The Boer and the Jackal: Satire and Resistance in Khoi Orature1

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provided by University of the Western Cape Research Repository Multilingual Margins 2014, 1(1): 101—120 75 The Boer and the Jackal: Satire and resistance in Khoi orature1

Hermann Wittenberg University of the Western Cape, South Africa [email protected]

Abstract Bushman narratives have been the subject of a large volume of scholarly and popular studies, particularly publications that have engaged with the Bleek and Lloyd archive. Khoi story-telling has attracted much less attention. This paper looks a number of lesser known Khoi narratives, collected by Thomas Baines and Leonhard Schultze. Despite commonalities in the respective oral traditions, Khoi folklore appears more open to discursive modes of satire, mockery and ridicule, features which are not readily found in Bushman story telling. A number of Khoi narratives that feature the trickster figure of the jackal are presented and analysed as discursive engagements with historical realities and political forces that impinged on indigenous societies. It is argued that Khoi orature was able to mock and subvert settler dominance by making imaginative use of animal proxies such as the jackal. This capacity for satire in Khoi oral culture allowed it to resist colonial violence on a discursive level, a strategy that was much less pronounced in Bushman narration.

Key words: Bushman narratives, Khoi orature, satire, resistance, subversion of settler dominance.

I Grey’s librarian, Bleek started to solicit Bushman and Khoi3 folktales from mis- lthough considerable scholarly and sionaries stationed in the remoter areas Apopular attention has been focused of the colonies, and in 1864 a collection on Bushman narratives over the last 30 of 42 of these translated oral narratives years, much of it centred on analyses was published as Reynard the Fox in South and re-tellings of the Bleek and Lloyd 2 Africa; or Hottentot Fables and Tales. The archive, little attention has been paid to book is South Africa’s earliest publication Khoi story-telling and the comparative of indigenous literature, and it remains insights made possible by such a study. one of the most important collections The monumental work on the |Xam of Khoi orature. This paper has two carried out by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy interrelated interests: firstly, drawing at- Lloyd in the 1870s and 1880s has over- tention to the largely neglected area of shadowed Bleek’s own earlier studies of Khoi orature, and secondly, developing Khoi folklore. Soon after his arrival in an argument about the similarities and Cape Town and appointment as Lord differences between Khoi story-telling

© Wittenberg and CMDR. 2014 76 Wittenberg and Bushman narratives. It is in this number of extant Khoi tales are drawn context that the contradistinctive idea of from more remote Nama and Koranna satire will be explored. In Khoi orature, sources, as exemplified in Bleek’s Reynard satire is associated with the transgres- book, Leonhard Schultze’s Aus Namaland sive trickster figure of the jackal; he is und Kalahari (1907), L.F Maingaard’s attractive, roguish and able to outwit the Koranna Folktales (1962), and the Sigrid powerful, in particular predators such as Schmidt corpus (1989) assembled much lions. In |Xam story telling on the other later in southern Namibia. Schmidt’s hand, the jackal does not function as a comprehensive Catalogue of Khoisan likable trickster but has negative traits Folktales of Southern Africa (1989) lists such as cunning, cowardice and selfish- mostly Nama Khoi narratives. The small ness, qualities that have not allowed him number of Cape Khoi sources cited in her to become a figure of identification. Such bibliography are in publications mainly a bifurcation, this paper will suggest, was devoted to other concerns (such as hunt- not without political consequence in the ing, natural history and travel), with the often violent nineteenth century Cape stories in them forming a minor aspect. frontier. The paucity Cape Khoi folklore and Given the long history of European their incidental presence in the record contact with Khoi people at the Cape, may be ascribed to the late emergence contact that pre-dated the VOC settle- of folklore as an object of scholarly study ment in 1652, it is surprising that more in the nineteenth century. Drawing Khoi stories have not entered the colonial on the philosophy of Herder and the archive. Khoi self-representation in the philological work of the Grimm brothers, form of a literary record is comparatively researchers in the emerging field of folk- rare, despite the fact that they were South lore studies in Europe sought to discover Africa’s first indigenous people to come an authentic literary heritage that would into contact with colonial literate cul- reveal a people’s essential and distinctive tures, a sustained and often intimate con- national character, uncontaminated by tact that stretched over 200 years from the homo-genising forces of urban capi- at least the late sixteenth century until talist modernity (Bendix 1997). Such a the 1750s when a coherent and distinc- paradigm, locating national and ethnic tive Khoi culture disintegrated and be- authenticity in a rural and primitive past, came absorbed into the Cape underclass could readily be transferred to the colo- (Elphick 1985: xvii). Khoi languages per- nial arena. This explains the interest of sisted on the colonial fringes, such as the Bleek, Grey and other Cape intellectuals eastern and northern Cape, for another in collecting, studying and systematising hundred years, but it is only in the re- indigenous literature. By the time that mote Richtersveld and southern Namibia folklore had emerged as a distinctive area that one of the Khoi languages, namely of scholarly interest, Cape Khoi culture Nama, is still spoken today. There is thus and language had largely disappeared. an almost inverse relationship between Cape Khoi literature is consequently the long history of settler-native contact, very rare in the colonial record. With and the volume of recorded narrative that in mind, we need to consider the material, where we have the least number significance of the stories collected by the of records of Cape Khoi narratives, de- famous painter Thomas Baines. Baines spite the extensive social history of per- was born in England in 1820 and came to vasive and intimate interaction. The vast South Africa as a young man to embark

