Fading footprints: In search of South Africa’s first people
Author: José Manuel de Prada-Samper
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
ISBN: 9781776194230
Fading footprints is not an out-of-place title for a book on the |xam, one of southern Africa’s most prominent Bushman ethnic groups. Starting with Laurens van der Post’s The lost world of the Kalahari (1958), through to Neil Bennun’s The broken string (2004) and Julia Blackburn’s Dreaming the Karoo (2022), those writing nonfiction works inspired by the |xam and other related Bushman groups never seem to disappoint with the poetic quality of their titles. Fading footprints is nevertheless a slightly different book from those just mentioned. Van der Post chronicles his journey to the Kalahari to create a documentary on the Ju|’hoansi, Bennun provides a popular historian’s account of the |xam’s “extinction” during the 19th century, and Blackburn’s book is a creative writer’s response to the |xam’s heritage texts through the lens of COVID-19 and the loss it brought to the world. José Manuel de Prada-Samper is an academic and folklorist, not a public intellectual, public historian or novelist. And in many ways, this is the type of memoir that the “industry” that surrounds the 19th century Bleek and Lloyd archive of |xam folklore and family history deserves, more than anything else.
Those who work intensively with this archive know that it is precisely those who merely whisk past it or, at most, hover for a while before continuing to their next flight of fancy, who often do the most damage to the shared understanding of who the |xam were, what their archive represents, and how much more still needs to be done relative to this integral dimension of South African history and culture (see Staphorst 2021, Solomon 2022, Staphorst 2025b).
De Prada-Samper, as mentioned, is an academic and folklorist who has been instrumental in creating a supplementary archive to that of Bleek and Lloyd. Through fieldwork research during the 2010s, he compiled what he calls the Archive of Traditional Narrative in Afrikaans – a collection of folklore relayed by Afrikaans inhabitants of the Upper Karoo, exhibiting certain continuities with the |xam folklore of yore (see De Prada-Samper 2016). Although he has contributed to various critical discussions on |xam-related research (see, for example, De Prada-Samper 2007, 2017b), it is his work on this collection that can be described as his greatest contribution to Bushman studies. In many ways, this “discovery” of a continuity between |xam and Afrikaans oral traditions is at the heart of this book. He reflects on his career in relation to the archive, but central to the overall framing of the book remains the “fading footprints” – which he has, he argues, identified as linking those in the present with those from the past.
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Although he has contributed to various critical discussions on |xam-related research (see, for example, De Prada-Samper 2007, 2017b), it is his work on this collection that can be described as his greatest contribution to Bushman studies. In many ways, this “discovery” of a continuity between |xam and Afrikaans oral traditions is at the heart of this book. He reflects on his career in relation to the archive, but central to the overall framing of the book remains the “fading footprints” – which he has, he argues, identified as linking those in the present with those from the past.
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At this point, I want to highlight a specific dimension of life writing that I noted elsewhere (see Staphorst 2024a). Reviewing this type of writing presents a peculiar challenge to the reviewer, since you respond not only to the text – or more specifically, the “life” that is reflected therein – but also to the shaper of that textualised life. There are two lives at stake in life writing: the writer and the written. In the case of De Prada-Samper’s text, this doubleness of subject matter is – at first glance – overcome. Since it is mostly written and presented as a memoir – and since memoirs reflect the life of the writer – this doubleness appears to be inconsequential. However, considering that Fading footprints is concerned with De Prada-Samper’s engagement with the |xam, the archive and his scholarly career, other lives – others’ lives – become important as well. This tension that the author invokes between the life of the author and the lives of others is the central drama that guides this review.
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Since it is mostly written and presented as a memoir – and since memoirs reflect the life of the writer – this doubleness appears to be inconsequential. However, considering that Fading footprints is concerned with De Prada-Samper’s engagement with the |xam, the archive and his scholarly career, other lives – others’ lives – become important as well. This tension that the author invokes between the life of the author and the lives of others is the central drama that guides this review.
