INDIGENOUS RELATIONS Art and Modernity in

Julie L. McGee, University of Delaware

In 1997 UNESCO included in its Memory of artist Pippa Skotnes. This publication, Claim to the the World Register an archive best known as the Country: The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek Bleek Collection and described thusly: (2007), continues Skotnes’s scholarly and artistic inquiry into the lives of the Lloyd and Bleek The Bleek Collection consists of papers family and their informants and was preceded of Dr W.H.I. Bleek (1827-1875), his by Skotnes’s Sound of the Thinking Strings (1991) sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd (1834-1914), his and the controversial exhibition (with catalogue) daughter (1873-1948) Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushman (1996). and G.W. Stow (1822-1882) relating to Skotnes’s latest exhibition and accompanying their researches into the San (Bushman) catalogue, Unconquerable Spirit: George Stow’s language and folklore, as well as albums History Paintings of the San, launched in November of photographs. Bleek developed a 2008 at Iziko South African Museum in Cape phonetic script for transcribing the Town, centers on Lucy Lloyd and the geologist/ characteristic clicks and sounds of the ethnographer George Stow in connection to Stow’s !Xam language which is used by linguists rock painting studies. Sustained and legitimized by to this day. Although some of the exhibitions, publications, and national museums, material was published by Lucy Lloyd universities, and archives, these projects have and Dorothea Bleek, a great deal remains provided privileged reinscriptions of archival unpublished. The material provides materials gathered during an era of cultural an invaluable and unique insight into plunder of South Africa’s indigenous heritage by the language, life, religion, mythology, colonial forces. Skotnes’s scholarly and artistic folklore and stories of this late Stone contributions to contemporary conceptualizations Age people.1 of South Africa’s earliest inhabitants are immensely valuable. Her appropriation of San The Bleek Collection does indeed offer many heritage is deeply infected by her scholarship on invaluable lessons, chief among them being how the San and most particularly Bleek, Lloyd, and Western constructions of modernity are imbedded Stow’s interpolations of the San and early rock art in tropes of prehistory and indigeneity and painting. Her publications and exhibitions offer wedded to proclamations of science and salvage. rich and at times competing layers of analyses Robert Gordon has suggested the archive be that seem to position her as a keen, insightful seen in the context of South Africa’s “incipient and detached observer-scholar and then again as scientific nationalism.”2 The Bleek Collection a romanticizing dramaturgist and scenographer. was recently published in a lavish volume and To this end, there are parallels with the endeavors accompanying CD ROM, edited by scholar and of Bleek and Lloyd and renewed courtship with

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Figure 1. Garth Erasmus in his Brakenfell Studio, 2005. Photo: Jurie Senekal. the constructions of Western modernity through larger interrogation of African modernity. Two and against African indigeneity. observations are set forth herein; frstly, that in Can artistic “appropriations” of indigenous terms of “indigenous,” modernity and prehistory cultural forms deconstruct or at the very least (or the premodern) are codependent; and second, interrogate the constructed modernities imposed that those artists who appropriate indigenous upon the term “indigenous”? This essay considers cultures through a lens of “critical extinction” a single artist’s — Garth Erasmus — relationship risk reproducing a paradigm of Eurocentric to contemporary conceptions of indigeneity in modernity. South Africa (Figure 1). It is guided by two key While South Africa is the self-proclaimed questions: How are contemporary understandings cradle of humankind,3 the indigenous people of and perceptions of indigeneity bound up in southern Africa have long been imagined as living the “what” and the “when” of South African examples of prehistory.4 The continued display of modernity; and Is indigeneity a trope of modernity, the dioramas of non-Eurocentric and if so, whose modernity? Historicizing the South African tribal [sic] groups that include naming and appropriation of indigenous cultures life casts situated in historicized environments at in South Africa offers critical insight into the the Iziko South African Museum perpetuates this