© Wittenberg and CMDR. 2014 The Boer and the Jackal 77 on a career as explorer artist. He travelled in print (the stories ‘The Wind’ and ‘The widely throughout the region, reaching Son of Wind’), as well as Wilhelm Bleek’s as far north as the upper parts of the posthumously published proposal to es- Zambezi on an expedition led by David tablish an anthropological institute in the Livingstone. His prolific output of sketch- region. es and dramatic oil paintings remains The Folklore Journal, together with the most valuable pictorial Africana of more popular publications such as the the nineteenth century. The Cape Khoi Cape Monthly Magazine, must be under- stories recorded by Baines were likely to stood as part of a short-lived Cape liberal have been picked up in the course of his enlightenment, a period between 1850 many travels, possibly during his early and the 1870s during which colonial in- four-year stay in the Eastern Cape in the tellectuals drew on universal knowledge 1840s (Carruthers and Arnold, 1995). and science to articulate more tolerant The two Cape Khoi stories which and open-minded attitudes towards in- Baines reproduced from his recollections digenous people. As described by Saul were published in the little-known and Dubow in his study A Commonwealth of short-lived Folklore Journal, which pub- Knowledge: Science, Sensibility and White lished over 12 issues in 1879 and 1880. South Africa (2009), the demand for Issued by the South African Folklore mining labour and the more assertive Society, in which Lucy Lloyd was an influ- demands of settler agriculture militated ential member, the Folklore Journal must against the liberal racial attitudes of an rank as the first scholarly journal pub- urban educated elite after the discovery lished in the country, in any discipline. of diamonds in Kimberly in 1868 and Under its epigraph ‘Semper novi quid self-government in 1872. ex Africa’ (Always something new out of Two of Baines’s Cape Khoi stories Africa), it sought to make available ‘a rep- were published in the Folk-lore Journal, resentative collection of traditional litera- namely ‘The Story of a Dam’ and ‘The ture existing among South Africa’s abo- Lion and the Jackal, A Hottentot Story’. riginal races’, which were ‘rapidly passing Both are jackal trickster stories, of a type away, under the influence of European well known from other sources. The lion ideas, and the spread of European civili- and the jackal story is found in similar sation’ (‘Preface’ 1879: ii). The scientific form not only in the Bleek and Lloyd ambitions of the journal were discernible corpus (a story told by ǂkasin ‘The lion in the language of the preface: it wanted and the jackals’ (Lewis Williams 2000: to collect ‘specimens of Native literature’ 165)), but also in the Reynard volume, drawn directly ‘from the lips of the abo- as well as the Schultze collection. The rigines, written down in their own lan- story is briefly as follows: the lion and the guage and words, and accompanied by a jackal agree to hunt together and share translation into English’ (‘Preface’ 1879: the spoils, with the jackal volunteering to ii–iii). The journal accordingly pioneered ‘transport the game to their dens’, taking the columnar side-by-side printing of ‘care that Mrs Lion and her family should oral transcribed material and translations not want’. The hunt is exceedingly suc- used in the subsequent publication of cessful, but when Lion returns home, Lucy Lloyd’s famous Specimens of Bushman his family is ‘on the point of death from Folklore (1911). The journal also contains sheer hunger, and in a mangy state’. a number of significant contributions, The jackal, it appeared, had only given among them |hanǂkass’o first kumkummi them a few entrails of the game’. Lion

