Wittenberg, H. (2011). Notes towards a history of Khoi literature. ENGLISH ACADEMY REVIEW 28(1): 6-22. Notes towards a History of Khoi Literature Hermann Wittenberg Abstract: This article puts forward a revisionist history of Khoi literature, and also presents a number of translated Khoi narratives that have not been available in English before. Compared to the large volume of Bushman literature and scholarship, there has been very little Khoi literature and engagement with it, and an argument is presented to account for this gap in South African cultural history. Until now, the major source of Khoi literature was Wilhelm Bleek’s Reynard the Fox in South Africa (1864), and this text is critically interrogated as a limiting version of Khoi orature. An alternative corpus of Khoi narratives is presented that was originally published in Leonard Schultze’s Aus Namaland und Kalahari (1907). Keywords: Khoi literature, Bushman literature, orality, W.H.I. Bleek, L. Schultze, translation A Brief History of Khoi Literature Compared to the wealth of scholarship and literary engagement with Bushman1 culture and orature, it is remarkable how little we know about the indigenous Khoi literatures of Southern Africa. Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd’s Specimens of Bushman Folklore (1911), and the 12 000 page /Xam notebooks from which the publication derived, have had a massive impact on current scholarship and popular writing, an interest that culminated in Pippa Skotnes’s landmark “Miscast” exhibition (1995), but which has since continued to generate a large volume of academic studies by historians, anthropologists and literary scholars. The Bushman archive has also spawned numerous imaginative interventions, ranging from Stephen Watson’s Return of the Moon (1991) and Antjie Krog’s more recent the stars say ‘tsau’ (2004), to a wide range of popular adaptations for children. In view of this wealth of Bushman-inspired material, the paucity of Khoi primary records as well as scholarly commentary and creative engagement represents a significant gap in South African cultural history. Like Bleek and Lloyd’s /Xam culture, the eleven Khoi languages of Southern Africa are also now extinct, with the exception of Nama (Traill, 2002: 27). This gap is all the more remarkable given the emphasis in postcolonial theory generally, and in post-1994 revisionist thinking more specifically, on a recovery of the indigenous voice. Not that the Khoi have been ignored in history and in colonial letters. As J.M. Coetzee has shown in a well-known essay “Idleness in South Africa”, the Khoi, or to use colonial parlance, the “Hottentot”, figured prominently University of the Western Cape Research Repository [email protected] colonial travel writing and Cape discourse, though primarily as a stereotypic figure of disparagement (1988: 12-35). Some significant Khoi figures such as Krotoa/Eva and Sarah Baartman (the “Hottentot Venus”) have recently received much revisionist attention, particularly by feminist scholars (for example Samuelson 2007), but evidence of Khoi self-representation in the form of a literary record is scant. This is surprising, given their status as South Africa’s first indigenous people to come into contact with colonial literate cultures, a sustained and often intimate contact that stretched over 200 years from at least the late 16th century until the 1750s when a coherent and distinctive Khoi culture can be understood to have largely disintegrated (Elphick 1985: xvii). Khoi languages persisted on the colonial fringes such as the eastern and northern Cape for another hundred years, but it is only in the remote Richtersveld and southern Namibia that one of the Khoi languages, namely Nama, is still spoken today. But even in mediated form, examples of Khoi voices in the literary record are rare, if we look at the solitary example of Andrew Bain’s coarse and caricature figure of Kaatjie Kekkelbek (1838). For Michael Chapman “it would take Lena – in Athol Fugard’s Boesman and Lena (1969) – to restore human speech to the caricature of the Hottentot” (2003: 33). Chapman’s only cited example of an authentic Khoi voice is even later, dating from the 1980s: it is Piet Draghoender’s lament, recorded in the Kat River area by the oral historian Jeff Peires (2003: 34-35). The major source of Khoi literature therefore remains Wilhelm Bleek’s Reynard the Fox in South Africa; or, Hottentot Fables and Tales, published in London in 1864. As Bleek put it himself in the preface to the slim volume, he had written “in 1861, to different Missionaries in South Africa, requesting them to make collections of Native Literature” (1864: xi). Together with a few stories culled from even earlier travelogues such as James Chapman’s Expedition of Discovery into the Interior of Africa (1838), 42 of these transcribed and translated oral narratives were published, making the Reynard