Smoking Around the Campfire: A San Encounter with the Colonial

ABSTRACT

In 1873 Joseph Orpen, resident of Nomansland, engaged a San¹ man Qing to guide a combined force of levies and mounted police through the Maloti mountains in present-day Lesotho where they hoped to intercept a group of reluctant Hlubi rebels under chief Langalibalele. Orpen was not only a colonial official but also a keen scholar. In response to his questions Qing commented on some of the rock paintings they saw on their short journey and recounted folklore. A year later Qing’s narratives and his comments on rock art were published along with Orpen’s account of the journey and ‘remarks’ by the celebrated linguist and collector of |Xam narrative, Wilhelm Bleek in an article in the Cape Monthly Magazine (CMM). Orpen’s piece has enjoyed a seminal position in San studies ever since, especially in the field of rock art. The encounter between Qing and Orpen occurred in a context of colonial violence. Not only was the campaign that was being pursued against Langalibalele and his men unnecessary but the San had been subject to genocidal attacks by both regular and irregular colonial forces for a considerable period of time, and the studies of San rock art and narrative at the time were largely carried out in an intellectual climate that saw the extinction of the San as inevitable. This article will locate the CMM article more firmly in its colonial context by combining a close reading of elements of the CMM article itself with a consideration of a wider body of writing that relates to Orpen’s piece.

KEYWORDS:

• San
• orality
• rock art
• narrative
• folklore
• colonialism
• translation
• agency

Acknowledgements

The research on which this article is based was conducted with the help of NRF funding for rated researchers. The article has been substantially improved by the detailed comments of the anonymous reviewers.

Note on Contributor

Michael Wessels teaches English literature at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). He has published widely in the fields of San studies, orality, indigeneity, and South African literature.

Notes

1. The decision to use the term ‘San’ rather than ‘Bushman’ in this article is a matter of individual preference. The sources to which the article refers often use the term ‘Bushman’.

2. Orpen states in his Reminiscences of Life in South Africa that he himself ‘raised and commanded an army … to co-operate against Langalibalele’ (1964: 2). Grant was initially impressed by Orpen's friendliness and willingness to cooperate with him (Mitchell & Challis 2008: 415) but later suspected Orpen of wanting to ‘be commanding officer’ (Mitchell & Challis 2008: 424) and of turning Grant's ‘squadron of Police into a support to a lot of dirty Basutos' (Mitchell & Challis 2008: 425). Orpen appears to have given Grant the assurances he sought when confronted by him (Mitchell & Challis 2008: 427). It is notable that Orpen does not refer to Grant in his article (1874) or his Reminiscences (1964). Rachel King (2014: 359) notes ‘Orpen's insubordination to Grant’ was later held against him when it was used ‘as evidence against [his] competence’ when ‘in his tenure as British Resident, he ill-advisedly called up Natal's armed forces to settle a relatively minor boundary dispute with Mpondomise or Mpondo residents'.

3. Grant also made overtures to procure Qing's services (Mitchell & Challis 2008: 424).

4. Orpen was critical of Stow's book, however, disagreeing with his thesis that African people, the Sotho in particular, were intruders who had displaced the San and claiming that most of Stow's information was second-hand (Eldredge 1988: 200)

5. The |Xam were a San people of the northern Cape. Bleek's informants were drawn from |Xam prisoners in Cape Town who were released into his custody with the governor's permission. They became part of his household in Mowbray.

6. Ironically, notes King (2014: 358–9), Orpen himself does not seem to have attributed much significance to his meeting with Qing. He does not refer to his encounter with Qing or to the expedition through the Maloti in any of his subsequent writing. King conjectures that this might have been due to the fact that he saw the expedition itself as a failure.

7. It is also true, though, that people claiming San ancestry continue to find significance in the paintings, and have even painted themselves, in the years since Orpen and Qing's meeting (see, for example, Mkhwanazi 2003; Lewis-Williams 2003: 49–51; Blundell 2004; Prins 2009; Wessels 2012; Sullivan & Low 2014: 236).

8. Discussions of individual stories include Lewis-Williams (2003: 45–9); Lewis-Williams & Challis (2011: 164–70); Lewis-Williams (2010: 8–15); Lewis-Williams (2013); Wessels (2014). Anne Solomon (1997, 2007) discusses Orpen's copies in relation to the whole cycle of stories.

9. Lewis-Williams (2003: 21) states that the stories were translated directly into English for Orpen, but since Orpen spoke a fair amount of Sesotho it seems likely that this language would also have been part of the translation process (McGranaghan et al. 2013: 140), a view to which Lewis-Williams, one of the co-authors of McGranaghan et al. 2013, seems to have also later subscribed.

10. Bank (2006: 308) claims that some of the views about the water-cow attributed to Dia!kwain in the CMM article were Bleek's rather than Dia!kwain's. He bases this assertion on discrepancies between Bleek's notebook and his contribution to the CCM article and also argues that the sort of analysis ascribed to Dia!kwain was ‘foreign’ to him. Bleek, Bank notes, wanted to construct a narrative from Orpen's different copies while Dia!kwain himself was more concerned with ‘telling a story based on a single feature identified in a single image’. Bank concludes that Bleek ‘adopted considerable poetic licence, adding to Dia!kwain's comments about the dragging of the water-cow his own constructions of what this and the other images depicted’ (2006: 309).

11. Orpen wrote ‘a genealogy and history’ of the BaPhuthi which was taken ‘directly from Moorosi himself’ (King 2014: 129).

12. King describes this memorandum as ‘the first and possibly most thorough chronicle of the BaPhuthi, their history, and their territories' yet produced, a position undoubtedly now held by her own work on the subject.

13. The widely used anthropological and linguistic term ‘Bantu’, notorious for its use as an apartheid racial category, was coined by Wilhelm Bleek (Bank 2006: 27).

14. See Helize van Vuuren (1994: 63) for a discussion of //Kabbo's piece as ‘meta-discourse’ and an example of ‘indigenous literary theory’.

15. Lewis-Williams (2000) uses the phrase in this sense in the title of his collection of material from the Bleek and Lloyd collection.

16. See Wright (1971) for a systematic account of the conflict with the San in Natal in Penn (1996, 2005) and Adhikari (2010) for accounts of the genocidal violence visited on the Cape San in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.