© Wittenberg and CMDR. 2014 78 Wittenberg is in ‘a terrible fury, vowing death to one of the earliest and best elaborated the jackal and his family’, but the jackal jackal trickster narratives, showing clear had taken the precaution of ensconcing linkages in oral tradition between the himself and his family on top of a steep Cape Khoi and the more northern Nama ‘krantz’. When the vengeful lion arrives, cultures. If we compare the Baines story the jackal greets him with the innocuous with the Nama jackal stories collected in words, ‘Good morning, uncle.’ The lion Bleek’s Reynard volume, we can see that responds in fury: ‘How dare you call me both the Nama and Cape Khoi stories uncle? You impudent scoundrel!’ The contain the same elements (unequal divi- jackal pretends to be taken aback, and sion of meat, an unreliable riem, an un- blames his wife. Taking a stick, he beats climbable cliff, a hot stone dropped into a hide loudly while Mrs Jackal screams as the lion’s mouth). instructed. Her howls are so dismal that However, both Baines’s and Bleek’s the lion begs the jackal to be merciful. narratives illustrate the ‘processes of Having mollified the lion, the jackal then exclusion, occlusion and effacement asks him to come up and eat meat, but the that have occurred in the construction cliff is too steep, so he cannot. The jackal of the cultural history of this country’, then offers to haul him up with a ‘riem’ as Duncan Brown argues in his introduc- (rope). Just as the lion nears the top, the tion to Oral Literature and Performance jackal lets go of the rope, so that the lion in Southern Africa (1999: 4). As shown falls down. Jackal repeats the process of elsewhere (Wittenberg 2012), Bleek sup- pretending to blame and beat his wife. presses the disruptive, erotic and scato- Then he again invites lion to come up logical elements of indigenous narration and eat meat. Once more the lion falls, that he deems unsuitable for a Victorian on this occasion ‘with such force, that he reading public. As Bleek himself put it in was fairly stunned for some time’. After the preface, the lion recovers, the jackal suggests ‘in a most sympathising tone’ that he drop to make these Hottentot fables read- down a ‘nice fat piece of eland breast’ able for the general public, a few into the lion’s mouth. However, instead of slight omissions and alterations of what would otherwise have been too meat, the jackal takes a round stone and naked for the English eye were neces- heats it in the fire till it is red hot. Then sary. (1864: xxiii) he puts fat around it. He drops ‘the hot shot right into the lions capacious mouth, While Bleek may have been motivated by which ran through the poor beast, killing a Victorian reserve that could not enter- it on the spot’ (Baines 1880: 54-57). tain Rabelaisian material, we also need In the Baines version, the story to see his editorial interventions in the has been somewhat domesticated, as is light of progressive Cape liberal attempts evident in the Victorian language and to disassociate the stereotypical figure of metaphors (the hide is ‘belaboured’, the the ‘Hottentot’ from its well-established stone is equated with ‘hot shot’, etc.), negative associations in colonial Cape making it clear that the story was not discourse with disorderliness, idleness the result of a scholarly attempt to col- and licentiousness. Overall though, lect folklore (as was Bleek’s Reynard vol- Bleek’s renditions of Khoi folklore need ume) or the outcome of ethnographic to be understood as limiting versions of fieldwork (as in Schultze 1907, Schmidt indigenous orature. 1989). Nevertheless, it presents us with

II Baines stories as well as Bleek’s Reynard tales in which the ‘naked’ elements of The inherent sanitisation of nineteenth indigenous storytelling had been cen- century Khoi orature becomes particu- sored. In Schultze’s analogous story ‘Der larly apparent when comparing the Bleek Löwe und der Schakal’ (1907: 489–490), and Baines narratives with oral material the narrative unfolds in much the same collected by the German ethnographer sequence, though elements are localized Leonhard Schultze, published in Aus in order to adapt to different fauna and Namaland und Kalahari (1907). Schultze’s topographic conditions. For instance, 67 tales were collected during extended instead of an eland, a giraffe is the ob- field trips in the northern Cape and ject of the hunt, and the rocky krantz is southern Namibia. While Schultze’s sci- replaced by a camelthorn acacia tree. The entific work became entangled with and narrative outcome (the lion is killed by tainted by his involvement in imperial being duped into swallowing a hot stone) Germany’s notorious Herero and Nama is common to all the versions, but in the wars of extermination (see Wittenberg Schultze narrative there is an additional 2012), his fluency in Nama, and his rigor- small ‘naked’ or bawdy, graphic detail: ous fieldwork methodology of transcrip- the hot stone tore apart the lion’s anus as tion produced a qualitatively different he was trying to ‘shit’ it out. Hence, as was body of narratives: explained to Schultze by his informant, What I had listened to at night lions will to this day always eat a piece of around the fire, I had repeated to me skin first, before wolfing down the meat, slowly the next day by the story teller, so as to plug up the hole. so that, after some practice, I was able In another lion and jackal tale in to obtain a coherent dictation. In or- Schultze’s corpus, ‘The Lions who pre- der to ascertain if the act of dictating tended to be dead”, the transgressive had disturbed the sentence structure humour with similar ‘naked’ elements is and sequence, I asked the Hottentot to repeat his story at normal speed even more evident: and carefully noted down variations. Two lions who were travelling were (1907: 752) tired and they saw a jackal approach- ing. [Not wanting the trouble of a Schultze’s corpus of tales was thus col- hunt] they lay down pretending to be lected in more natural conditions than dead, and the jackal came closer. He those in which Bleek did his research on quietly crept up and softly touched ex-prison convicts, and yielded stories the back hole [anus] of the one lion, that contained a fair share of risqué jokes, and saw how it contracted. Then he scatological references and politically dis- knew that they only pretended to be ruptive material. Commenting on Bleek’s dead and said: “Thank you Lord, stories, Schultze claimed that they ‘do not that you have given me this food!” reveal to me the Hottentot whom I have Then he made a fire with some grass and said aloud: “Let me first find gotten to know. Since I was able to tap some fire wood,” and he went off. into the very source of their lore, I will And while he was breaking off wood, disregard his versions completely’ (1907: he gradually went further and further 389). away, and once he had escaped he Schultze’s Khoi stories, as will be- climbed on to a rock and called out: come immediately apparent, are told in “Luckily I touched your arseholes! a very different register from that of the You stupid, dirty, pus-encrusted dick