volume the first published book of indigenous literature. Khoi literature, in its published form, thus not only precedes the publication of Bushman literature, but also comes well before Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm (1883), which is conventionally regarded as the work that inaugurates South African English fiction. The singular achievement of Bleek’s book must be judged against the dominant attitudes of the time, which Tony Trail characterizes as an “extreme linguistic prejudice”: from the first contacts between Europeans and Khoekhoe there had been a persistent attitude on the part of the Europeans that the language was utterly bizarre, unpleasant, inarticulate and not human (2002: 32) Against this colonial structure of feeling, Bleek’s interest in Khoi language and folklore must be regarded as progressive and enlightened. So singular is Bleek’s work, that other https://reposito ry.uwc.ac.za/ published instances of Khoi voice have had to rely on his pioneering book. Five short Khoi poems in the Penguin Book of Southern African Verse (Gray 1989: 33-34) are extracted from the Reynard book, and in the anthology SA Poesie / SA in Poetry (Van Wyk et al, 1988) there are three short versifications based on extracts from Schapera’s The Khoisan Peoples of South Africa. Bushmen and Hottentots (1930). Schapera, in turn, used Bleek’s records as a source. There are five short animal stories (of which two are of Tswana origin) in L.F. Maingard’s Korana Folktales (1962). These narratives were, as he recounts, dictated to Dr Lucy Lloyd, 1879, by //oãxab=/=xam or Piet Links, who belonged to the kei! Korana (the great Korana) or Taaibosch tribe. He was born at Mamusa (the modern Schweitzer Reneke), the seat of the tribe, and wandered from there to Kimberly. After the defeat and dispersal of the Taaibosch at the battle of Mamusa, the tribe ceased to exist (1885). From Kimberley, he and his family mistaken for Bushmen, were sent to Dr Lloyd in Cape Town. (1962: iii) Maingard’s narrative of confused ethnic identity confirms again that it were the Bushmen, rather than the Khoi that were to become the primary object of scholarly interest. For Bleek, the Bushmen could be regarded as an original first people, in whose language and culture perhaps were traces of humanity’s lost beginnings. By the time he was working with his Breakwater informants in the late 19th century, the descendants of the Cape Khoi were not a remote, exotic culture, but had become largely assimilated into domestic service, forming an ever-present urban and rural underclass that had become part of everyday life in the Cape Colony. The Bushmen, on the other hand, came from the remote fringes of civilization, and their rarity and near extinction excited his Bleek’s imagination. This is how he put it in a letter to the governor of the Cape, Sir George Grey in 1873: You can fancy that the rare and difficult opportunity of having it within my reach to discover not only a language almost unknown , but still more to rescue portions of a rich and highly important folklore belonging to so primitive and in the point of civilization so low a race, dared not to be neglected by me. (Spohr 1962: 37) In the 1870s, until his premature death, Bleek consequently focused all his energies on a rapidly vanishing Bushman culture, and his Khoi research would remain confined to the Reynard book. Despite the significance then of the Reynard volume as a valuable and unique record of Khoi oral tradition, Bleek’s approach to indigenous orature is however also emblematic of the “processes of exclusion, occlusion and effacement that have occurred in the construction of the cultural history of this country”, as Duncan Brown has put it in his https://reposito ry.uwc.ac.za/ introduction to Oral Literature and Performance in Southern Africa (1999: 4). Bleek, as I have shown elsewhere,2 suppressed the erotic and sexually explicit aspects of indigenous narration, trapping Khoi orature in an immature cultural space that could not admit any adult, mature content. As Bleek himself put it in the preface, to make these Hottentot fables readable for the general public, a few slight omissions and alterations of what would otherwise have been too naked for the English eye were necessary. (1864: xxiii) Bleek was not only constrained by his Victorian morality and prurience that could not admit any erotic and scatological material,3 but his editorial interventions must perhaps also be understood as a progressive, enlightened attempt to elevate the figure of the “Hottentot” from the its well-established negative associations in colonial Cape discourse with disorderliness, indolence and licenciousness. By framing South African indigenous narratives within the generic conventions of the naïve European children’s fable, Bleek was thus attempting to civilize the Khoi imagination. Leonhard Schultze’s Khoi Researches The