Research 116 McGee view. European derogation and marked them as a The prehistory has and continues to play a lesser race, between human and beast.10 European seminal role in South African national identity.5 illustrations of Cape inhabitants rendered them Indeed, in South Africa, constructions of variously as savage, wild, exotic, and indolent.11 modernity are contingent upon prehistory is a blended term that, in its contemporary narratives as much as they are on the premodern. use, acknowledges the mutual fates of the Khoi According to Robert Gordon, “While [South and San peoples of South Africa, displaced and Africa’s frst peoples] have been socially marginal, greatly decimated by European colonization. symbolically they were [and are] central to a As with “Bushmen,” revived popular and civic number of different ideological constellations.”6 usage has not dispelled debates about proper In the European “age of discovery,” assumed links nomenclature and land right claims, nor eased, in between “modern savages” and stone-age peoples Skotnes’ words, the “tangled lines of inheritance of were common. “Modern savages” were that characterize Khoisan identity today.”12 “found” at the “uttermost ends of the earth” and Artist and San scholar Pippa Skotnes suggests the South African Cape represented just such a that, “The final dispossession of the Khoisan place.7 Voyages to these distant parts represented came with their assimilation into Afrikaner life a kind of time travel for which Europeans “made and their classifcation along with others of (as the crucial substitution of space for time.”8 the state perceived it) ‘mixed blood’ as ‘Cape But for European settlers living in proximity Coloured.’”13 to the indigenous peoples of South Africa, the The dispossession of these indigenous mythologized temporal distance became a critical peoples by European settlers suggests that the replacement for spatial distancing. European Khoisan problematic is not easily positioned under modernity was produced by the collapse and the themes of Africa and modernity although distortion of time such that simultaneous presents both are critically present. Notwithstanding were rendered chronologically distant and through their long history of social, political, and cultural such reductive exercises, a process of “othering” engagement with Bantu peoples, the indigenous was begun. peoples of southern Africa are and have been South Africa’s earliest inhabitants are repeatedly situated apart from black Africans commonly called the Khoikhoi (KhoiKhoi) and the for ideological, economic and political gain .14 San, the former cast as pastoralists and the latter The indigenous people are treated very much as hunter-gathers. Although movement among like the “discovered” hominid fossils used to the early inhabitants and between these modes support claims that South Africa is the “cradle of living took place, modernist narratives created of humankind.” They are located within “Africa” separate myths and derogatory names — the but as relics of “prehistory” are considered not Hottentots and the Bushmen — for the Khoi per se “African” i.e. “black African.” The issue in and the San, respectively.9 Distinguishing hunter- question here is specifcally the African identity gatherers from pastoralists served the ideological, and modernity of white South Africans, which unilinear trajectory of cultural evolution, and was contemporaneous yet deemed superior rather secured the San’s place as first primitives. The than parallel to other modernities within the same clicks that dominate the languages spoken by location.15 To quote one noted South African the Khoi and the San were the subject of early archaeologist, “All people who populate the world

Critical Interventions 3/4, Spring 2009 INDIGENOUS RELATIONS 117 today are descended from people who originated of primitivism — the vestigial Adam. in Africa […] The San or ‘Bushmen’ of southern There is still some of the primitive Africa are descended from those individuals who man in all of us, and we as Europeans stayed at home and did not emigrate to seek their were perfectly justifed in taking what fortunes elsewhere.”16 we wanted from our ancestors, and I South African archeological studies long looked upon the Bushman as rather a served two mythic constructs. First, that the minor form of this big background, prehistory evident in southern Africa could be because the white people had ancestors sequenced back to Europe and second, that South who had lived in caves, and [there are] Africa’s prehistory was indelibly linked to the San, white people within civilization living a modern/contemporary ethnically designated primitive and simple lives today and they group who were seen as living relics of southern still retain something of that outlook Africa’s prehistory.17 As archaeologist Nick which the artist admires. I am going into Shepherd poignantly argued, colonial archeology some detail about this but I think there was practiced “without knowing or wanting is a complete misunderstanding in South to know anything about African people, per Africa over what a South African artist se — least of all the African present — [and] doing should use. I think he should use what is archeology involved looking through a present about him, what he fnds there, that he landscape […] to fnd the traces of an imagined should use it as a European.20 past lying below.”18 Artistically speaking, South African-born South African discourses on indigenous (1906-1982) is a good example of culture that center temporal distance are laden this trajectory. Acknowledged today for looking with modernist conceptions of extinction and to South African rock art for source material at acculturation and often preclude contemporary a time when most white artists were looking to exigencies. However, artist Garth Erasmus, whose Europe for inspiration, Battiss claimed to not performance, soundscapes, and visual art have for understand the black man and to fnd in Bushmen some years focused on South African indigenous 19 a vestigial Adam. history and culture, revises an interest in indigenous narratives in South Africa that presents I was trying to fnd out what came a dialectical challenge to such assumptions (Figure before the Europeans came, take what I 2). Erasmus’ work represents an inversion or could from it, change it and build on it. refutation of modernity’s constructed relationship This was something that was completely to a “primitive” indigenous past. His concept of misunderstood. People thought that all the indigenous is neither temporally nor spatially I was doing was imitating the Bushman distant; rather it suggests that the social temporality or just extending Bushman art or that matters most is the present condition. prehistoric art, but that is not what I In many ways, South Africa’s present is was getting at at all. I think it is really symbolically conditioned by the success of necessary to make it quite clear now the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a that what I had recognized was that comprehensive process of social healing relative in all of us there is still some aspect to apartheid-era atrocities. Yet South African

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Figure 2. Garth Erasmus, Maak Nanu Los, musical instruments installed as “art,” 2007. Photo: Jurie Senekal. © Garth Erasmus. citizens and government policies and practices atrocities cannot be healed without a return to likewise need to reconcile historical injustices and investigation of the injustices within southern rooted in colonial legacies and those that Africa’s deeper history. “It is all about redress,” preceded or were continuous with them, which Erasmus remarks, “and I will go even further to includes aggressions and alliances among Bantu say that this should have been one of the primary and indigenous “nations.” In apartheid-era South agendas of the truth and reconciliation process Africa, Erasmus was considered a cultural worker period.”21 whose art contributed to a larger body of work For example, recent monoprints (Figures 3 labeled “Resistance Art” in Sue Williamson’s and 4) by Erasmus reference Kinnerlê—the place Resistance Art in South Africa (1989). Today, Erasmus name of a gravesite in Namaqualand where, in the is no less a cultural worker, but the focus of his mid nineteenth-century, a band of “Bushmen” confrontational practices and artistic energies have massacred some thirty Nama (Khoi) children while relocated towards reconnecting with a cultural their parents were away. Kinnerlê (or Kinderlay) past rendered strange or extinct by colonial and is Afrikaans for “children” and “lay,” referencing apartheid ideologies. For Erasmus, apartheid-era both the burial ground and the way the deceased

