A Necklace of Springbok Ears: /Xam orality and South African literature
Author: Helize van Vuuren
Publisher: Sun Press
ISBN: 9781920869896
Ebook: 9781920689902
Helize van Vuuren describes her essays in the field of Bushman studies as a monograph. Perhaps. It is, however, the wide-ranging and delicately intelligent work of a polymath.
She describes the lives, the cultural history and the modern and contemporary “afterlives” of the Bushmen. The primary focus is the written records of late 19th and early 20th century researchers; she extends her focus to the ways Afrikaans literature, especially poetry, was infused with a sense of the Bushmen in mind. It’s an inevitable step to her chronicling the contemporary, acrimonious contest for the souls and authority of the native. Absent presence acts as alternative identities, nostalgic quests for what was never known and emblems and weapons for political and cultural advantage. (The Bushmen become, like Cavafy’s barbarians who never arrive, “a kind of solution”.)
The primary and dominant evidence of the Bushmen is written mainly in English: Van Vuuren reminds us of the overlooked equivalent in Afrikaans. These are transcripts of Bushman tales, originating in performance and serving ritual and historical purposes. The evidence has two chief sources: the best known – enjoying World Heritage status – are the archives of the German-born Wilhelm Bleek and the Englishwoman Lucy Lloyd (Cape Town, 1870–1884). The lesser known, but roughly contemporaneous, are those archives assembled by the Afrikaans frontiersman-cum-land surveyor, Gideon von Wielligh (1859–1932). In an ideal world, their work would be complementary.
Their backgrounds and their approaches differed; the broad contrasts are between dispassionate scholars and the impassioned frontiersman, the scribe versus the actor; but, in a better world, they would be complementary.
The Bleek/Lloyd archives partly comprise translated interviews with Bushmen, notably – and unsettlingly – with Robben Island and Cape Town prisoners. Von Wielligh’s work was in the field, face to face with free men with the common language of Afrikaans. The Bleek/Lloyd archives were bases of research and understanding; von Wielligh’s were put to service as a basis for his vastly popular and influential children’s stories, an element of the language renaissance in post-Anglo-Boer War Afrikaner recovery.
It is difficult to separate the book from the author: van Vuuren’s is dually based on her 1990s experience as a fieldworker in Bushman studies, and her [distinguished] career as a literature scholar with a concern about the extinction of the indigenous and minority languages. Both include a respect for fact, clarity and the minute and telling detail. These inoculate her work against the besetting diseases of academic and other writing: virtue-signalling. In her writing, the Bushmen are not queuing in the chambers of history in order to “speak to us”. Van Vuuren quotes Carl Leggo’s salutary reminder:
… the object of the narrative is lost and silent and cannot interrogate or contest the narratives written and told about them.i
The book is itself a set of gestures. First, it is written in English; van Vuuren’s birth language is Afrikaans, the language of her wider scholarship, though her field extends to European writing: she is proficient in Dutch, German, English and French. Her gesture is strategic: Bushman and allied studies are predominantly in English. Springbok ears is unignorably placed there and cannot, by virtue of language, be ignored.
Second, it uses some visual material to complement the written study of oral culture. The scale is large enough to be more than symbolic; the telling images could have been Jurgen Schadeberg’s 1950 photographs of Kalahari San in performance.
Third, the cover photo alludes to a principle of structuring the book consistently with the topic, though the notion is questionable – imitative form – and the execution is at the expense of clarity and economy. The image is of a Bushman necklace (or anklelace) of five dried springbok ears strung loosely on thongs. It displays juxtaposition and parallelism; the narrative has similar elements, but at the expense of a clear line of argument. The logic of the arrangement of chapters – the sequence – is unclear; a degree of repetition, too, suggests that outside editing – at least ‘n blik van buite – might have clarified the work and eliminated recurring stylistic tics. They niggle.
The work comprises nine loosely linked essays, six previously published between 2000 and 2010. The rest are new: the first two are substantial, containing the thrust of argument. They describe and analyse van Wielligh’s /Xam archives and the tales; the second is a quietly searing and masterly account of the lives of von Wielligh – the surveyor, explorer, language campaigner, prisoner of war, and his plunge into the black depths of bankruptcy, humiliation, divorce, semi-blindness and dependence on children. One gains a bifocal view of individual self-destructiveness, but also mirroring the fate more eerily of [A full biography waits in the wings].