fourteen narratives presented here are an initial attempt to recuperate Khoi orature from these restrictive cultural politics, and allow an alternative insight into a narrative world less tainted by the operations of colonial censorship. The source of these narratives is a little known German scientific treatise written by Leonhard Schultze, titled Aus Namaland und Kalahari (1907). It contains a corpus of 67 tales, as well as proverbs, riddles and songs, collected during a scientific expedition to southern Namibia and the Northern Cape in the years 1903 to 1905. Leonhard Schultze (1872 - 1955)4 trained as a zoologist under Ernst Haeckel, Germany’s leading exponent of Darwinian evolutionary theories, but was appointed as an extraordinary professor in Geography at the University of Jena. Subsequent to his African expedition, he held a chair at the University of Marburg and conducted major ethnographic and linguistic research in Meso-America. Schultze was a brilliant scientist, and worked effortlessly across several disciplines in order to produce a synthesized account of the “Gesamtnatur” of a given country. His research expedition was funded by the Humboldt Foundation, and Aus Namaland und Kalahari takes a Humboldtian approach by describing the country’s geology, climate, plants, animals and people in a broad, panoramic sweep, blending empirical rigor and carefully observed detail with occasional lyrical passages. His perceptive eye and keen interest in people was not only limited to ethnographic description of the various indigenous groups, but also produced critical observations of colonial German foibles and failings: We have to admit openly by now that the Hottentot knows us better than we know him … He never loses interest in studying the white invader. (1907: 174) https://reposito ry.uwc.ac.za/ Schultze’s understood his research into Khoi culture and language as a means to rectify this imbalance, and was primarily through the folktales that a detailed and in depth insight into the very essence of the subject people was possible. As Schultze put it, “These texts are the title deeds to the soul of the Hottentot, which need to be decoded.” (1907: 390) Because of the outbreak of the Herero and Nama war at the beginning of 1904, Schultze’s exploratory zeal was severely curtailed. Displaced by the conflict to Klein Namaland (the area of the northern Cape Colony south of the Orange River), he worked ethnographically in the area of Steinkopf and Springbok for most of 1904, learned the difficult Nama language, and presumably collected many of the tales. By the beginning of 1905, Schultze sought to extend his researches to Great Namaland (north of the Orange River) but it was here that the German Imperial Army was waging a major campaign against the Nama. Schultze accordingly attached himself to the armed forces of General Lothar von Trotha headquartered in Keetmanshoop, repaying the hospitality and supply of armed escorts with part-time work as a war correspondent. Trotha was also generously thanked in the preface of the book. After the last major flanking maneuvers against Hendrik Witbooi, Schultze was given an armed escort taking him westwards into the Kalahari. In recent revisionist scholarship, the brutal Herero and Nama extermination wars are now recognized as Germany’s first exercises in genocide. As recounted in a recent survey article of these studies by Mohamed Adhikari (2008: 317), the Nama lost 50% of their population following Trotha’s notorious annihilation warfare. What is extraordinary about Schultze’s ethnographic work undertaken during these genocidal military campaigns, is that it reflects none of the unprecedented violent trauma which would have been the unavoidable context of the narration of these tales. A paradoxical picture however emerges of Schultze’s colonial ethnography: on the one hand he was Trotha’s complicit embedded scientist who utilized the victims of war, both the dead and imprisoned, as convenient subjects for study. But on the other hand, Schultze’s efforts to learn the difficult Nama language with its complex plosives and clicks, and his painstaking method of transcription and exact, grammatically annotated word for word translation, reveal not only a man of extraordinary listening skills, but also someone who displayed a genuine respect for and engagement with the culture and language of his informants. The sheer volume, the detailed annotations and moreover the candid content of the narratives suggest a close, intimate and mutually trusting relationship between himself and the people who gave him the gift of their stories. In trying to make sense of Schultze, it is tempting to contrast the day-time positivist scientist with the night-time sympathetic listener, who allowed himself to be lured away from the measurable certainties of quantitative knowledge into a magical world of nocturnal story-telling. During