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Figures 3 and 4. Kinnerlê, Xnau Drawings series, 2007. Monoprints, 18 × 26 cm each. © Garth Erasmus. Photo: Jurie Senekal. children were found. As told by Erasmus, the paranoia of the “Bushmen” in the 1800s monoprints summon up: and to the genocide that was happening to them and any strangers they met tragic events dating back to 1850s of an were dealt with in this way […] The incident where a band of “Bushmen” unfortunate event happened on a night massacred these Nama children. Mystery that all the parents of these children had still surrounds the circumstances but gone to a neighboring village to attend [there are] still highly charged emotions some occasion, and the children of the in the area toward “Bushmen” to this tribe were left in the care of an elderly day. At a recent political conference of person who was essentially “babysitting” Khoisan communities of the Northern that night. 22 Cape, the Nama delegation walked out because of this unresolved issue. Mistrust among indigenous groups was often Historians relate the events to the

Research 120 McGee fueled by and through colonial and missionary Khoisan culture has reiterative agency. presences in South Africa. Erasmus’ monoprints Eramsus borrows liberally from Khoi and are from a body of work he completed after a San cultural resources and their contemporary heritage workshop in the Kalahari. The children’s symbolic potential matters more than marking their massacre represents one of the haunting histories archeologic time as “the past.” His relationship to of descendants of the Khomani San and Nama indigenous heritage is much by way of rediscovery communities. In an effort to engage this history as and uncovering, unearthing proximate and present a signifcant component of South African history histories. Erasmus grew up outside Port Elizabeth, and contemporary reality, Erasmus’ referents to not far from Bethelsdorp, an early missionary the history and culture of indigenous peoples have station established to convert local indigenous intensifed over the years. Popular and academic peoples. His investment in indigenous heritage is attention has also risen, thanks in part to a focus political but he is not aligned with the various local, on Saartjie (“Sara”) Baartman and the return of national, and global movements for recognition of her remains to South Africa in 2002, the pivotal indigenous rights active in South Africa. Neither is 1996 Miscast exhibition curated by Pippa Skotnes, Khoisan culture and identity bound to precolonial the establishment of WIMSA (Working Group and modernist reifcations for him; rather they for Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa) in are vitally present. For Erasmus, indigenous 1996, key Khoisan conferences in 1997 and 2001, heritage provides material necessary for a and the launch of the Khoisan Legacy Project creative healing process, a way of deconstructing in 2000.23 The reconstitution and recognition of colonial and apartheid identities embedded in indigenous histories and narratives are frequently racial concepts, and restoring personal, national, linked to reconciliation. At the 2001 Khoisan and African dignity. In South Africa, state-level Conference, Keyan Tomaselli suggested that efforts to bring about cultural healing are many, “today’s Khoisan are representatives of a First as seen in the new state architecture — especially Culture, and as such offer pre-nationalist solutions the constitutional court — a massive renaming to the future of our racially divided country.”24 policy, and sponsorship of new heritage sites, Space does not allow for discussion of the rich to name but a few. Erasmus’ concerns focus on yet politicized place presently held by indigenous the level of the individual yet are clearly infected discourses in South Africa nor the use of Khoisan by national discourses. Erasmus believes his heritage as an emblem of a pan-South African or mixed heritage includes Khoi ancestry and his a democratically united yet culturally diverse South wife Susan’s ancestry that of the Nama peoples. Africa, as it is used in South Africa’s national coat The connections he has to precolonial Khoisan of arms.25 Though Khoisan identity has been heritage are constructed, mythopoetic, and made appropriated for a platform for national unity real not through ancestry but through necessary in the South African state, it functions more as appropriation and a South African condition. a gloss of history. One need only scratch the For Erasmus it is a matter of psychosocial surface of South Africa’s past to fnd records of survival, taking back that which was stolen from animosities and perceived differences bewteen and him, rewriting “being Coloured,” and finding amongst the the early inhabitants of South Africa meaningful an ontology distant from the sickness and the later settlers; precolonial unity is more wrought by colonialism and apartheid. Erasmus’ mythic than real. So why appropriate it? Because use of Khoisan culture is a personally recuperative