heads! You could have almost killed their jackal trickster narratives as a strat- me!” This is how he shouted, but the egy of discursive resistance. But before lions were very tired, and therefore we examine the political consequences they did not run after him. (Schultze of such story-telling modes as symbolic 1907: 486) forms of resistance, we first need to ex- Here the jackal avoids being eaten amine the parallels in Bushman orature. through a neat bodily inversion when he approaches the lion from the wrong III end: instead of being ingested by the lion’s dangerous mouth, he cunningly In Bushman culture, the lion, as in Khoi approaches from the other side, exploit- orature, has a negative connotation so we ing the unguarded weakness of the mas- can speak of a considerable cultural over- ter’s delicately twitching anus. In Achille lap. As Mark McGranaghan has shown in Mbembe’s discussion of scatological hu- a detailed study of |Xam society, identity mour as political strategy in the African and the idea of the human was not re- postcolony, ‘the significance of orifices’ stricted to homo sapiens but was fluid and and of a body that drinks, eats, shits ‘and expansive enough to encompass other is open’ is fundamental to ‘people’s politi- ‘people’ such as animals. However, lions cal humour’ (2001: 107), a humour which were ‘people who are different’ since in particular targets ‘the president’s anus’ they ‘eat other people’, and display no (2001: 108). Both these Khoi tales may restraint in their excessive consumption: very well function in a similar subversive Anti-social agents were for the |Xam manner in their mockery of the ‘king of fundamentally “different”, violent the beasts’ as they disallow faunal and and angry “beasts-of-prey” who political elites to eat easily at the cost of went about by night to kill people others, and skilfully deconstruct the lion’s (LL.II.3.421-422) and eat them greed (figured by his ravenous, ever- (LL.II.16.1550)… The most typical hungry open mouth) by shifting attention exemplars of persons who did not to his vulnerable anus. As we have seen, act in accordance with these norms in Khoi orature the wily jackal is an at- and aims of |Xam society were to tractive and entertaining trickster figure be found (unsurprisingly) in non- who consistently manages to outwit the human communities such as those of lions (or “beasts-of-prey” generally) powerful and mighty by exploiting their (2012: 211; 204-205) vulnerabilities. In these narratives, the jackal is clearly a figure of identification In |Xam culture, the lion was thus not for Khoi story-tellers and listeners, while only a dangerous marauder who posed the lion is the symbolically defeated and a real and ever-present danger, but was discredited enemy at whose misfortune also an exemplary figure for predatory one laughs. The cultural script implicit in anti-sociality, violating the accepted so- the jackal trickster narratives allowed the cial norms of ‘behaving nicely’ (2012: weaker subject to outwit a dominant mas- 183) and sharing food with others. People ter. I would argue that this was a template who displayed such qualities of greed that seemed eminently adaptable in the or violence were regarded as ‘different’ face of historical change. With the entry (|xarra) and equated with lions (|xa), of powerful colonial forces into the north- where the lexical similarity reinforced an ern Cape frontier, the Khoi could deploy overlap in meaning.

