Representing Bushmen: South Africa and the Origin of Language (review)

"We move upon a giddy height when we attempt to know the direction of the world's development" - so runs the opening line of an 1868 monograph by the Prussian-born philologist Wilhelm Bleek, Über den Ursprung der Sprache (On the Origin of Language). With a preface by the fervent Darwinist Ernst Haeckel (Bleek's cousin), it was just one of a flood of nineteenth-century exercises in comparative philology which attempted to map evolutionary theory onto the study of language and to divine linguistic origins as a master-key to human history: "the living and speaking witness of the whole history of our race", as Friedrich Max Müller put it in 1862, "an unbroken chain of speech" carrying one back beyond cuneiform and hieroglyphics to "the first utterances of the human mind."¹

Bleek's unusual career would take him from the universities of Bonn and Berlin to southern Africa and from such rarefied (and now obsolete) theorising to a much more practical encounter with a specific language community. In 1870, following a request to the governor of the Cape Colony, he obtained permission to have an inmate from Cape Town's Breakwater Convict Station transferred to his villa. Over the next fourteen years, he and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd would accommodate a succession of individuals from four extended families of |Xam-ka !ei: a people descended from one branch of the indigenous inhabitants of southern Africa who had no collective name for themselves, but were known to the Dutch as Bosjemans, to the English as Bushmen, and to the cattle-owning Khoekhoen as Sonqua, Soaqua or San. In colonial suburbia, individuals like Diä!kwain (David Hoesar), |Han≠kass”o (Klein Jantje) and ||Kabbo (Oud Jantje Tooren) were received first as convicts on parole, servants and “native informants” for Bleek’s abstruse philological enquiries, yet increasingly as valued teachers, storytellers, artists and (in Lloyds phrase) “givers of native literature.”²

The Bleek and Lloyd Collection now comprises the most important written record of the earliest expressive cultures of southern Africa: some 150 notebooks filled with phonetic notations of the languages once spoken by southern Africa's Xam and !Kung peoples with English translations alongside that run to some 13,000 pages.³ Its rediscovery has been one of the major events of South African scholarship in the last decades, bringing together archaeology, linguistics, literature, museum display, rock art studies and cultural politics, often controversially, in an attempt to explicate an archive that is by turns mythical and autobiographical, violent and comic, digressive, impenetrable, poetic and greatly moving.

That, at least, is how the story is most often told, and it is precisely this narrative that Shane Moran sets out to contest. Following a series of articles in which he recast titles from the collection in order to reverse the ethnographic gaze - offering accounts of "Specimens of 'Bushman' Studies" and "Customs and Beliefs of Bleek and Lloyd Scholarship" within the contemporary academy - we now have a dense and wide-ranging work that is bracingly impatient with the atmosphere of piety, melancholia and veneration that surrounds the archive.⁴

In the received, optimistic narrative, Bleek, a man ahead of his time, sets aside his philological endeavours and his unfinished Comparative Grammar of South African languages to devote his attention to a culture that is fast disappearing. In so doing, he performs a valuable service to the future, multiracial nation state; after all, the national Coat of Arms unveiled by President Thabo Mbeki on 27 April 2000 carries as its motto a sentence written in Xam, preserving the nineteenth-century orthography of the notebooks to record its various clicks.⁵

Morans approach, however, is suspicious of the "historically sedimented figuration" of the Bushmen as "exemplary indigenes" (8), and much of his book seeks to show Bleeks "contribution to, and appropriation by, racial thinking" (15), suggesting that this feted scholar of African languages (and populariser of the descriptor "Bantu") should also be seen as the country's first...