Preface: Stones, stories and silences

What we commonly mean by 'understand' coincides with 'simplify': without a profound simplification the world around us would be an infinite, undefined tangle that would defy our ability to orient ourselves and decide upon our actions.

Primo Levi

On 28 August 1913, at the Kenhardt location in today's Northern Cape province of South Africa, a woman called Meitjie Streep passed away after an illness of two months. The certificate that contains these details states also that she was 'Bushman', born in the Cape Province and 'about 105 years'; that she was in domestic service; and that she had died of 'senile decay'. Present at her house when she died was another woman, Elsie Alexander, who had witnessed Meitjie's death and signed the death certificate with a mark.

As Streep and her relatives probably knew, two years earlier she had become widely known among students of African folklore when a gold-embossed image of her holding a digging stick was used as the cover illustration of a book titled Specimens of Bushman Folklore, by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy C Lloyd, published in London in 1911. The photograph on which the image is based also featured in the book as photograph 13, even if, oddly, Streep was not identified by name.

Twenty-three years later, Dorothea Bleek, Wilhelm's daughter, published in a learned journal a series of photographs she had taken in 1911. They included images of several relatives of Streep, and it was here that Miss Bleek revealed that it was Mikki (as she writes her name) Streep in the photograph in Specimens and thus, by implication, the woman in the gold-embossed image on its cover.

Bleek also supplied one of Meitjie Streep's |xam names, |ogen-a?, and estimated her age in 1911 as 80, probably more realistic than the death certificate suggested. Even today, in the area where she lived, people tend to exaggerate the age of those who look really old. This is not surprising among communities where people tend not to know their age, not even the one guessed for them by some functionary filling in the details for their official identity documents.

Still, Dorothea Bleek's estimate would place |ogen-a?'s date of birth at around 1831, at a time when the part of the Upper Karoo from where she came was outside the limits of the Cape Colony and largely unexplored by settlers of European or mixed descent.

Dorothea obtained snippets of information from |ogen-a? when she saw her in 1911. Only Bushmen were in the country when she was child, she said, many Bushmen. The first strangers they saw were the Korana, Khoekhoe herders with horses and guns who lived north of the Orange River. 'They fought the Bushmen and killed them,' she told Bleek. 'The Korana came first from the north and killed many Bushmen and women. Then the white men came from the south and killed more.'

She had been born at !kuries, near Kenhardt. 'She was a married woman, with three children when the first White man came, Baas Frederick, who came to hunt.' Dorothea had known |ogen-a? when she herself was only 11 years old. The |xam woman and other members of her band, several of them direct relatives, had been brought to Cape Town early in 1884 in an effort by the local magistrate to cleanse the area of obnoxious and redundant hunter-gatherers who stubbornly clung to their traditional lifestyle. It was then that the photograph of |ogen-a? with the digging stick was taken at the request of Dorothea's aunt, Lucy Lloyd.

The stones, stories and silences present in this book are all emblems of discontinuity and absence. The story to which this book is devoted needs to be told, even if it is full of gaps and obscurities, not to mention tangents, subplots and a varied cast of characters. What Primo Levi states in the epigraph of this preface must be borne in mind: if we want to understand, we have to simplify. In these chapters I am not by any means telling everything that can or even needs to be told about the events and individuals at the centre of this book, but I have tried to achieve a meaningful simplification of what I know to help others obtain an adequate understanding of them and hopefully open new avenues of research.

The region variously known as |xam-ka !au, Bushmanland or the Upper (or Bo) Karoo has always been maligned by European visitors and settlers. Environmentally speaking, today it is in a state of devastation after almost three centuries of, among other things, sheep farming, destruction of fauna, garbage accumulation, over-exploitation of the water table and legal and illegal mining, not to mention missile-testing from Cape Agulhas to the Strandberg. Yet for the people who called themselves |xam-ka !ei and their ancestors, this was home, a place which, to use Hugh Brody's phrase, they had 'made perfect by knowledge'.

The history of genocide, dispossession and the forced pauperisation of the Upper Karoo |xam that haunts this book remains one of the lesser known and more tragic chapters in the history of South Africa. The tragedy went almost completely unnoticed when it happened, and this state of things has continued for more than a century. Needless to say, there has been no acknowledgement, apology, redress or attempt to ameliorate the plight of the survivors' descendants. One of the aims of Fading Footprints is to make this tragedy more widely known and the present communities of |xam descendants more visible.

The happy confluence of several archives has made this book possible. One of them is found in colonial records kept in Cape Town. Another is the Bleek and Lloyd Collection, whose holdings are divided mostly between the University of Cape Town (UCT), the Iziko South African Museum and the National Library of South Africa. The story of the Bleek and Lloyd Collection and its creators is another of the book's narratives.

Especially for the last chapter, another important source is what I call the Archive of Traditional Narrative in Afrikaans (ATNA), the collection of oral histories and traditional narratives I have been gathering from the present inhabitants since 2011. I have also made extensive use of my own field notes and correspondence.

The 'tens of millions of . artefacts scattered across the karoo surface' mentioned by John Parkington in one of the book's epigraphs can be considered another important 'archive', as can the many images engraved in the dolerites strewn across |xam-ka !au. These are the archaeological records explored by Parkington, Janette Deacon and others.

Valuable information has also been sourced from newspaper articles, directories of several kinds, private memoirs, travellers' accounts and printed official reports, as well as the holdings of several other academic and public institutions.

My personal history and that of my research in the landscape and in the libraries and archives between 1986 and 2011 serves as the framing narrative for the stories set in the past. This has proved a convenient way to organise the historical and ethnographic material, while at the same time it has allowed me to share my experiences as a traveller and researcher in the Upper Karoo and give the reader an idea of the methodologies I have gradually developed to work with the texts and conduct fieldwork.

In the 19th century, the spelling of personal names - especially the names of places in remote areas - could be highly fluid and variable. Because these variations are part of the texture of the past, I have left them unchanged. Some adjustments in punctuation have, however, been made occasionally for the sake of clarity. The texts of the |xam kukummi (stories) quoted throughout the book have at times been slightly edited. A glossary has been added at the beginning of the book for terms that appear often.

Throughout these pages I refer to the hunter-gatherers by the name they call themselves, in this book mostly |xam or |xam-ka !ei, but I also use 'Bushman' when it features in the original sources or when a generic is necessary. I repudiate, of course, all negative connotations the word may hold for some readers. The word 'San', favoured by some authors, is in itself problematic and is rejected by several communities of hunter-gatherers in southern Africa, who prefer to be called Bushmen.

For the herders formerly known by the now pejorative designation of 'Hottentots' I use the term 'Khoekhoe', documented in the early sources and which means 'people of the people'. The word 'Hottentot', however, appears in some of the contemporary documents cited.

The Basters are also mentioned often. 'Baster' is the modern Afrikaans spelling of the Cape Dutch 'bastaard', which can be translated as 'hybrid'. William Porter, the liberal Attorney General of the Cape Colony, wrote in his 1839 journal that the word 'is not understood as involving any indelicacy or reproach'. However, there can be no doubt that, depending on the historical moment, the place and the general context, this designation did carry a stigma. In the historical documents cited here, it appears more often as 'bastard'. Nowadays, the term has indeed...