No 152 - Living poetry in Southern Africa 3: Presences of the San

 

Rock paintings at Salem

A fascinating article appeared recently in the South African Sunday Times (26 January 2025). It reported that certain self-styled “Khoisan community” leaders, were being accused of stealing people’s money, contributions they’d elicited against promises of a mythical “reparations payout”. One such upstart claimed “she had annexed the whole of Southern Africa”, presumably on the grounds that Khoisan once did inhabit most of the subcontinent.

But who were and are the “Khoisan”? There’s no agreement about how coherent a culture ‘they’ were at any point in history; no agreement on what to name them (Khoekhoen, San, Bushmen, Abatwa?); no agreement on how to delineate such a community today; no agreement on who can claim legitimate leadership. There is an argument that, since the ‘Bushmen’ were subjected to thoroughgoing genocidal attacks by colonial invaders, they are entitled to some form of “reparations”. One might also argue that reparation need not involve or be confined to the financial, but ought to extend to the more intangible but equally vital restoration of some kind of cultural dignity, of historical identity. A sub-question that arises then is this: What does our poetry have to say about the Bushman, about their identity and belonging? Can it contribute to a form of “reparation”?

Now the Bushmen (let’s settle on this name for now) have been the subject of a massive amount of anthropological attention – some horribly exploitative, distortive or romanticised, more recently much more respectful and restorative. And in our literatures, the figure of the Bushman appears very frequently indeed. As far as I know, no one has done a comprehensive survey of this literary presence.

I got into studying the Bushman by a somewhat scenic route. Round about 2000, I began in my academic research and teaching to get into ecological concerns. It had long been clear that the global ecological emergency is the crisis of our times.  I mean, almost all our worries are going to seem trivial in comparison to the damage being wrought upon the planet’s living systems: its pervasive poisoning and depletion, its entangled collapses in biodiversity, soil viability, clean air, potable water, survivable weather and temperatures. It is blindingly evident that we cannot go on in our present numbers, destroying our own habitable systems and wielding economies of rampant extractivism.

Now one common move in the discourses of eco-dissent has been to turn to various indigenous or precapitalist societies for a counter-model: the Native Americans, the Amazonian Indians, and of course the Bushmen. Such peoples, the narrative goes, lived and sometimes still live in knowledgeable ‘harmony’ with nature, spiritually integrated with it, inflicting minimal damage upon it, drawing on deep animal wisdoms, and so on. Pre-eminently, the desert-dwelling Bushmen, minimalist and hardy, with their wonderful rock art, were what poet Douglas Livingstone called “symbiotic man”.

Of course, they were not all, and not always, either harmonious or desert-dwelling. As the rock art shows, they – small groups speaking maybe 200 often mutually unintelligible languages – lived right across the subcontinent in every imaginable environment. Here in the Eastern Cape, at the foot of rock faces on which the poet Don Maclennan tested my vertical nerves, we would find those little ochre depictions of flying men, bows and arrows and animals. Maclennan would write a whole collection of short poems entitled Rock Paintings at Salem, puzzling at their hidden, somehow ineffably poetic, meanings.

The rock art remains mysterious partly because, as everybody knows, its creators were practically eradicated by incoming white settlers, along with the wildlife. Bushmen were wildlife back then, “vermin” to be hunted down or, if they survived, enslaved. The early Eastern Cape poet, Thomas Pringle, participated in some of those lethal hunts in the 1820s. When he mentions, in his poem “Afar in the Desert”, riding along with a nameless, wordless Bushman boy running by his side, he is describing a captive slave. To be fair, though, Pringle was for his time a comparatively enlightened liberal, and at least tried to see things from the defiant indigenous perspective, in his poem, “Song of the Wild Bushman”:

[…] I am lord of the Desert Land,

   And I will not leave my bounds,

To crouch beneath the Christian’s hand,

   And kennel with his hounds:

To be a hound, and watch the flocks,

   For the cruel White Man’s gain […]

 

Some later Europeans also took a more sympathetic interest in the few shreds of Bushman society that survived. Pre-eminent among them was German linguist Wilhelm Bleek who in the 1870s, along with his daughter Dorothea and niece Lucy Lloyd, compiled an extraordinary 12,000 pages of testimony from /Xam Bushman prisoners in Cape Town. The Bleek-Lloyd Archive, now fully available online, has proved to be utterly bewitching and fruitful for a slew of writers, from Laurens van der Post in the 1950s to Pippa Skotnes seventy years later. There’s now a huge secondary literature around the Archive, its provenance and problems, its textural beauties and undeniable richness of linguistics and lore.

Julia Martin, for one, writes a lovely chapter on encountering the Archive, in her book A Millimetre of Dust. And the father of her husband Michael Cope, über-editor Jack Cope (1913-1991), was among the first to publish his own poetic ‘versions’ of selections from the Bleek-Lloyd records. He has been followed by, among others, Stephen Watson (Return of the Moon, 1991), Harold Farmer, Alan James (The First Bushman’s Path, 2001), and Antjie Krog (The Stars Say Tsau!, 2004). Each poet makes a unique selection, though they sometimes overlap; each brings to the material a slightly different sensibility and stylistic quirk. For these are not merely extracts, nor strictly translations (since no-one any longer speaks /Xam): they are ‘versions’, carved out of the raw ore of the testimonies and shaped on the page into artefacts that look like ‘poems’ in a recognisably modern, publishable sort of way.