The negative treatment given to lived in isolation from historical change. lions in both Khoi and |Xam orature But more recent studies have re-asserted points to a pan-Khoisan cultural world. the importance of fundamental cultural Megan Biesele’s Kalahari based work, for differences between hunter gathering example, argues that ‘Bushman folklore and pastoral societies, differences that is itself practically indistinguishable from are keyed to economic differentiation. Khoisan tradition as a whole’ and that it Mark McGranaghan argues that while ‘is very hard to tell the difference between hunter gathering was not an absolute a Bushman story and a Khoikhoi story’ and exclusive mode for the |Xam (for (1993: 34). Biesele’s work points to the example Bleek’s informant Dia!kwain commonalities in pan-Southern African possessed cattle), there were ‘meaningful Khoisan culture, citing close similarities distinctions between hunter-gatherers and linkages between |Xam stories pub- who have acquired livestock or started lished in Bleek and Lloyd’s Specimens of cultivating wild plants, and pastoralists Bushman Folklore (1911) and narratives or farmers who happen to hunt or who collected among the Kalahari Ju |’hoa supplement their diet with wild plants’ during the 1970s. But assumptions of an (2012: 339). John Parkington has pro- undifferentiated cultural commonality posed that hunter-gatherer and pastoral- across diverse Southern African Khoi and ist world-views and ideologies were fun- Bushman societies are also problematic, damentally divergent and incompatible, given the pronounced differences be- making a pragmatic cycling between two tween them in economic mode; Bushmen modes of economic subsistence highly or San were generally associated with a unlikely. Bushman culture is inclusive hunter-gatherer life-style and the Khoi and fundamentally shaped by an obliga- were pastoralists. Earlier studies, such tion to share, which not only solves the as Richard Elphick’s (1977) influential problem of waste in times of a sudden materialist thesis, underplay the role of surplus of fresh food, but also permeates intrinsic ethnic and cultural differences, all other aspects of culture. The eland, arguing that many of the people whom whose successful hunt was productive of the colonists called Bushmen and the a huge supply of meat far in excess of Khoi called San (both pejorative terms) the needs of the hunter and his family, were failed pastoralists who had fallen on is so central in Bushman rock art and hard times, lost their livestock and now narrative precisely because it represented had to rely on hunter-gathering; con- an exemplary instance of this ideology of versely that people who were pastoralists sharing, the basic social glue of hunter- were former hunter-gatherers whose eco- gatherer society. While Bushman culture nomic fortunes had now risen. The dif- is dispersive, distributive and egalitar- ference between the Cape hunter gathers ian, Khoi pastoral culture, in contrast, and Khoi pastoralists was thus fluid and is exclusive and accumulative, based on contingent on historical change, with the property ownership and fairly well de- people concerned moving between two veloped hierarchical political systems. As different economic modes. Parkington puts it: ‘[H]erders or farmers Elphick’s study which discounted who lost the ability to herd or grow crops differences between hunter gatherers and may well have engaged in hunting and pastoralists was important in destabilising in the gathering of wild plant foods, but essentialist notions of a pure and pristine never lost the world-view of the accumu- hunter-gatherer Bushman culture that lator’ (2007: 86).

If we follow this argument, Khoi and how do we then make sense of a |Xam Bushman cultures enjoyed commonalities trickster narrative which appears to shaped by distant ancestral links, by cen- violate this cultural logic, and depicts the turies of contact and by living in the same jackal as a hero? The story in question is landscape, but they were also fundamen- ǂkasin’s tale, ‘The lion and the jackals’, tally divergent in ideological orientation related to Lucy Lloyd in November 1873. or world view. I would suggest that in the In this story, a jackal shoots eland on two oral story-telling traditions, these dif- successive days, but always loses his kill to ferences were articulated in the way the a lion. A sorceress advises him to remain jackal trickster figure could be used. So silent and stay at home; she then makes while Khoi and |Xam beliefs coalesced all the bushes and water disappear so that with respect to lions, they were sharply an eland comes right up to his house. different with regard to jackals. Jackals, The jackal shoots the eland, and the sor- as we have seen, were sympathetic figures ceress makes a mountain rise up with the with which the Khoi identified, proxies dead eland upon it, together with all the for the human underdog in his dealings other houses, water and ‘also the people’ with powerful and oppressive masters. (Lewis Williams 2000: 165). The lion, But in |Xam culture, jackals, like lions, smelling the feast above him, wants eland were also primarily regarded as predators fat poured into his mouth and the jackal, or ‘different people’. As McGranaghan with the help of other jackals, heats a has shown, the idea of a greedy person stone and drops it into the lion’s mouth was ‘applied to animals (e.g. jack- below. His insides are burned up and he als, LL.II.15.1477)4 and people (LL. dies while running away. The story ends II.14.1319) noted for generally excessive with all the jackals looking at the dead consumption’ (2012: 183). In a culture lion, the first jackal saying ‘The man is whose survival was premised on an ide- dead’ (Lewis Williams 2000: 166). ology of distribution and sharing, such At first glance the story is similar to greediness was not permissible: ‘people the Khoi versions of Baines, Bleek and should work the excess food ‘nicely’ instead of behaving like jackals by gorging Schultze, but there are important differ- themselves while food was plentiful (LL. ences, most significantly the supernatural VIII.16.7449’)’ (2012: 254). In the Bleek element of the sorceress is added. Overall, and Lloyd archive, jackals thus function the resourceful, cunning trickster person- very differently in Khoi story-telling. ality of the jackal is disabled in ǂkasin’s Here they are generally associated with story and he is strangely passive in the negative traits such as cowardice, cun- face of the lion’s rapaciousness. Agency ning and selfish behaviour. According is less located in a wily animal than in to |hanǂkass’o, the places where jackals the supernatural agency of the sorceress and hyenas urinate must be avoided (LL through whose divine intervention social VIII.29. 8584 rev.-8587 rev.), and they justice is eventually meted out. Although are also associated with dangerous black the story contains the basic plot structure clouds (‘jackal clouds’) from which one and several narrative elements of the should shelter (LL VIII.-23. 8018-8029). Khoi jackal trickster stories (disposses- He also warns that children should not sion of the game, refuge in a high place, a eat its heart lest they imbibe his cowardly hot stone wrapped in fat), ǂkasin’s version qualities (LL VIII-16. 7457-7459). of the narrative destabilizes its ostensive If we accept that the |Xam held such Khoi trickster structure and instead re- sceptical and negative views of jackals, fashions the tale as a narrative permeated