the day, Schultze employed his methodical gaze in the https://reposito ry.uwc.ac.za/ collection of scientific data, making precise measurements and taking anthropometric photographs which reduced the surface of the native body to a series of numbers and mathematical ratios. But at night, around the evening camp fires, Schultze appeared increasingly drawn to the inner, imaginative world of his travelling companions. In such an intimate context under a familiar night sky, surrounded by a land that was their own home, the Khoi could engage in a revelatory form of story-telling that was open to the free flow of risqué jokes, and earthy, racy content. Unlike the narratives collected by Bleek and Lloyd from Bushman prisoners in artificial constrained circumstances, the stories that Schultze recorded were primarily performed by and for the other Khoi listeners who accompanied the research expedition as mule drivers, cooks and guides. The researcher himself sat quietly taking notes in the background: What I had listened to at night around the fire, I had repeated to me slowly the next day by the story teller, so that, after some practice, I was able to obtain a coherent dictation. In order to ascertain if the act of dictating had disturbed the sentence structure and sequence, I asked the Hottentot to repeat his story at normal speed and carefully noted down variations. (1907: 752) Comparing his stories with those assembled by Bleek in the Reynard volume, Schultze’s conclusion about their ethnographic veracity was contemptuous: “Bleek’s stories do not reveal to me the Hottentot whom I have gotten to know. Since I was able to tap into the very source of their lore, I will disregard his versions completely” (1907: 389). Schultze’s Khoi stories, as will become immediately apparent, are told in a very different register than Bleek and Lloyd’s material. Methodological reflections In keeping with the philological paradigm of the period, Schultze transcribed the Khoi stories in an exact and precise manner as possible, using an orthography of his own invention that rendered the various click sounds and intonation variables as faithfully as possible. Unlike Bleek and Lloyd’s Specimens of Bushman Folklore that was only published four years later, Schultze did not follow a side by side presentation of original and translated texts, but used a sequential method. Following the Khoi text, is then a German translation that attempts to keep to the original word order, and is liberally interspersed with parenthetical grammatical glosses. A distinguishing feature of Khoi narration, namely the pervasive use of the passive voice, for example remains visible. With all the meticulous and detailed annotations, the translated texts are often more than twice the length of the original, making for a cumbersome reading experience. Schultze’s translation method was less aimed at producing a coherent and fluent German-language narrative, but to provide an exact, verifiable rendering of the original. https://reposito ry.uwc.ac.za/ In contemporary translation theory, the elusive goal of absolute equivalence between original and translated text is no longer regarded as attainable or desirable, and the word for word paradigm employed by Schultze (as well as Bleek and Lloyd) is no longer accepted as an appropriate way to translate oral narrative. I have therefore followed Harold Scheub’s counsel that one of the greatest injuries that can be done to the original work is simply to ‘retell’ it without making any effort to give it a dynamic and artistic content. (qtd in Biesele 1993: xii) My translation of Schultze’s German versions has therefore been somewhat freer, but always adhering to the original content. In the case of sexual terminology and vulgar language, an approximation of the plain, direct language of the original has been preferred to more polite circumlocutions or Latinate euphemisms: thus “shit” instead of “faeces” or “excrement”. The word “penis” has been reluctantly used instead of more colloquial English synonyms, since all these variants have connotations that seemed inappropriate for the narrative context. Occasionally I have consulted Nama dictionaries where Schultze’s translation seemed suspect, and square brackets indicate where extraneous explanatory material has been inserted. The selection from Schultze’s 67 tales has been guided by the following criteria. Firstly, stories were chosen that had not been published in a variant form in Bleek’s Reynard book, nor in Maingard’s Korana Folktales. Both Maingard’s three Khoi stories and at least a third of Bleek’s 42 “fables” have a close correlate in the Schultze corpus. Some examples of stories which can be regarded as closely related, or even, in some cases, almost identical are as follows: “Hunt of the Lion and Jackal” (Bleek 3) and “The Lion and Jackal” (Schulze 489); “The White Man and the Snake” (Bleek 