Van Vuuren’s approach is, as she says, necessarily multi-disciplinary. The material demands the denotative and the connotative – a reading of a tombstone inscription, but also an apprehension of death. The pulse of her corpus derives from a sense of wider context applied to scholarship, in which those linguistically associated with a victorious colonial force are read to the exclusion of the native, defeated and, thus, marginalised. (This is my rendering, however blatant or vulgar, of the implicit, and not van Vuuren’s.)
In principle, operational best practice in such studies synthesises understanding fieldwork and distant analysis. To a degree, van Vuuren’s discussion of the limitations of both Bleek/Lloyd and Von Wielligh, which is based on other researchers’ criticisms, lays out professional limitations of the work of both.
Van Vuuren writes that the Bleek/Lloyd records are a “particular form of European writing” whose “stylistic choices … impart a specific ‘flavour’ to the narratives” which are notable for the “absence of the wider social context” or sense of interactions: “artificial”, “disembodied”, a “jarring and jerky word-for-word transcription”. Van Vuuren writes that the objections to van Wielligh’s work “seem to concern” methods and consequence, particularly von Wielligh’s use of the transcripts in children’s stories – an extension in other media of his pioneering.
Elephant herds loom outside the scribblers’ room. One is the status of translations and transliterations of the oral and performative (van Vuuren’s term). The illuminating analogy is with South African theatre: in dispensing with the written script and being staged in spaces defined as theatrical, rather than theatres, it became gestural. Western script-based scholarship is, at best, misdirected.
The /Xam texts are extractions, thus a sense of category error, mere paradox or priority of operational demands is inescapable. Extractions risk being understood as adequate representations.
The other herd stands for the politics of culture. An illustration:
By virtue of common language and background, the geological and palaeontological discoveries by the colonial pioneer and frontiersman Andrew Geddes Bain (1797–1864) were welcomed and honoured in London.ii However, like von Wielligh’s work earlier, that of Eugene Marais (1871–1936) existed outside the dominant magic circle of language associated with political power and cultural influence. His Die siel van die wit ant (1925) was gapsed by the Belgian playwright (later Nobel laureate), Maeterlink (1862–1949), and effectively republished as La vie des termites (The life of termites) in 1926. Like von Wielligh, Marais died shamed and eviscerated. To be and to write in Afrikaans (or any minority language) in that field risks being considered negligible, or not being considered at all.
The later chapters of Springbok ears deal with subsequent, associated literary manifestations of the Bushmen in Afrikaans literature. This extends to broader manifestations in post-1994 conflicts about possession. Van Wielligh’s Bushman writing helped stimulate early 20th century Afrikaans poetry: in later poetry Von Weilligh’s records of interaction with Bushmen would become an infusion of the sense of absent presences. (We should not forget Baine’s reference in his Journey to the north describing black African deference to the Bushman firstcomers.) Afrikaans poems, ranging from Jan EE Cilliers’s 1908 poem Die vlakte, to DJ Opperman’s apocalyptic Vuurbees – surely one of the great works of South African literature – are infused with a sense of firstcomers and origins.
The account of influence becomes one of struggle for symbolic possession in the distasteful dispute flowing from the Cape Town poet and scholar, the late Stephen Watson, accusing the poet Antje Krog of plagiarising his poems inspired by and based on the Bleek/Lloyd transcriptions. At risk of being flippant, the rancour of dispute suggests category confusion: categories of property ownership existing in scholarship applied to literature where theft, unauthorised use and influenceiii are principles of health.
After 1994, “appropriation” of the Bushmen went further and wider; it is implicit in Van Vuuren’s account. All those white women performance artists gussied up as tribal blacks and Bushmen running around in the wild and being photographed ... all the post-Truth and Reconciliation rancour about “the right to speak” of the racially and historically specific ...
Like Cavafy’s barbarians who never arrive, the Bushmen become “a kind of solution”.
i Leggo queers his pitch by succumbing to the flatulent – “interrogate” for “question” and “contest” for “dispute”.
ii By contrast, the curators of a Grahamstown museum, performing the colonial cringe, dismissed his fossils as “old bones”.
iii In a long literary tradition based on a single language in a monolingual society, poems may have the attributes of the palimpsest. TS Eliot’s notes to The waste land listing his “sources” of passages in The waste land are poker-faced satire of foot-and-note disease.