Critical Interventions 3/4, Spring 2009 INDIGENOUS RELATIONS 121 one, not a modernist salvage mission. have noted, “museums have played an active role In the 1870s, German philologist Wilhelm in an atrocious legacy relative to the conquest, Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd collected dispossession and genocide of the Khoisan, and stories and documented the language of several a role that extends beyond epistemic violence of San informants and collaborators who spoke classifcation to literal violence and violation of !Xam and !Kung languages. Bleek and Lloyd flled the body.”31 The collected specimens in South several notebooks with information provided by Africa’s museums are contested territory and await these informants, many of whom had been or respectful resolution as various constituencies were convicts in a prison.26 Bleek make competing and compelling claims. The and Lloyd’s voluminous studies, housed at the transition in the SA Museum today, from the University of Cape Town and now accessible new, handsomely installed, “Unconquerable Sprit: via the Internet, were of little interest until the George Stow’s History Paintings of the San,” to 1980s, coincident with revisions in studies of the the hall of prehistory where life casts of southern San.27 Bleek’s interest in the “Bushmen,” whom Africa’s non-white peoples are displayed in window he endeavored to rank above the “Kafirs,” or vitrines with their tools, including those for rock Bantu speakers, partook of Victorian Eurocentric painting is sobering. Discursively speaking, this prejudices: for him, “Bushmen” represented a is where analysis of Khoisan history and culture primitive, aboriginal race whose language and breaks down, for their inability to deal with folklore could provide insight into what he called the implications of this necrophilic impulse of “their mind, their thoughts, [and] their ideas.” Western engagements with Africa, which is more In 1875, Bleek proclaimed, “it is, scientifically properly theorized as a form of cannibalism. One speaking, of exceeding importance not to allow the can argue that the contemporary appropriation mental life of the Aborigines in its uninfuenced of Khoisan in any manner, by black or white, primitiveness to become quite effaced, without continues this process and raises very signifcant making an effort to preserve an image of it, fxed questions.32 in the truest manner in their own words.”28 By The Bleek and Lloyd archive has permeated the late nineteenth-century, “The underlying literary, cultural, historical, and popular accounts assumption was that ‘Bushmen’ and ‘Hottentots’ of South Africa’s earliest inhabitants. Pippa were living examples of a primitive and dying race Skotnes, who brought renewed attention to the that should be studied before it became extinct.”29 Bleek and Lloyd archive, proposes that, “in fact, Not long thereafter, “a more generalised discourse almost nothing at all would be left of the ideas of [emerged] around the scientifc importance of the the bushmen were it not for the work […] of Lucy Bushman body—dead or alive—as relic, as fossil Lloyd and […] Wilhelm Bleek.”33 Despite their late and specimen of natural history.”30 The Bushmen modern date and direct relationship to specifc Relics Act, South Africa’s first conservation and limited group of individuals — primarily legislation, was passed in 1911, just after the men — the Bleek and Lloyd records are repeatedly formation of the Union of South Africa. Louis used and read backwards in time to document San Péringuey, director of the SA Museum from beliefs, spirituality, and mythology. Bleek himself 1906 to 1924, worked assiduously to acquire described his work as “penetrating into the minds both the human remains and replicas of living of the original inhabitants of this country!”34 Khoisan. As Ciraj Rassool and Martin Legassick As artists, both Erasmus and Skotnes have

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Figure 5. Kalahari San Music Display, Iziko South African Museum, Cape Town. Photo courtesy of Lindsay Hooper. been inspired by the presentation of indigenous / Uma playing a hunting bow and photographed peoples in the SA Museum in Cape Town. South before a measuring line (Figure 6), embodies a Africa’s national archaeological and ethnographic Bleek legacy, furthered by early museum director, museum houses and continues to display, in Louis Péringuey: the belief in “fxity” and scientifc various ways, rock art and indigenous culture and preservation of cultural memory through heritage history. Erasmus’ interest in Khoisan instruments and human specimen. For Erasmus the muteness emerged in the early 1980s after a visit to the SA of the musical display, the encased and silenced Museum in Cape Town. Display cases on view cultural resonance, inspired him to release the since the 1970s provide information on music exhibited heritage from its role as fxed specimen. practiced by San in the Kalahari, as does a life- Erasmus describes the strange sensations he felt cast made of a young boy at Tokai in the Cape at that time — the attraction to objects he could around 1907–1910 (Figure 5). The case, like a neither touch nor hear: late-nineteenth century view of Bleek contributor

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The way I received them at that stage was in a museum context, in a context where I was still separated from [them], I used this separation as a metaphor of doing something about them in my work […] I had no idea what these musical instruments sounded like, but I had a clear idea of what they looked like. So I simply had to use my initiative and build something similar and fnd out what the music was.35

