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

The late-nineteenth-century archive of materials that resulted from interviews philologist Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd conducted with /Xam informants, nearly all of whom had been released into the Bleek household from Cape Town's Breakwater prison for the purpose, is widely celebrated, as a rich ethnographic and literary resource and also as an example of interracial collaboration during a period of South Africa's history that was characterized by colonial expansion. Although a few scholars have argued that Bleek's work was framed by a racist evolutionary ideology, Shane Moran's book offers the first sustained critique of Bleek's intellectual program and of the general response to it, situating both in the context of South Africa's racialized history.

It is not an easy book to summarize in a short review. Its arguments are complex and a great deal of ground is covered. As good a place to start as any perhaps is with the question that Moran poses at the beginning of his chapter entitled "colonial intellectual": How does one approach the texts of colonialism—texts overtly marked with the violence of expropriation" (19). Moran's systematic analysis of Bleek's On the Origin of Language provides an exemplary answer. He proceeds to deconstruct (Derrida's work is frequently cited) Bleek's book, which, for reasons that form part of the investigation, has been largely ignored by the scholars who have created the Bleek and Lloyd industry. His analysis is based on a close examination of passages from On the Origin of Language, which are reproduced at some length in the book, and demonstrates with inexorable logic and theoretical finesse that Bleek's theory of language was integral to colonial ideology. Much of the European interest in the origins of language was premised on a narcissistic and self-serving racist teleology in which European languages, religion, and culture were situated higher on the ladder of human evolution than those of the peoples they were subjugating. Bleek and Lloyd's Bushman project was not an exception to the colonial project, as has often been claimed, but a contributor to it. Statements that concerned Bushman language, literature, and mythology were crucial, for example, to the positioning of the African people, who presented the biggest obstacle at the time to European hegemony in Southern Africa, as incapable of further development, so preparing the way ideologically for their conquest and the appropriation of their territory. Moran clinches his argument by switching from an examination of Bleek's work on language to a consideration of Bleek's account of his travels in the colony of Natal and in the independent Zulu kingdom before concluding his book with a discussion of the Bleek and Lloyd project itself, concentrating on Specimens of Bushman Folklore, the first published selection of materials from the /Xam notebooks.

Representing Bushmen is densely written. It is certainly not a disadvantage for the reader to have some acquaintance with the writing of Hegel, Marx, Freud, Derrida, Foucault, and Spivak, among others. The text richly rewards the effort to engage with it, though. There is nothing of comparable analytic depth in the field of Bushman studies. Moran's book is also, in my opinion, a seminal work in the context of postcolonial studies as a whole. More importantly, perhaps, it shows that the ethnocentric premises of colonialism are often current in contemporary scholarship and in the neoliberal order of postapartheid South Africa (and further afield). In this respect it is a passionate, engaged, and activist piece of scholarship.