Notes
- UNESCO. “Memory of the World Register” portal [http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=22938&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html] (Accessed 26 November 2008).
- Robert J. Gordon, review of Skotnes, ed. Claim to the Country: The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek (Johannesburg: Jacana and Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007) in De Arte 77(2008): 77.
- Sterkfontein cave, about 50 km from Johannesburg, was the site of hominid fossils as old as 2.5 million years, including “Mrs. Ples.” See Nick Shepherd, “State of Discipline: Science, Culture and Identity in South African Archaeology, 1870–2003,” Journal of Southern African Studies 29, 4 (December 2003): 824.
- See Robert J. Gordon, Picturing Bushmen: The Denver African Expedition of 1925 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1997), 20–21. See also Clive Gamble, “Archaeology, history and the uttermost ends of the earth–-Tasmania, Tierra del Fuego and the Cape,” Antiquity 66(1992): 712–20; and Zachary Kingdon, “Reinterpreting the African Collections of the World Museum Liverpool,” Critical Interventions, 2(Spring 2008): 31.
- For the role of archaeology in this construct of prehistory, see Shepherd, “State of Discipline,” 827.
- Robert J. Gordon, “‘Bain's Bushmen’: Scenes at the Empire Exhibition, 1936,” in Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business, ed. Bernth Lindfors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 284.
- Peter Bowler, “Victorian Evolutionism and the Interpretation of Marginalized Peoples,” Antiquity 66(1992): 725.
- Gamble “Archeology, history,” 713.
- For South African anatomist Alan Morris, “the primary goal of many modern physical anthropologists working in southern Africa has been to clarify the enigmatic relationship of the Khoikhoi with the San.” Alan Morris, The South African Archaeological Bulletin 42(1987): 20.
- “It is first and foremost because they were presumed to lack true human language that the Hottentot was assigned the role of a creature bridging human and animal realms.” Zoë Strother, “Display of the Body Hottentot,” in Lindfors, Africans on Stage, 3–4.
- Strother, passim (1–61).
- Pippa Skotnes, “‘Civilised Off the Face of the Earth’: Museum Display and the Silencing of the !Xam,” Poetics Today 22, 2 (Summer 2001): 309.
- Ibid., For some Khoisan, their modern ancestry became morally suspect when seen as a byproduct of the illicit union of Jan van Riebeek with Hottentot women. See Robin Oakley, “Collective Rural Identity in Steinkopf, a Communal Coloured Reserve, c. 1926–1996,” Journal of Southern African Studies 32, 3 (September, 2006): 495–496.
- “Bantu” is itself a colonial construct coined by W.H. Bleek in the 1850s. There were Bantu speakers in present day South Africa long before the European settlers, at least by 300 AD. See Robert K. Herbert and Richard Bailey, “The Bantu Languages: Sociohistorical Perspectives,” in Language in South Africa, ed. Rajend Mesthrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 50–78.
- I refer here notably to separate researches in black modernity, the New African Intellectuals, within the Bantu speaking populations, and the important work of Ntongela Masilela. “The advent of European modernity in South Africa practically alters everything, rendering certain things PRIMARY and others SECONDARY. What becomes primary is the relation of both Africans and the Khoisan to the Europeans, and the relationship between them becomes secondary if not ‘irrelevant.’ By the time of the making of the New Africans, who have entered modernity in the process of recreating it AHEAD of the Khoisan, and begin to write in earnest rather than ‘oralizing’ their challenging new historical experience, there was no compelling imperative that they should concern themselves with the First People.” Ntongela Masilela, personal communication, April 2007.
- Janette Deacon and Craig Foster, My Heart Stands in the Hill (Cape Town: Struik Publishers, 2005), 19.
- Nick Shepherd, “State of the Discipline,” 823&ndash844
- Ibid., 838–839.
- “‘I am terribly fond of black people. Africans […] They are a big mystery to me […] I can't understand them and I am sure they don't fully understand me as a white person, but they are close to me through art […] they are so near and part of the environment of Africa: they understand the soil and they understand the mountains and the rivers better than I do. That is the sort of kick I get out of them–-it's their contact with this Africa in which I live.'” Walter Battiss in Walter Battiss (Craighall: A. D. Donker, 1985), 16.
- Walter Battiss c. 1960s cited by Murray Schoonraad, “Battisss and Prehistoric Rock Art,” in Walter Battiss, 50.
- Garth Erasmus, interview, November 2008.
- “Kinnerle: There has to be a little cap on the last e to give a pronunciation something like a short, quick ‘air’ sound, so the whole word phonetically is something like: ‘Kinnerlair.’ Literally, a combination of two words: children + lay. It is the place name of the gravesite of thirty-odd children in Steinkopf in Namaqualand specifically in the Richtersveld area up the west coast of SA and near to the Namibia borderline.” Garth Erasmus, personal communication, 29 March 2007.
- Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage Conference in 1997 (Cape Town) and the National Khoisan Consultative Conference in 2001 (Oudtshoorn). The Khoisan Legacy Project was launched through the South African Heritage Resources Agency in 2000.
- “They offer a culturally and historically binding cement as depicted in our new national coat of arms […] the Khoisan could and should play a cultural, political and reconciliatory role of proportions way beyond the size of their actual numbers. Such is their historical legacy.” Keyan G. Tomaselli, “The Khoisan Represented: Recovering Agency,” (paper presented at the National Khoisan Consultative Conference, Oudtshoorn, 2001), 41.
