Notes towards a history of Khoi literature

Abstract

This article puts forward a revisionist history of Khoi literature, and also presents a number of translated Khoi narratives that have not been available in English before. Compared to the large volume of Bushman literature and scholarship, there has been very little Khoi literature and engagement with it, and an argument is presented to account for this gap in South African cultural history. Until now, the major source of Khoi literature was Wilhelm Bleek's Reynard the Fox in South Africa (1864. London:Trübner), and this text is critically interrogated as a limiting version of Khoi orature. An alternative corpus of Khoi narratives is presented that was originally published in Leonhard Schultze's Aus Namaland und Kalahari (1907. Jena: Gustav Fischer).

Keywords:

• W. H. I. Bleek
• Bushman literature
• Khoi literature
• orality
• L. Schultze
• translation

Notes

The use of racial and ethnic terms is contentious in South African studies. I have used the term ‘Bushman’ rather than ‘San’ since it is now again widely in use, as is evident from recent titles in my bibliography. The term /Xam has been used when referring to the particular group of now extinct Cape Bushmen. Instead of Bleek's and Schultze's use of ‘Hottentot’, the less offensive and widely accepted word ‘Khoi’ has been used. The word ‘Nama’ is more geographically limiting as it refers to groupings of Khoi people to the north and south of the Orange River.

See Elwyn Jenkins's recent article, ‘San Tales Again: Acknowledgement and appropriation’ (2010), which critically surveys the large volume of literary appropriations of the Bushman archive.

See ‘Wilhelm Bleek and the reconstruction of the Native Erotic Imagination: a study of censorship, genocide and colonial science’, seminar paper presented at a SANPAD Colloquium, UWC, November 2010.

For a fuller discussion of Bleek's awkwardness regarding sexual matters see Andrew Bank's comprehensive study Bushmen in a Victorian World: The Remarkable Story of the Bleek-Lloyd Collection of Bushman Folklore (2006, 98).

The biographical information about Schultze is inferred from the prefaces of several of his publications, as well as a short biographical entry in Thomas Adam's book Germany and the Americas: culture, politics and history (2005: 950).