Around 1985, Erasmus made his frst musical bow, which included the attached resonator — a calabash (Figure 7). Although the instrument resembles the popular Berimbau from Brazil and the Xhosa uhadi, Erasmus calls his a “Khoisan bow” to bind it more closely to his chosen pathway toward cultural healing. Erasmus’ interest in the sound and music made by the bow came only after its construction. In his own words, “the sound became much more interesting for me and it kind of took over to the point where I don’t see them as objects now, I see them as music making instruments [that enable] the music that is within me: the music that I make is the same as the art that I make […] they [come] from the same source, the same spiritual and emotional Figure 6. Túma (/Uma), informant for Bleek and place.”36 Lloyd playing a hunting bow as a musical instrument Erasmus has recreated several indigenous before a line of measure (1880s). National Library South instruments and the methods for playing them are Africa, San Portraits Album—INIL 17238. Courtesy Special Collections NLSA, Cape Town and Melanie Geustyn. often the subject of his work (Figure 8). But it is also the concept of the Khoisan bow within which Erasmus positions himself and his work. The chord to the past — to South African indigenous knowledge — was twisted and frayed under colonialism and apartheid. In Bleek and Lloyd’s accouts of San language and folklore, a “string” is a referent for modes of connection, that is consciousness, or “thinking strings.” Vibration facilitated communication, and death equalled a

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Figure 7. “Khoisan bow,” constructed by Garth Erasmus ca. 1985. Photo: Jurie Senekal. severed chord.37 Mending this broken string is a African prehistory or in an indigenous past soulful and artistic endeavour for Erasmus, for perceived as primitive? Erasmus’ work endeavors whom string is a binding thing (Riem or Riempie is to transcend such questions even though it is Afrikaans for cord or strap) and a chord’s musical constrained by the continuous presentation of tones resonates as testimony. this history and its culture through modernist South African artistic relationships to Westernized discourses. prehistory are varied and conditioned by national In her 1991 book, Sound From the Thinking identity, personal history, and experience, Strings: A Visual, Literary, Archaeological and and popular and academic discourses. These Historical Interpretation of the Final Years of !Xam relationships necessitate a comprehensive Life, Pippa Skotnes designed a series of etchings comparative study of South in which based extensively on the Bleek and Lloyd archive, prehistory, or South Africa’s real and imagined rock art, and archaeological research. “In a indigeneity is present but constraints of space in sense,” Skotnes writes, “I have attempted to this essay preclude that ideal. Instead we can posit invert the museum dioramas, asserting not the a question of such work: is it located or dislocated physical evidence of the San life, but rather the in the symbolic economy of modernity and South metaphorical aspects of their cosmology.”38 In

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Figure 8. Garth Erasmus, Boog van die Testimonie, from Boog van die Testimonie series, 2003, silkscreen, 18 × 33 cm. Photo: Jurie Senekal. © Garth Erasmus.

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Plate VII, three earthbound, silouetted fgures Sound from the Thinking Stings folio, responds to a stand before a skyscape of concentric cirles and a deep sense of loss in the extinction of the !Xam, hovering theriomorph. As Skotnes notes, “Entopic and a desire to “promote a common responsibility phenomena, produced by human neurophysiology for what happened in the past.”44 Erasmus’ work during altered states of consciousness such as the shares Skotnes’ and Deacon and Foster’s deep healing trance, are described by contemporary concern for past atrocities but it is focused on !Kung hunter gatherers and are often depicted in the complexity and complicity of contemporary the rock paintings. In this etching the eidolon-like circumstances — the now, and the deconstruction shaman and entopic spiral shape are contrasted of modernist projections on prehistory and with the black figures which symbolise the indigenous cultures. colonisers and the missionaries.”39 Similarly, in In November 2006, Erasmus served as a the recent collaborative project, My Heart Stands facilitator for a heritage workshop run by the in the Hill, archeologist Janette Deacon and flm Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in the and photo artist Craig Foster, claim to have “taken Northern Cape. Titled “Stories I remember,” the ancestors home.” Deacon and Foster traveled descendants of the Khomani San and Nama to !Xam informant locations recorded in the Bleek communities of the Green Kalahari and and Lloyd notebooks. There they projected into Namaqualand gathered to record and illustrate the surrounding landscape the faces of the !Xam oral histories, folktales, and music. Ownership contributors and prisoners gathered from the was emphasized, ensuring the communities Bleek Collection. Foster compared their work to directed, wrote, and produced their stories shamanistic trance experiences (suggesting that primarily for themselves. Like Bleek’s project it “In trance they would see ancestral spirits huge was about securing stories, but the fundamental and often transformed into animals or trees”40) imperative was creating space for community and claimed the project to be restorative: “In a and healing around heritage. Some may see this small way the process had mended some of the as a post-apartheid project to rewrite history with broken strings that had been severed when the Bleek-like ethnographic overtones using local !Xam had been removed from their land, from interlocutors and informants. For the participants their ancestors.”41 it represented a legitimizing of their oral history The trance of the shaman is perhaps the most and provided mechanisms for recording their attractive aspect of San life and rock art to scholars knowledge for wider dispersal within and beyond and enthusiasts. Of course, the mysteriousness and oral transmission.45 For Erasmus, it presented a “otherness” of the altered trance state easily fuels rare opportunity to reckon his own appropriations the imagination. But it can also be a device for of indigenous heritage with that of others. temporal distancing — evoking simultaneous yet Intimately engaged with the community different presents.42 For Skotnes, “the transformed during the day, by night Erasmus flled notebooks shaman hovers at the interface between what is with “words, descriptions of things, impressions.” known and what is unknown, between ordinary The notebooks became a space of enunciation and non-ordinary reality, between life and death, for him. Erasmus interpolates his Khomani and in so doing facilitates the work of symbolic San and Nama experiences into his unfolding repair which lies at the root of much art.”43 Much understanding of self, which becomes his art, as of her San-inflected work, including the 1991 seen in a recent series of monoprints, ffty in all,