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Structurally, the book consists of ten chapters, which roughly follow De Prada-Samper’s career in a sequential order. The most engaging part is the first chapter. Therein, he relays his first contact with Specimens of Bushman Folklore (1911; the first published collection from the archive), in particular, and |xam folklore more generally. The first chapter references his time as a student, attending summer school courses at Cambridge University and whiling away his days in second-hand bookshops in England; his postgraduate studies at Columbia University in New York City; and his eventual return to Spain, where he published a translation of material from the archive in Spanish. The first chapter also provides a vivid portrait of a cultural, linguistic and continental outsider’s journey to this most enigmatic of collections. That he is further unafraid of discussing his own missteps relative to working with the material, and of reflecting on major personal events that tie in with his research, such as his father’s passing from cancer while trying to start an academic career, marks this section as particularly moving.
The remainder of the book unfolds mostly in a linear fashion. Following on from his initial contact with Specimens, his postgraduate studies and his Spanish translation, De Prada-Samper recounts his various fieldwork trips to South Africa, his conversations with academic colleagues and inhabitants of Bushmanland, and some of the original research which he conducted in relation to those trips and encounters. In many ways, what makes the first chapter so engaging and moving, is what disturbed me in reading the rest. The honesty with which he approaches his early awakening to the |xam does not translate well into his reflections on working with and commenting on the opinions, experiences and impressions of others – whether those “others” are well-known, respected academics or unknown residents of South Africa’s arid interior.
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In many ways, what makes the first chapter so engaging and moving, is what disturbed me in reading the rest. The honesty with which he approaches his early awakening to the |xam does not translate well into his reflections on working with and commenting on the opinions, experiences and impressions of others – whether those “others” are well-known, respected academics or unknown residents of South Africa’s arid interior.
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In relation to the former, De Prada-Samper recounts, for example, a conversation with the renowned academic Janette Deacon; she was a founding figure in the resurgence of |xam studies during the 1990s, and pioneered archaeological inquiry into the mapping of our knowledge of colonial-era |xam-ka !au, as relayed by |xam interlocutors to Bleek and Lloyd, and on to the present (see Deacon 1986, 1988, 1996). With the aid of Deacon’s work, the contemporary scholar can visit the Bitterputs or the Strontberge, or a myriad of other places named in the archive, which would otherwise be obscure for a researcher without extensive knowledge. De Prada-Samper knows this, since it was Deacon who took him on his first trip to Bushmanland. And, to his credit, he acknowledges this as well. However, in reflecting on a short conversation with Deacon during said trip, he recollects a comment on the rock art tradition within the area; she described it as being devoid of social or spiritual meaning – at least to the generation of |xam who took part in the Bleek and Lloyd recording process. This was a contestable statement, indeed, for anyone familiar with the material, but did not indicate a position that has no merit in scholarly discourse. Without engaging with her position or providing evidence to the contrary, De Prada-Samper makes it clear to the reader that he believes she is wrong. He dismisses her out of hand. And had I not engaged with the archive and the scholarly tradition surrounding the material before, I might have believed him. But, since I have, I’m aware of the messy and unsettled debates in the field. But this is not mentioned.
In the case of Deacon, there does, at least, exist a discursive footprint that the keen reader can follow, if they’re interested to know more about her particular viewpoints and the broader discussions surrounding the nature and place of rock art in |xam cosmology. When it comes to the inhabitants of Bushmanland, De Prada-Samper’s approach becomes much more troubling. He notes an interaction with a farmer, Alwyn van Jaarsveld, who, after being probed about (historical) conflict between |xam and Afrikaners in the area, replied: “No conflicts”. After discussing various instances of fatal intercultural contact between peoples of these two groups, De Prada-Samper again quotes Van Jaarsveld’s “No conflicts” response, and says the following: “The reality was far less idyllic, and he probably knew it” (115). Not only is there no evidence that Van Jaarsveld was somehow disingenuous in making his statement, but De Prada-Samper does not grapple with the question of translation. For he – De Prada-Samper – cannot speak Afrikaans, yet almost all of his interlocutors are Afrikaans home language speakers. In this particular moment, Van Jaarsveld was speaking English. But the question that deserves asking is: what content filled his particular expression of English? Was Van Jaarsveld thinking oorlog vis-à-vis “conflict”, or stryd or konfrontasie? Or perhaps it was a perfect cognate: konflik for “conflict”. De Prada-Samper chastises Van Jaarsveld’s motivation and answer, even though the extent to which they are literally speaking the language is unknown and unreflected upon on the part of De Prada-Samper.