You can probably smell the ethical dilemmas from where you sit. Is this sort of thing restorative or exploitative? Does it illuminate or distort? What do all these white writers think they’re doing? Are they assuaging residual racial guilt for the earlier genocide; or valorising commonalities between wildly disparate cultures; or reiterating the old prurient anthropological interest in ‘them’ precisely because they are so different – or, like van der Post and many since, using them as an exemplary lever against the ecologically destructive, alienating tendencies in industrial modernity? Elements of all these, perhaps – and the poets are keenly aware of the issues; Alan James discusses them at great length in his book.

For now, as an example, let’s just take a glance at a single piece – a fragment, really, since it was not originally conceived as a poem by either the informant Dia-kwain or by Wilhelm Bleek.

 This is how Bleek translated and re-arranged it for his 1911 distillation, Specimens of Bushman Folklore (a facsimile also available online):

People were those who

Broke for me the string.

Therefore

The place () became like this to me,

On account of it,

Because the string was that which broke for me.

Therefore

The place does not feel to me,

As the place used to feel to me,

On account of it.

For,

The place feels as if it stood open before me,

() because the string has broken for me.

Therefore,

The place does not feel pleasant to me,

On account of it.

 

How reliable is the translation? Like much of the archive, it would have been translated first into Dutch – the only language shared by both the German Bleek and the /Xam, who had already been overrun by, and had been sometimes working on, Dutch sheep-farms – and then translated again into English. Slippery, to say the least. This Dutch element especially intrigued the Afrikaans Antjie Krog, who produced both English and Afrikaans versions of The Stars Say Tsau! In the English, she reproduced fairly faithfully Bleek’s version of “The Broken String”; it was an example of how the testimonies often “fell naturally into poetry”, she said. There seemed at times to be this startling correspondence between the tenor of the /Xam fragments and the elusive, loose quality of the modernist ‘Western’ lyric. At the same time, the awkwardness of the grammar seemed to capture the very quality of broken-ness that is the poem’s subject.

Stephen Watson did something rather different in Return of the Moon. He retained some of the repetitiveness of the original, and the slightly archaic diction, but changed the format, the way the lines break:

Because

of a people,

because of others,

other people

who came

breaking

the string for me,

the earth

is not earth,

this place is

a place now

changed for me …

 

And so on. Watson literally strings the poem out; its form on the page mimicks its own content. He justifies the lines to the left, rather than centred, as Bleek had done. Watson also introduces telling changes of diction. The “people” who break the string are now explicitly “others”; a specific place becomes a generalised “earth”. Clearly, all this gives it a different feel, a refurbished meaning. This new angle is implicit in Watson’s own note to the poem: he claims it is “probably the most powerful single record of /Xam life losing its coherence under the impact of other encroaching cultures”.

This is a reading of the fragment that began I think with van der Post and has been amplified by many others. Neil Bennun takes it for the title of a whole book. In his 2024 poem “Strangeling”, Eastern Cape poet Brian Walter expands the image to include all manner of displaced or discomfited peoples: “So I am disempowered, the string/ broken, empty of words, meaning/ love// as words ring in the void” (Of Love and Bone, Ecca Poets).

The original piece was in fact about a single incident. Apparently a /Xam rainmaker named Nuin-kui-ten, going about at night “in the form of a lion” (whatever that entails in the /Xam mind), was shot (by whom is unclear, though a “Boer” was blamed) and consequently died. The piece laments that individual death: a particular connection, a “string”, has thus been broken. And as other testimonies show, the image of the “string” or “thong” was especially used to figure the connection of the shaman with the “rain-bull”. It’s arguably as much an environmental as a personal loss. Nevertheless, it has been repeatedly expanded to become symbolic of a whole culture’s downfall.

There’s so much more we could say about all this. But let’s end by returning to the central question. Is this ‘string’ of white poetry a legitimate, heartfelt and valid illumination, however partial, of a fantastically complex culture and language that would otherwise vanish entirely? Or is it symptomatic of a kind of pseudo-nostalgia, an anxious desire by relatively recent invaders to truly belong here in the deeply integrated way those autochthonous, or First Peoples did? Or do we take comfort in the opinion of /Kabbo, Wilhelm Bleek’s chief informant, who was glad to see his story/songs, or kukummi, migrate into print, since all such stories, he said, “float on the wind”, and belong to no one?

 

If you’re interested, I’ve written more extensively on this material elsewhere, including:   ‘//Kabbo’s Challenge: Transculturation and the question of a South African ecocriticism’, Journal of Literary Studies. 23/3, 252-270; ‘”Now strangers walk in that place”: Antjie Krog, modernity, and the making of //Kabbo’s story’, Current Writing 19/2, 49-71, reprinted in Judith Lutge Coullie and Andries Visagie, eds. Antjie Krog: An ethics of body and otherness. UKZN Press 2014:215-240; and a chapter in my Seven Southern African Poets and the Natural World (Atelier, 2024).