© Wittenberg and CMDR. 2014 The Boer and the Jackal 83 by the |Xam ideology of distribution and The true trickster tales in |Xam sharing, as is evident in the co-operative orature are thus associated with the en- actions of the jackal community on the igmatic |Kaggen or mantis figure whose cliff: mischievous presence both destabilises and reinforces social conventions, not He went and said to the other jackals, ‘The lion is asking us for fat.’ The the jackal. A good example is ǁKabbo’s other jackals told him to get a stone, famous opening story in Specimens of and they all heated it. Another jackal Bushman Folklore, ‘The mantis assumes took the stone, and they all heated the form of a hartebeest’. In this story the it. The first jackal went and told the mantis disguises himself as a dead harte- lion to wait. He went back and asked beest, tricking the children to cut him the other if the stone was heated. The up: ‘The children jumped for joy (say- others said yes. They took the stone ing): “Our hartebeest! we shall eat great out of the fire. The others told him meat’” (1911: 23). But while they are busy to take fat from the pot which was dismembering the hartebeest, the pieces on the fire and to fill up the dish. … begin to move uncannily, eventually re- Another jackal held the wet eland’s skin. (Lewis Williams 2000: 166) constituting themselves into the animal who chases the frightened children back The narrative clearly emphasises a mul- home: tiplicity of actors engaged in communal The children said: “We thought that action and co-operative behaviour, rather the hartebeest’s horns were there, the than individual heroic action, as in the hartebeest had hair. The hartebeest conventional trickster tales. The hybrid was one which had not an arrow’s nature of the tale (Khoi fabula, |Xam wound; while the hartebeest felt that sjuzhet) and its anomalous relationship the hartebeest would talk. Therefore, with other representations of jackals in the hartebeest came and chased us, the |Xam corpus is possibly explained when we had put down the hartebeest’s flesh. The hartebeest’s flesh by the genealogy of its narrator: ǂkasin jumped together, while it springing was the son of a Koranna chief and a gathered (itself) together, that it |Xam mother and spoke both languages might mend, that it might mending (Skotnes 2007: 220). ǂkasin went on to hold together to the hartebeest’s marry a |Xam wife and live with her com- back. The hartebeest’s back also munity, and the hybrid nature of his story joined on. reflects a curious and revealing melding Therefore, the hartebeest ran for- of two cultures. I am suggesting then that ward, while his body was red, when he ǂkasin took a well-known fable from his had no hair (that coat of hair in which own Khoi pastoralist cultural background he had been lying down), as he ran, and re-shaped the narrative material swinging his arm like a man. to make it fit the ideological worldview of his adoptive |Xam community. The And when he saw that we reached the other jackal trickster fables in the Bleek house, he whisked round. He ran, kicking up his heels (showing the and Lloyd archive, such as the stories white soles of his shoes), while run- ‘The Jackal deceives the Hyena’ and ‘The ning went before the wind, while the Jackal and the Porcupine’ are also drawn sun shone upon his feet’s face (soles), from Koranna sources and have under- while he ran with all his might into gone similar permutations. the little river (bed), that he might

