Bleek collection was added, the Memory of the World register was limited in scope. The list given here indicates how the project has burgeoned since its inception in the 1990s in keeping with contemporary and postcolonial attitudes to archives, memory and heritage. Recent additions suggest a purposeful effort towards redress and the inclusion of material previously regarded as marginal. These include court papers from the Rivonia Treason Trial (added in 2007); materials relating to the Slave Trade across 11 countries gathered under the title Ports of Call (2007); the John Marshall Ju/’hoan Bushman Film and Video Collection 1950–2000 (2009); and Documentary Heritage on the Resistance and Struggle for Human Rights in the Dominican Republic 1930–1961 (2009). See http://www.unesco.org/webworld/mdm/en/index_mdm.html, accessed 28 October 2011.

⁹⁷It was this space into which the fictional writings of Laurens van der Post, alongside the famous ethnographies of researchers such as the Marshall family and Marjorie Shostak, found a perfect fit in the 1950s and 1960s. See E. Wilmsen, ‘Primal Anxiety, Sanctified Landscapes: The Imagery of Primitiveness in the Ethnographic Fictions of Laurens van der Post’, Visual Anthropology, 15 (2002), 143–201; E. Marshall Thomas, The Harmless People (New York: Knopf, 1959); and M. Shostak, ‘“What the Wind Won’t take Away”, The Genesis of Nisa – The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman’, in Personal Narratives Group, eds, Interpreting Women’s Lives, Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 228–240.