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Figure 9. “Riempie Vasmaak” exhibtion, Erdmann Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa 2007. Photo: Jurie Senekal. based on his Kalahari notebooks and workshop inscribed “DIE EK NA AAP” (Figures 10 and experiences. Erasmus titled them The Xnau 11), Afrikaans for “The I imitated.” Here, Erasmus Drawings. Xnau — often pronounced now — means has left out an “understood” hyphen between initiation, or more appropriately, “a spiritual “na” and “aap” to achieve this latter reading, awakening” through a rite of self-commitment. such that it literally reads “the I after ape.” This In March 2007 they were displayed as though reading conjures and refutes the myriad associated pages from an exploded book in the exhibition relationships between Africa, ape, primitive man, “Riempie Vasmaak” — which means to fasten or and language. The image is also produced by an tie a chord (Figure 9). In the exhibition space the imprint of Erasmus’ hand — or as Erasmus says, Xnau drawings fank one of his instruments — a “this is me and the I imitated.”47 Blik ’nsnaar (tin can guitar)— and they represent Unlike the Bleek and Lloyd archive or Iziko Erasmus’ thinking strings, his markings, his South African Museum dioramas, Erasmus’ work connections to a rich history and cultural heritage has no pretense of scientifc objectivity, nor does that he appropriates by way of understanding his it envision the stories and heritage from which situated self.46 Several of the images return to a it draws inspiration as primitive or vanishing. familiar theme, playing music, while others are Nick Shepherd has called for an archaeology that

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Figure 10 and 11. Xnau Drawings series, 2006-7. Monoprint, 18 × 26 cm. Photo: Jurie Senekal. © Garth Erasmus. engages with issues of identity and culture within Erasmus’ works visualize a South African present a pressing need for restoration and restitution.48 that touches on very complex conversations Erasmus’ artistic archaeology does just this and relative to both indigenous and South African is primarily located in what he conceives as the histories and modernities. Anne Solomon, in Claim indigenous now rather than in an extinct historical to the Country, states that “It would be beyond the past. Erasmus, Skotnes, Foster, and Bleek and wildest imaginings of the !Xam commentators Lloyd all can be said to have appropriated Khoisan that their words and world would be accessible heritage, but Erasmus is wedded to a search for worldwide […] at home the narrators have understanding of self not already determined contributed to a reconstructed national identity by Western colonial, Victorian, or apartheid and new artistic impulses in post-apartheid visual nomenclature and framing; indeed Erasmus seeks and literary culture.” In this regard, Pippa Skotnes a connection to this heritage beyond the context suggests that the !Xam and !Kung contributions of cultural pillage. Refusing to be temporally recorded in the Bleek and Lloyd archive are “their distanced or displaced into a nebulous past, claim to the country.”49 However, for Erasmus,

Critical Interventions 3/4, Spring 2009 INDIGENOUS RELATIONS 129 such claim to the country is and was already always Gamble, “Archaeology, history and the uttermost there and certainly not awaiting its enunciation by ends of the earth—Tasmania, Tierra del Fuego Western interlocutors. Not all recuperations and and the Cape,” Antiquity 66 (1992): 712-20; and appropriations of cultural heritage are equivalent Zachary Kingdon, “Reinterpreting the African nor are the consequences of the appropriation. Collections of the World Museum Liverpool,” Critical Interventions, 2 (Spring 2008): 31. Bleek, Lloyd, Battiss, Skotnes, and even Erasmus 5 For the role of archaeology in this construct of all use Khoisan heritage to fnd themselves. For prehistory, see Shepherd, “State of Discipline,” Eramsus though it is a matter of necessity — a 827. lodestone of sorts — for reshaping the “coloured” 6 Robert J. Gordon, “‘Bain’s Bushmen’: Scenes identity imposed by apartheid—not a recapturing at the Empire Exhibition, 1936,” in Africans on of extinct or pre-modern existence. Unlike Bleek, Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business, ed. Bernth Lloyd, Battiss, and Skotnes, Erasmus’ does not Lindfors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, identify with the Western perceptions of Khoisan 1999), 284. 7 culture — rather he sources and excavates these Peter Bowler, “Victorian Evolutionism and the perceptions and projections to fnd connections to Interpretation of Marginalized Peoples,” Antiquity 66 (1992): 725. the very culture othered by Western engagements 8 Gamble “Archeology, history,” 713. with Africa. Herein lies the difference, subtle 9 For South African anatomist Alan Morris, perhaps, but keen. “the primary goal of many modern physical anthropologists working in southern Africa has been to clarify the enigmatic relationship of the Khoikhoi with the San.” Alan Morris, The South NOTES African Archaeological Bulletin 42 (1987): 20. 10 “It is first and foremost because they were 1 UNESCO. “Memory of the World Register” presumed to lack true human language that the portal [http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php- Hottentot was assigned the role of a creature URL_ID=22938&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC bridging human and animal realms.” Zoë Strother, &URL_SECTION=201.html] (Accessed 26 “Display of the Body Hottentot,” in Lindfors, November 2008). Africans on Stage, 3–4. 2 Robert J. Gordon, review of Skotnes, ed. Claim to 11 Strother, passim (1-61). the Country: The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm 12 Pippa Skotnes, “‘Civilised Off the Face of the Bleek (Johannesburg: Jacana and Athens, OH: Earth’: Museum Display and the Silencing of the Ohio University Press, 2007) in De Arte 77 (2008): !Xam,” Poetics Today 22, 2 (Summer 2001): 309. 77. 13 Ibid. For some Khoisan, their modern ancestry 3 Sterkfontein cave, about 50 km from Johannesburg, became morally suspect when seen as a byproduct was the site of hominid fossils as old as 2.5 million of the illicit union of Jan van Riebeek with years, including “Mrs. Ples.” See Nick Shepherd, Hottentot women. See Robin Oakley, “Collective “State of Discipline: Science, Culture and Identity Rural Identity in Steinkopf, a Communal Coloured in South African Archaeology, 1870-2003,” Journal Reserve, c. 1926-1996,” Journal of Southern African of Southern African Studies 29, 4 (December 2003): Studies 32, 3 (September, 2006): 495-496. 824. 14 “Bantu” is itself a colonial construct coined 4 See Robert J. Gordon, Picturing Bushmen: The by W.H. Bleek in the 1850s. There were Bantu Denver African Expedition of 1925 (Athens, OH: speakers in present day South Africa long before Ohio University Press, 1997), 20-21. See also Clive the European settlers, at least by 300 AD. See