At this point, Fading footprints became a much darker tome for me as a reader. It became a far less idyllic read, but I don’t know whether De Prada-Samper realises this. For at the heart of this moment of ventriloquising is the power that he – as memoirist – has over those voices he includes in the book, yet whom he seems again and again either to dismiss directly – as is the case with Deacon – or to cast aspersions on indirectly – such as Van Jaarsveld.
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The self-reflection which is so palpable in the opening chapter, is for the most part absent in the rest of the book.
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The self-reflection which is so palpable in the opening chapter, is for the most part absent in the rest of the book. He appears to position himself as a kind of epistemological saviour – an outsider who penetrates the veil of ignorance that those intellectually close to Bushmanland (Deacon) or living there (Van Jaarsveld) cannot seem to move past. If this were relevant only to the “white” interlocutors in the memoir, one might come to forgive him. However, the legitimate and necessary discussion of the |xam and their descendants’ plight – particularly in the face of colonial violence – is often so unnuanced, uncritical and, ironically enough, ventriloquised, that De Prada-Samper appears to be guilty of perpetuating a form of epistemic violence that others have committed against them, namely casting them in the mould of the noble savage. The most prominent example hereof is the overall framing of the |xam and their descendants as victims of specifically white power.
While this particular form of power was undoubtedly the most prominent factor in radically changing the sociocultural fabric of the Karoo and its inhabitants over the past two centuries, De Prada-Samper seems to be oblivious of, for example, the Kalahari debate (see Barnard 1992, Gordon and Sholto-Douglas 2000). This prominent point of contention within the study of Khoesan peoples grapples with the evidence that Bushman peoples were historically – if not always, then at least very often – subjected to positions of serfdom relative to Khoekhoe peoples. The Bushmen, therefore, formed an underclass in southern African socioeconomic relations. Even if one were not to agree with the stronger form of this argument, there is nevertheless enough evidence of various forms of violence that were visited upon both Bushmen and Khoekhoe groups from within each group towards the other. The most recent poetry collection by the Nama-Afrikaans poet Lynthia Julius (2024) explores an example of historical violence, where Bushman peoples murdered 32 children of Khoekhoe converts to Christianity. It is an unpopular theme to explore, but absolutely necessary in a time when – from certain corners of the “indigenous” debate in South Africa – the Khoesan as a whole are being imagined as primordially peaceful and free from sin (see Staphorst 2024b).
These expressions of violence were also the case between Bushman and Nguni peoples. De Prada-Samper briefly references John Wright when discussing his first trip to the Drakensberg – a scholar who “had written about the extermination of the mountain Bushmen” (50; see Wright 1971). This conflict, which can be labelled as exterminatory, was tied to conflicts between Bushmen and an array of different peoples, including the Zulu and the Sotho. This is not mentioned in the book, however – probably since it counters the view of the Afrikaner as primeval settler-colonist bent on destroying the Bushmen, that pervades the entirety of the book, with contemporary Afrikaners either wholly stupid or conniving in their hiding of the “truth”. This absence of grappling with intra- and intergroup conflict, where the “group” is not white South Africa, is not new. As I have noted before, it characterises other writing on the |xam and on contemporary inhabitants of the Upper Karoo as well (see Staphorst 2023a).
To return to the main contribution that De Prada-Samper has made to our contemporary understanding of the |xam and their legacy, I again highlight the importance of his scholarship in compiling and interpreting a new archive of folkloric traditions that have altered the landscape of Bushman studies. Committing this process to paper in a context other than dry footnotes accompanying a stuffy scholarly article is immensely valuable. But, in his writing on this research, we again see a lack of self-reflection on De Prada-Samper’s part. While the traditions, narratives and motifs that he has collected and made available to a wider audience through his research point to continuities in oral culture, they do not necessarily point to continuities in identity. And this is central to my final critique. De Prada-Samper is very careful throughout the memoir not to label those he engages with (outside of Afrikaners) in relation to a specific identity category, such as Bushman, Khoesan or Coloured. Despite this, the very (sub)title of the book, and the descriptions and blurbs on the cover jacket, betray this. While the book presents no sustained engagement with the so-called descendants of the |xam as self-described Bushmen (which, in previous anthropological literature, has been done relative to a group of people De Prada-Samper neither mentions nor engages with, namely the Karretjiemense; see De Jongh 2012), the book as a whole lays claim to this. Again, the links between the folklore of yore and the contemporary moment are laudable, but this does not justify a claim relative to identity, which the book unfortunately (and unjustifiably, in my opinion) makes. This leads to another instance of ventriloquising, and perhaps this is the most dangerous one of all, since it implicitly strips the central interlocutors – whom he describes as |xam descendants – of their own ability to self-identify, even if only in relation to the written word in the form of this memoir. Are they really the “first people”, or do they perhaps come second?