11) and “The Snake which was rolled over by a Stone” (Schultze 491); “Fish Stealing” (Bleek 1) and “The Jackal who lies next to the wagon” (Schultze 464); “Cloud Eating (Bleek 14) and “The Hyena and Jackal jump up to the Clouds” (Schulze 460); “The Cock” (Bleek 23) and “The Jackal who tricked the Flamingo and the Hen” (Schultze 483); “The Zebra Stallion” (Bleek 39) and “The Zebra Mares and the Baboon” (Schultze 535). In comparing many of these tales, the differences between Schultze’s “naked” and uncensored versions, and Bleek’s sanitized adaptations are of course noteworthy, but I have here wanted to present new material. Secondly, tales from Schultze’s collection were chosen to illustrate the various categories of narratives, giving the reader a representative selection of the corpus. Apart from several animal stories, there are thus three tales which feature the Aigamuchab, who is a well-known ogre figure in Khoi mythology, recognizable by the eyes on his feet. When the Aigamuchab manages to pick out the choice fatty cuts of meat on the plate although they are turned upside down, his canny companion suspects that he may be looking up https://reposito ry.uwc.ac.za/ at the meat from below, and so the fact that his eyes are on his feet is revealed. In this and a couple of other narratives, the wily jackal is a central figure. He is an attractive and entertaining trickster figure in Khoi orature, who even manages to outwit lions, hyenas, leopards and people. Three of the tales also feature Boers, showing clearly that Khoi orature was not locked in a time-less pre-colonial world, but had adapted to historical and social change. In one of these stories, “The Jackal who sold a Horse to the Boers”, the jackal outwits a greedy but dimwitted Boer who eventually, once the penny has finally dropped, retaliates with characteristic and unrelenting violence. In stories such as this, the antics of animal proxies in Khoi folklore do not only reveal deep insights into human psychology, but are also a window into the fraught colonial relationships between settlers and indigenous peoples. Living on the fringes of a new colonial monetary economy that was beginning to replace the traded exchange of goods, the Khoi here mock the new forms of value by conflating money with “shit”. Even the missionaries and their Christianity are the butt of subtle satire, for example in the story “The Two Brothers” : the Christian ritual language of thanksgiving (“The Lord has given us water!” ; “The Lord has provided us with food!”) is discredited and perverted in the mouths of murderous robbers, who moreover mistake human urine and excrement for divine nourishment. The word of God is a load of ‘’shit”, if we follow the language and logic of this Khoi narrative. The Khoi were however not only the recipients of violence in the form of an encroaching colonial order, but had themselves subjected the Damara people to their rule. A number of stories deal with the uneasy and often violent relationship between the Khoi and their Damara subject people, such as the story of the Damara boy who escaped being killed. Even a cursory look at these narratives reveals that sexual and scatological content forms an integral part of the imaginative and story-telling universe in Khoi orature. Rich expletive insults such as “You dirty pus-encrusted dick head” (original ‘kya !haî !garaba’, transl. by Schultze as ‘Schmutzkrusten Schamkerl!’ 481) are frequently used in the narratives. A good example of unrestrained erotic story-telling is the narrative “The Jackal and the Two Girls” in which fantastical magical transformations allow the liberated, disembodied penis free access to penetrate a reluctant girl. Stories such as these should however not lead us to a simplified conclusion that Khoi culture was given to sexual or moral wantonness. Marital fidelity is the major theme in the first story, “The People who collected Reeds”, where the faithful persistence of conjugal love leads to a happy ending. In the next story, “The Girl who insulted the Damara”, shame and nakedness play a pivotal role, and the precocious girl who transgressed the behavioral code is punished by being deprived of her clothes – and her brothers cannot rescue her until they cover her nudity with ash. https://reposito ry.uwc.ac.za/ Altogether, a reading of the Schultze corpus of tales against Reynard shows the normalized and natural presence of “naked” elements in the Khoi narratives where no part of the anatomy is taboo. Bodily functions, excrement and violence are a natural, uncensored part of the story-telling world and it is not surprising that such “naked” tales would not have found an appreciative audience in Bleek’s Victorian society. The dominant picture that we have of the Khoi (and Bushman) imagination is one that has been shaped by Bleek’s editorial interventions; the sample of Schultze’s translated tales presented here