Daimon Publishers
In 1857, a thirty-year-old German linguist named Wilhelm Bleek traveled to the Cape Colony, in what is now the Republic of South Africa, to visit his émigré brother and his family. Trained as a philologist, Bleek had prepared himself for the trip by studying the grammars of several indigenous languages; when he arrived, he carefully reviewed earlier linguists' work, finding native speakers and asking them to correct problems of pronunciation and usage that he had found in the scholarly literature.
In this way, Bleek painstakingly achieved a working knowledge of several languages of southern Africa. All posed difficulties for the outsider, Bleek noted, but none was quite so challenging as the Khoisan tongue of the people called Boesjemans, or Bushmen, a tongue that gave phonemic value to an array of "clicks," glottal stops, and other sounds that were baffling to European ears. Bleek pressed on, developing an orthography for the Bushmen dialects he encountered and writing learned articles about them for scholarly journals in Germany and England.
In his study of these languages and their variants, following the model of his near-contemporaries Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and working with his brilliant sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd, Bleek collected a large body of folktales. Most of them came from Bushmen narrators who had been born in the interior but brought to the Cape Colony, almost always against their will. Many of his consultants were, in fact, prisoners who had been jailed for the offense of having done nothing more than following their way of life - hunting on ancestral lands suddenly declared off-limits to them, refusing to abandon practices developed over countless millennia, evading the directives of traveling missionaries and government officials. Bleek's friend Xhabbo, "The Dream," was one such man; cut off from his wife and children, far from the hills and saltpans of the interior, Xhabbo recited stories he had learned as a child, reminisced about his encounters with unpredictably dangerous animals and predictably dangerous people, and quietly lamented the fact that in his remote English prison the stories that had arrived to him in the desert, as if carried by the wind, could no longer find him.
The stories Xhabbo and other Bushmen gave to Bleek were small masterpieces, marvels of storytelling economy, charged with meaning, metaphorical and beautiful. In these stories, the captive Bushmen who once followed game through the vast, arid interior spoke of the sometimes treacherous behavior of the Mantis, the insect god who assisted at the creation and gave names to things. They explained the origin of the stars, which give light to the people so that they can find their way home, and the origin of death, the outcome of a hare's foolishness. They warned of the many dangers that the world poses, whether in the form of marauding baboons or lethal lightning. They revealed the meaning of dreams and the ways of their people. And, quietly and elegantly, they made it clear that their knowledge of such things gave them a pressing claim to exist and to be left in peace.
Sitting in his brother's windswept garden, notebook in hand, Wilhelm Bleek listened to these stories with a linguist's practiced concentration, striving to record the smallest nuances of pronunciation and grammar, to transcribe the faintest nasalization and the sharpest lateral fricative. The meaning of the utterances he gathered was, in the early months of his work, of secondary interest to him, but in time, in the company of Xhabbo and his friends, Bleek came to listen to the texts spellbound. Eliciting clarifications, retellings, and alternate versions, he gathered several books' worth of Bushmen stories, almost all of them published after listener and speaker alike had died - for, felled by disease and the terrible loneliness of imprisonment, Xhabbo died in 1873, and Bleek joined him in death only two years later.
The body of work Bleek and Lucy Lloyd collected is now generally regarded as the single most reliable body of ethnographic evidence for traditional Bushman culture, and it remains at the heart of the scattered anthropological literature devoted to the first peoples of the Kalahari. Laurens van der Post, the great South African writer and ethnographer whose work both drew on and augmented that of Bleek and Lloyd, observed in The Heart of the Hunter that these stories contain a universe of detail that would otherwise be unknown to us, and that, although lions and elephants and other large creatures figure prominently in them, they reveal a wealth of information about the actors that European science too often overlooks: the procession of the stars and planets, the ways of ants, the movement of elands and gemsboks from one watering hole to another, the rustling of dry reeds in the hot wind, and the solitude of ghosts.
One of the books Bleek and Lloyd made of their work was published in London, in 1911, as Specimens of Bushmen Folklore. That book underlies this one: each of the stories in The Girl Who Made Stars corresponds to one in the original collection. A small difference is that in the present book the stories are grouped thematically. A larger difference, which will be immediately noticeable to readers of Bleek and Lloyd's original, is that these stories are here rendered in a contemporary, literary English that departs markedly from the nineteenth-century versions, in which Bleek and Lloyd attempted to convey the sometimes orotund, sometimes elliptical, and often repetitive rhetorical features of traditional Bushman expression, arriving at a kind of hybrid speech that was not quite English and not quite Bushman, but a curious blend of both.
Their method remains of considerable interest to students of oral literature, but it is of less immediate concern to readers whose wish is simply to hear a good story. Both publisher and editor hope in this book to honor Bleek and Lloyd's extraordinary work while creating a text that would appeal to readers without prior knowledge of Bushmen ways of life - and certainly without formal training in linguistics. We hope that these retellings of their texts have not in any way betrayed Bleek and Lloyd's intentions or done violence to the stories they gathered, stories that are always more complex than they appear to be on first glance.
The time when Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd did their work has long passed. With it, the world of the Bushmen on whom those sympathetic Europeans relied has now very nearly disappeared. Bleek observed of the Bushmen that in his day "every man's hand was against them," and that their every hour was laden with peril. Matters did not much improve for succeeding generations, as thousands of Bushmen were murdered or driven away from their lands. It is thought that perhaps only forty individuals are now alive who preserve intact traditional ways of life and knowledge; still not free to move at will across the countryside, these forty reside within South Africa's Kagga Kamma Game Reserve, where they live astride two worlds: that of the ancient past, and the ever more closely approaching global monoculture that has erased so many cultures in the space of a few decades.
When those forty are gone, a way of life that has endured for fifty centuries, and perhaps even longer, will disappear with them. It will be but one of the myriad such quiet disappearances that mark our time, the disappearances of languages, animal and plant species, habitats. We can only hope, as Xhabbo gently suggested, that the Bushmen will remain in the world forever, their bodies having taken the guise of trailing, beautiful, ever-transforming clouds.
Let us close with a note on the perils of terminology. The term Bushman has a long history, first used by Dutch arrivals in southern Africa to refer, more or less collectively, to the indigenous peoples who lived inland from the coast - that is, in "the bush." In recent years a view has emerged that the introduced word Bushman carries pejorative connotations and should therefore be avoided. Some anthropologists and activists have suggested that San take its place. This replacement, however, is equally problematic, for San, which comes from the Nama language of Namibia, is a blanket term that means, the anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas observes, "someone who is poor, lives in the bush, has no livestock, and eats food from the ground." The San-speaking peoples in question have no collective term for themselves in their own languages; instead, they use ethnic terms such as !Xo, Juwasi, and Nahara for individual groups and Bushmen for the collectivity. Following Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, this usage is observed in this book.
GREGORY MCNAMEE
Tucson, Arizona
Autumn, 2000
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