pass behind the back of the hill lying nineteenth century, |Xam society had yonder. (1911: 26) already irrevocably disintegrated. After more than a hundred years of commando The extract here is an example of the raids in which the |Xam had become the magical transformations of |Kaggen, the target for genocidal extermination and hybrid animal-human trickster. Like most enslavement, their hunting-gathering of the Bleek and Lloyd material, the nar- lifestyle had been severely curtailed by rative is told in characteristic digressions, encroaching faming settlement in their repetitions and reformulations in which dry northern Cape heartlands. Driven the narrative retains an open-ended by starvation to enter the harsh service allusive nature that is resistant to a lin- of farmers or risk arrest by engaging in ear reading and to neat closure. Unlike stock theft, |Xam society was on the brink the jackal trickster in Khoi orature, the of dissolution (Bank 2006; Skotnes 2007). |Kaggen figure is much less reducible to While the Cape Khoi society had earlier a human subject, and the tale as a whole suffered a similar fate in the aftermath remains located in a mysterious and enig- of a catastrophic smallpox epidemic matic mythical space. Matthias Guenther in the early eighteenth century and writes that consequently became assimilated into Bushman mythology is hauntingly a hybrid Cape underclass, autonomous asocial and pre-cultural, as well as Khoi societies survived in the northern liminal and surreal. This expressive Cape regions of the colony. The Koranna domain is removed from, rather than waged successful wars against colonial en- informed by, social reality; indeed so- croachment in the mid 1860s (Penn 2005) cial and cultural reality is frequently forcing settlers to abandon the region, inverted or disassembled. The beings hovering above and tampering with and the Nama retained a strong autono- that reality are therianthropic were- mous polity into the twentieth century creatures or precariously human men until eventually crushed by General von or women whose ontological state is Trotha’s infamous annihilation warfare fragile and slippery, ever ready to where they lost 50% of their population undergo transformation back into an (Adhikari 2005: 317). alternate state of being. (1994: 259) The Khoi oral tradition, particularly in the case of the Nama, reflects In contrast to the mythic other-worldliness a resisting engagement with colonial that makes the Bleek and Lloyd material power, where the narrative template of so enigmatic, the Khoi tales, as we have the jackal trickster fable was adjusted to seen, are more direct, earthy forms of deal with the new realities on the north- story-telling in whose animal proxies we ern frontier. This was achieved through a can easily recognize human characteris- simple substitution of the boer or white tics. It is this groundedness and the social settler for the lion. The lion, as we have connection of the Khoi tales that makes seen earlier, was associated in both |Xam it possible to adapted them more readily and Khoi culture with rapacious and to changing historical circumstance, as is dangerous predatoriness. This substitu- evident in following discussion. tive association had a long cultural history as is evident in numerous colonial IV accounts. For example in his 1778 travel By the time that Bleek and Lloyd in- diary, Robert Gordon records ‘Sunei’ terviewed their informants in the late Bushmen as saying that ‘they say we

[colonists] are evil and come in the night into the horse’s back hole. He then like wolves [hyenas], and have hair like led the horse to them and said: “Now lions.’ (quoted by McGranaghan 2012: I will first get some money from that 205). Boer commandos often attacked horse!” And when the horse shat, he Bushman encampments at dawn, and the held his hand underneath, and they could see that the horse was shitting nocturnal habits of the enemy are further money. reinforced through the stereotypical figure of the bearded boer. When the two Boers spoke about the The connections between nocturnal, price of the horse, the jackal said: “I hairy predators (hyenas and lions) and cannot put a price on this horse be- powerful, hirsute settlers is a continuing cause I will not sell it. But any man cultural logic in the Khoi and Bushman would give me a wagon and its span imagination. In 2007, Jan van der of oxen for it.” Westhuizen, a member of the ǂKhomani The Boer gave him a wagon with a group fighting SANParks for access to span of oxen. The jackal spanned their ancestral hunting grounds in the in the oxen, climbed the wagon and Kalahari game reserve, used the motif said: “Boer, wait for three days and of the jackal and the lion to illustrate the the horse will shit money!” Thus unequal power relations: spoke the jackal and he rode away. We have also had a tremendous The two Boers however waited, and struggle with the Parks. We call them when the third day had passed, they the young male lion as he is a rich waited until the fourth day. But the gentleman and we are the small jack- horse shat no money. Then they sad- als that just get a small bit of bread, dled their horses and gave chase. or just wait for a small piece here and They came to a place next to the road there of the bones or to scratch open and asked: “Where is the wagon that the stomach contents once the young came past here?” “The day before he male lion is finished. And we ask that came past,” they were told. they … give back to the people what was lost to them over all the centuries. They rode on and came to another (quoted in Dyll-Myklebust 2011: 141) place and asked: “Where is the wagon that came past here?” And the people This association between lion and boer told them: “Yesterday it came past is evident in several of the tales in the here.” Schultze and Schmidt corpuses, show- They rode further and came to an- ing clearly that Khoi orature was able other place and asked: “Where is the to adapt dynamically to historical and wagon that came past here?” And the social change in a manner that sought to people told them: “This morning it critique and challenge colonial power re- came past here.” lationships. In one of these stories, ‘The Jackal who sold a Horse to the Boers’, So they rode further and when they the impish jackal outwits a greedy but came to the jackal’s place they called: dim-witted boer who eventually, once the “Uncle Fox, I will shoot you through penny has finally dropped, retaliates with your head!” characteristic and unrelenting violence: The jackal replied: “What have I The jackal sold a horse to the Boers done wrong that you want to shoot but beforehand he put some money me?”