for the first time in English therefore offers us a fuller, more comprehensive picture of a richly imaginative indigenous culture. Selections from Leonhard Schultze’s Nama Tales 1. The People who collected Reeds A man had taken a wife. Together with his brother and his wife, the three of them went riding out on an ox looking for reeds to make sleeping mats. When they came to the water they unsaddled the ox, and the two men went away to cut the reeds. The woman however went to the water to wash herself. And as she was washing herself, a frog- woman appeared and put on the clothes of the woman. She said: “Frog, take off those clothes!” But the frog replied: “No, sister, I am only trying them on.” And when the woman had finished washing herself, she said: “Give me the clothes back now, frog!” But the frog fled and went to the place where they had unsaddled the ox. The woman was ashamed and hid in the bushes, and the man took the frog as his woman, thinking that the frog was his wife. But when the people go out looking for reeds, the true wife comes and sweeps the hut, cleans the pots, grinds the buchu, makes butter in the calabash, and gives milk to her old blind mother-in-law. Then she goes away again. One day the old woman spoke to her son and said: “Hide yourself in this grass mat, lie down quietly rolled up in it, and try to see which person always comes here.” And while he lay hiding, the woman came. She sat down, took the calabash and while she was making butter he spat at her. She fled, but he ran after her and caught her. She then said: “Go to your frog-wife, you, who have married a frog-woman, and has abandoned me!” But he caught her again and wanted to take her back to the hut to have her again. In the mean time the frog-wife and the man’s brother arrived on the ox. The frog-wife commanded the husband to help her and spoke: “Take me down!” But no one answered her. He then took his leather whip and lashed her. She jumped down from the ox herself and called out: “I am a frog! I swim in the waters!” So she spoke and jumped into the water. And the man who had found his wife again, married her again. (432-434) https://reposito ry.uwc.ac.za/ 2. The Girl who insulted the Damara A Damara man once came to a hut and as he sat down at the door, a girl [peering under his loin-cloth] said to him: “Like that calf in front of my mother’s hut, as misshapen and gross is your penis.” And she took ash out of the fire place and threw the ash over him. The older girls said to the girl: “Know that he is a grown up man.” He however answered: “Let it be, she talks so out of ignorance, let her go.” And on the next morning, early, the girls all went swimming. When they had undressed and had gone down into the water, the Damara came and took away their clothes. And only when they came out, they saw the man. They went to him and said: “Dear old father, give me back my embroidered hind loin cloth and my front loin cloth, all of it!” And he gave it all back to them, but to the girl who had insulted him he said: “First run and pick thorns from that thorn tree which stands over there.” So she ran and brought them to him. The Damara however grabbed her and stuck the thorns hard into her, joining her limbs, and she could no longer move her body. Then he picked her up and threw her into the thorn bush. Then her people came past and the first ones to come past were the grandparents. So the girl called: “My grandparents, see, the roots [spikes?] of the thorn tree are holding me down.” But the grandparents answered: “Had I not told you, girl, ‘Pour some water for me’, and you did not listen?” So they spoke and went away. Then the two servants of her mother came past, and the girl called out: “Oh servants of my mother who are walking past, see, the roots of the thorn tree are holding me down.” But they answered: “Did I not tell you, girl, to milk the cow so that I can mix in the water, and you did not do this?” So they spoke and went away. Then the parents came by, and the girl called out: “Dear parents who are walking past, see, the roots of the thorn tree are holding me down.” But they answered: “Did I not tell you, girl, to clean the hut, and you did not do this?” So they spoke and went away. Then the sisters came by, and the girl called out: “Dear sisters who are walking past, see, the roots of the thorn tree are holding me down.” But they answered: “Had we not told you: ‘Know that he is a grown-up man?’” So they spoke and went away. Then her two brothers came, and the girl called out: “My brothers who are walking past, see, the roots of the thorn tree are holding me down.” They ran to her [and when they saw her nakedness] they threw ash on her [to cover her shame], and then hauled her out. The brothers then sat behind the tree and a bitch pulled out her thorns. And when the dog had all her thorns pulled out, they all went away. (434-436) https://reposito ry.uwc.ac.za/