- The coat of arms includes figures from a well- known rock art site and San (!Xam) inscription. !ke e: /xarra //ke, “written in the Khoisan language of the !Xam people, literally meaning diverse people unite. It addresses each individual effort to harness the unity between thought and action. On a collective scale it calls for the nation to unite in a common sense of belonging and national pride–-unity in diversity.” South African Government Information, “About Government–-National Coat of Arms” [http://www.info.gov.za/aboutgovt/symbols/coa/index.htm#The_symbols_of_the_coat_of_arms].
- There were ten primary informants (six !Xam speakers and four !Kung speakers). Other material was provided by !Xam speakers at various locations including Breakwater Prison. See “Claim to the Country, The Digital Bleek and Lloyd” University of Cape Town, Michaelis School of Fine Art [http://banzai.cs.uct.ac.za/~hussein/bleek_lloyd/index.html]. The use of the word “informant” is slowly being replaced by “collaborator.” This is significant in that it suggests greater empowerment on the part of the San and better credits their contributions, but it cannot erase the clearly subordinate position the San held in Bleek's colonial household. See Andrew Bank, Bushmen in a Victorian World: The Remarkable Story of the Bleek-Lloyd Collection of Bushman Folklore (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2006).
- See also Pippa Skotnes ed., Claim to the Country: The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek (Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jacana Books, 2007). Skotnes (41) describes this recent publication as “the archive itself” rather than a recreation, version, or interpretation of its contents, or its makers. The Bleek and Lloyd archives are housed in the University of Cape Town, Iziko South African Museum, and the National Library of South Africa.
- Wilhelm Bleek, Bushman Folklore and Other Texts, (Cape Town: J.C. Juta, 1875), 2. [http://www.lloydbleekcollecion.uct.ac.za].
- Patricia Davison in Martin Legassick and Ciraj Rassool, Skeletons in the Cupboard: South African Museums and the Trade in Human Remains 1907–1917 (Cape Town and Kimberley: South African Museum and McGregor Museum, 2000), v.
- Ibid., 43.
- Ibid., 48.
- See Deborah Root, Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation and the Commodification of Difference (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996).
- Pippa Skotnes, Poetics Today 22, 2 (Summer 2001): 301.
- Bleek, Bushman Folklore, 2.
- Garth Erasmus, quoted in “Demystifying Art: Garth Erasmus interviewed by Mario Pissarra, 21 September 2005,” [http://www.asai.co.za/artstudio.php?view=essay&artist=8&essay=31] (accessed 24 April 2006).
- Ibid.
- Skotnes, “Civilized off the Face of the Earth,” 307.
- Skotnes, Sound from the Thinking Strings: A Visual, Literary, Archaelogicl and Historical Interpretation of the Final Years of !Xam Life (Cape Town: Omega Art, Axeage Private Press, 1991), 52.
- Ibid., 53.
- Deacon and Foster, My Heart Stands in the Hill, 143.
- Ibid.
- For those sensitive to the plights of indigenous peoples, appreciation and appropriation of the Khoisan past today is usually accompanied by belief in its healing potential, or the rhetoric thereof. My concern with contemporary shamanistic projection is that its potential for understanding the interstitial spaces between the “known” and the “unknown” may facilitate misreadings, displacement, or interpretive power inequity.
- Pippa Skotnes, Sound from the Thinking Strings, 52.
- Ibid.
- The subsequent publication and DVD was produced for learners in Afrikaans, Nama, and N/u. Erasmsus provided artwork, supervision, and music. See Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, “Stories I remember…A Northern Cape Heritage,” [http://www.ijr.org.za/recon-recon/memoryhealing/memory-arts-and-culture/storiesremember].
- Though instrumental sound is intrinsic to the works, Erasmus did not compose music for the “Riempie Vasmaak” exhibition. This was to avoid conflict with the documentary video, similarly titled “Riempie Vasmaak” and made by Andrew Emdon, which played during the exhibition and included shots of Erasmus playing music on the Blik'nsnaar among other things. Erasmus did set up a display of his CDs, which were for sale, but no one bought them, as they assumed they were part of the exhibition. Erasmus, personal communication, April 2007.
- Garth Erasmus, personal communication, 29 March 2007. “DIE EK NA-AAP the proper Afrikaans has the hyphen in place making it one word…literal translation is ‘The I imitated’ and I suppose that's exactly the meaning I want to convey. Of course in Afrikaans it's incorrect language but it's supposed to have a humorous intent…when leaving out the hyphen the meanings change radically…‘aap’ equals ape and ‘na’ equals after…so then it would read…‘The I after ape’ but the double meaning is intentional. The ape reference directly plays on the old racial stereotyping which Afrikaans as a language used to abound with [i.e., in colloquial or common street terms]. However, in the ‘language of art’ terms, ‘The I Imitated’ makes perfect sense because the image accompaniment is simply a print of my hand…IT IS MY HAND…it is ME…therefore, an imitation [direct representation] of me…I am IN the work, so to speak. The absence of the hyphen is a very subtle thing…I have found that not many viewers dwell on it long enough so that they miss this…the first interpretation is the ‘obvious,’ e.g., imitation.”
- Paraphrased from Shepherd, “State of Discipline,” 844.
- Skotnes, “Claim to the Country,” 43.