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Robert K. Herbert and Richard Bailey, “The 22 “Kinnerle: There has to be a little cap on the last Bantu Languages: Sociohistorical Perspectives,” e to give a pronunciation something like a short, in Language in South Africa, ed. Rajend Mesthrie quick ‘air’ sound, so the whole word phonetically (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), is something like: ‘Kinnerlair.’ Literally, a 50-78. combination of two words: children + lay. It is the 15 I refer here notably to separate researches in place name of the gravesite of thirty-odd children black modernity, the New African Intellectuals, in Steinkopf in Namaqualand specifcally in the within the Bantu speaking populations, and the Richtersveld area up the west coast of SA and important work of Ntongela Masilila. “The near to the Namibia borderline.” Garth Erasmus, advent of European modernity in South Africa personal communication, 29 March 2007. practically alters everything, rendering certain 23 Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage things PRIMARY and others SECONDARY. Conference in 1997 (Cape Town) and the What becomes primary is the relation of both National Khoisan Consultative Conference in Africans and the Khoisan to the Europeans, and 2001 (Oudtshoorn). The Khoisan Legacy Project the relationship between them becomes secondary was launched through the South African Heritage if not ‘irrelevant.’ By the time of the making of Resources Agency in 2000. the New Africans, who have entered modernity 24 “They offer a culturally and historically binding in the process of recreating it AHEAD of the cement as depicted in our new national coat of Khoisan, and begin to write in earnest rather arms […] the Khoisan could and should play than ‘oralizing’ their challenging new historical a cultural, political and reconciliatory role of experience, there was no compelling imperative proportions way beyond the size of their actual that they should concern themselves with the numbers. Such is their historical legacy.” Keyan G. First People.” Ntongela Masilela, personal Tomaselli, “The Khoisan Represented: Recovering communication, April 2007. Agency,” (paper presented at the National Khoisan 16 Janette Deacon and Craig Foster, My Heart Stands Consultative Conference, Oudtshoorn, 2001), in the Hill (Cape Town: Struik Publishers, 2005), 41. 19. 25 The coat of arms includes fgures from a well- 17 Nick Shepherd, “State of the Discipline,” 823- known rock art site and San (!Xam) inscription. 844. !ke e: /xarra //ke, “written in the Khoisan 18 Ibid., 838-839. language of the !Xam people, literally meaning 19 “‘ I am terribly fond of black people. Africans diverse people unite. It addresses each individual […] They are a big mystery to me […] I can’t effort to harness the unity between thought and understand them and I am sure they don’t fully action. On a collective scale it calls for the nation understand me as a white person, but they are close to unite in a common sense of belonging and to me through art […] they are so near and part national pride — unity in diversity.” South African of the environment of Africa: they understand the Government Information, “About Government— soil and they understand the mountains and the National Coat of Arms” [http://www.info.gov rivers better than I do. That is the sort of kick I .za/aboutgovt/symbols/coa/index.htm#The get out of them—it’s their contact with this Africa _symbols_of_the_coat_of_arms]. in which I live.’” Walter Battiss in Walter Battiss 26 There were ten primary informants (six !Xam (Craighall: A. D. Donker, 1985), 16. speakers and four !Kung speakers). Other 20 Walter Battiss c. 1960s cited by Murray Schoonraad, material was provided by !Xam speakers at various “Battisss and Prehistoric Rock Art,” in Walter locations including Breakwater Prison. See “Claim Battiss, 50. to the Country, The Digital Bleek and Lloyd” 21 Garth Erasmus, interview, November 2008. University of Cape Town, Michaelis School of