If De Prada-Samper’s engagement with a great many voices can be contested, something also remains to be said for those voices with whom he does not converse. The most prominent of these, in the context of his central argument for the recognition of a living continuity between |xam and Afrikaans, is Gideon Retief von Wielligh – the compiler of the “other” other-archive, alongside his own. Von Wielligh’s four-part collection of |xam-Afrikaans folklore, published between 1919 and 1921, has continually been defamed by scholars in Bushman studies. De Prada-Samper (2017a) provides no exception, despite the possible value that Von Wielligh’s collection holds as support for De Prada-Samper’s thesis – specifically, providing evidence for the transfer of |xam folkloric content into an emergent form of Afrikaans. What makes the exclusion of any mention – even if only dismissive – of Von Wielligh inexplicable within this memoir is the reference to Helize van Vuuren in the acknowledgements section. Van Vuuren’s most important contribution to Bushman studies has been bringing the Von Wielligh texts to the fore, and drawing on them in discussions of the role of Afrikaans in the Bleek and Lloyd archive, on the one hand, and the ways in which |xam folklore has shaped South African literature, on the other (see Van Vuuren 1995, 2010, 2011, 2016; also my work building on her insights, Staphorst 2020a, 2020b, 2022a, 2022b, 2023b, 2025a). I would wager that acknowledging the value of this “other” other-archive would go a long way in undermining the overall picture of white Afrikaans speakers that De Prada-Samper is sketching throughout the book, namely that they are ignorant of history and culture (at best). And, furthermore, as I have asked before: “Sou die resente optekening van eietydse Afrikaanstalige verhale wat ’n direkte verbintenis met die 19de-eeuse |xam verhaalskat aandui steeds as ’n ‘ontdekking’ van die ‘voortlewing’ van die |xam in Afrikaans beskryf kon word (indien Von Wielligh se versameling erken word as egte |xam-Afrikaanse tekste)?” (Staphorst 2023b:21-2). Whatever the reason, in De Prada-Samper’s book, Von Wielligh’s footprints are nowhere to be found.
In the end, I would note that the book illustrates the necessity of the academic memoir, and yet fails simultaneously at fulfilling the promise of such a text type through uncritically favouring opinion over scholarly rigour. The previous entries in this tradition of nonfiction writing on the |xam tend, as mentioned in the introduction, to be superficial in their approach and the conclusions reached. Against that backdrop alone, the type of endeavour represented by Fading footprints ought to be welcomed. But what could have been a meaningful, challenging and simultaneously inviting read for initiates to the |xam, their history and heritage texts has sadly become an opportunity for an over-personalised (yet seemingly scholarly) account. This might merely reflect the difference between publishing models, where the academic who writes a scholarly article is constrained both by the process of peer review and by the conventions of academic writing, while the memoirist is free to indulge in the personal and their writing is not subject to rigorous scrutiny. But what the academic author of such a memoir ought to remember, I would conclude, is their relative authority. They have to remain cognisant both of the genre they are writing in, and of their role as scholar who enters, works in and, in this case, invites others alongside them into a contested and heated field. If not, the academic memoirist might end up sweeping away the footprints of others who come with, before and after them.
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But what the academic author of such a memoir ought to remember, I would conclude, is their relative authority. They have to remain cognisant both of the genre they are writing in, and of their role as scholar who enters, works in and, in this case, invites others alongside them into a contested and heated field. If not, the academic memoirist might end up sweeping away the footprints of others who come with, before and after them
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