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Fine Art [http://banzai.cs.uct.ac.za/~hussein 38 Skotnes, Sound from the Thinking Strings: A Visual, /bleek_lloyd/index.html]. The use of the Literary, Archaelogicl and Historical Interpretation of word “informant” is slowly being replaced by the Final Years of !Xam Life (Cape Town: Omega “collaborator.” This is signifcant in that it suggests Art, Axeage Private Press, 1991), 52. greater empowerment on the part of the San and 39 Ibid., 53. better credits their contributions, but it cannot 40 Deacon and Foster, My Heart Stands in the Hill, erase the clearly subordinate position the San held 143. in Bleek’s colonial household. See Andrew Bank, 41 Ibid. Bushmen in a Victorian World: The Remarkable Story of 42 For those sensitive to the plights of indigenous the Bleek-Lloyd Collection of Bushman Folklore (Cape peoples, appreciation and appropriation of the Town: Double Storey, 2006). Khoisan past today is usually accompanied by 27 See also Pippa Skotnes ed., Claim to the Country: belief in its healing potential, or the rhetoric The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek thereof. My concern with contemporary (Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jacana Books, shamanistic projection is that its potential for 2007). Skotnes (41) describes this recent publication understanding the interstitial spaces between as “the archive itself ” rather than a recreation, the “known” and the “unknown” may facilitate version, or interpretation of its contents, or its misreadings, displacement, or interpretive power makers. The Bleek and Lloyd archives are housed inequity. in the University of Cape Town, Iziko South 43 Pippa Skotnes, Sound from the Thinking Strings, 52. African Museum, and the National Library of 44 Ibid. South Africa. 45 The subsequent publication and DVD was 28 Wilhelm Bleek, Bushman Folklore and Other Texts, produced for learners in Afrikaans, Nama, and (Cape Town: J.C. Juta, 1875), 2. [http://www N/u. Erasmsus provided artwork, supervision, .lloydbleekcollecion.uct.ac.za]. and music. See Institute for Justice and 29 Patricia Davison in Martin Legassick and Ciraj Reconciliation, “Stories I remember…A Northern Rassool, Skeletons in the Cupboard: South African Cape Heritage,” [http://www.ijr.org.za/recon Museums and the Trade in Human Remains 1907– -recon/memoryhealing/memory-arts-and 1917 (Cape Town and Kimberley: South African -culture/storiesremember]. Museum and McGregor Museum, 2000), v. 46 Though instrumental sound is intrinsic to the 30 Ibid., 43. works, Erasmus did not compose music for the 31 Ibid., 48. “Riempie Vasmaak” exhibition. This was to avoid 32 See Deborah Root, Cannibal Culture: Art, conflict with the documentary video, similarly Appropriation and the Commodifcation of Difference titled “Riempie Vasmaak” and made by Andrew (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996). Emdon, which played during the exhibition and 33 Pippa Skotnes, Poetics Today 22, 2 (Summer 2001): included shots of Erasmus playing music on the 301. Blik’nsnaar among other things. Erasmus did set 34 Bleek, Bushman Folklore, 2. up a display of his CDs, which were for sale, 35 Garth Erasmus, quoted in “Demystifying Art: but no one bought them, as they assumed they Garth Erasmus interviewed by Mario Pissarra, were part of the exhibition. Erasmus, personal 21 September 2005,” [http://www.asai.co.za communication, April 2007. /artstudio.php?view=essay&artist=8&essay=31] 47 Garth Erasmus, personal communication, 29 (accessed 24 April 2006). March 2007. “DIE EK NA-AAP the proper 36 Ibid. Afrikaans has the hyphen in place making it one 37 Skotnes, “Civilized off the Face of the Earth,” word…literal translation is ‘The I imitated’ and 307. I suppose that’s exactly the meaning I want to

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convey. Of course in Afrikaans it’s incorrect language but it’s supposed to have a humorous intent…when leaving out the hyphen the meanings change radically... ‘aap’ equals ape and ‘na’ equals after…so then it would read…‘The I after ape’ but the double meaning is intentional. The ape reference directly plays on the old racial stereotyping which Afrikaans as a language used to abound with [i.e., in colloquial or common street terms]. However, in the ‘language of art’ terms, ‘The I Imitated’ makes perfect sense because the image accompaniment is simply a print of my hand…IT IS MY HAND…it is ME …therefore, an imitation [direct representation] of me…I am IN the work, so to speak. The absence of the hyphen is a very subtle thing…I have found that not many viewers dwell on it long enough so that they miss this…the frst interpretation is the ‘obvious,’ e.g., imitation.” 48 Paraphrased from Shepherd, “State of Discipline,” 844. 49 Skotnes, “Claim to the Country,” 43.

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