The Boer said: “You told me that the In the Schmidt corpus, such satire horse which does not shit money, directed at settler authority proliferates shits money!” and takes on even more extreme forms: But the jackal replied: “No, do not in one tale, the jackal sells a flute to a speak to me so rudely! My older boer which is claimed to have the power brother traded with you, not I.” to resurrect the dead. The duped boer kills his wife, but the flute proves useless. The Boers asked: “Where is he?” And In another violent story the jackal sets the the jackal replied: “There, further farmhouse on fire, becoming lord over down that way is his place.” So the the white children; in another fantastical Boers went away to the other jackal cross-dressing narrative the jackal dis- who was innocent in order to shoot guises himself as a woman and becomes a him dead. (Schultze 1907: 470-472) serving maid in a boer household, using In stories such as this, the antics of ani- the opportunity to sleep with the Boer’s mal proxies, who are thinly disguised hu- daughter. When she falls pregnant, the man subjects, provide a window into the duped Boer wants to kill the jackal, but fraught colonial relationships between he escapes (Schmidt 1989: 215). In such the settlers and the Khoi. Living on explicit, transgressive stories a counter- the fringes of a new colonial monetary hegemonic resistance is clearly visible, economy, which was beginning to replace but the substitutive logic established in the traded exchange of goods, the Khoi Khoi culture (Lion = Boer) would also here mock the greedy acquisitiveness of imply that seemingly naïve lion and the settler by conflating money with ‘shit’. jackal fables would be understood to be The narrative also imaginatively inverts referring to contemporary lived reality, the more common-place historical re- with the outwitted lion becoming a sym- alities where indigenous people were rou- bol for the duped Boer. tinely duped by colonial settlers into unequal trade exchanges. In the early Dutch period, the Cape Khoi, for instance, V bartered herds of oxen for a few nails, An overall evaluation of Khoi satire shows mirrors or other trinkets. In story-telling, that Edward Rosenheim’s famous defini- a new inverted ‘fictional reality’ is manu- tion of satire is particularly apt. Rosenheim factured through laughter and humorous defined satire as ‘an attack by means of consent which can rival or supplant their manifest fiction upon discernible historic historical experience. The ending of the particulars’ (cited in Ball 2003: 1). The story is thus not necessarily readable as a victims or dupes of satire must therefore retributive assertion of Boer power, but it never be entirely fictitious, but always be could also be understood as a narrative recognisable figures in actual lived reality, mis-en-abyme: that the next jackal will also as in the case of the Boers. The liberating in turn outwit the Boer, and so on. Such comic potential of satire depends on such ‘discordant, unresolved endings of satiric referentiality; the historic oppressor and texts can disrupt generic expectations’ the barely fictionalised target become (1995: 15), according to Connert and merged. But satire is not simply report- Combe. The open-ended conclusion and age, but draws attention to its fantastical, lack of closure is a hall-mark of satiric absurd and at times grotesque aspects, an narrative. overt form of fictionalisation that shields

© Wittenberg and CMDR. 2014 The Boer and the Jackal 87 its speakers from retribution. While satire The dreadful conditions under which seeks to associate the targeted figure of the |Xam lived at the time of the col- the dupe with ‘discernible historic par- lection impinges only infrequently on ticulars’, the genre as a whole makes use the collected texts, and in only one narrative are the settlers even men- of an extravagant and at times burlesque tioned. (1986: 32) form of fictionality that draws attention to its non-referential literariness. Just like Hewitt does not account for this osten- the jackal, who can take the moral high sible gap in |Xam orature and one may ground and reject the Boer’s accusation also speculate that Bleek’s and Lloyd’s of ‘speaking rudely’, the Khoi story-teller ex-prisoner informants may have been can also shield behind the proxy figure of reticent about sharing their candid views the crafty jackal and indulge in the fiction of the European invader. This paper of simply telling innocent animal stories. suggests that deeper rooted differences The deployment of the jackal in in culture, visible in the oral tradition, the Schultze and Schmidt corpuses sug- need to be taken into account when con- gests that Khoi orature was open to sa- sidering how |Xam and Khoi societies tirical and subversive discursive modes. engaged the colonial order. However, based on the evidence of the In conclusion then, the jackal stories Bleek and Lloyd records, the jackal trick- show that the Khoi were able to deploy ster was absent in |Xam orature. The subversive humour, in particular mock- jackal trickster, an impish, subversive fig- ing satire, as a cultural strategy in dealing ure of identification in the Khoi imagina- with the powerful, and to adapt them to tion, could therefore become enlisted in a the challenges of living with and under postcolonial strategy of resistance where the colonial intruder, whereas in |Xam the settler could be symbolically outwit- culture this repertoire of discursive ac- ted and defeated. In the light of John commodation was either not available or Parkington’s argument that Khoi society took different forms that are not readily was already organised hierarchically long visible in the Bleek and Lloyd archive. before the colonial intrusion into the Bushman and Khoi orature has a large Cape, we would expect that satiric modes overlap in terms of similar narrative ma- of dissent could flourish in such a strati- terial, but the way in which the building fied social space and become transferra- blocks of story were narratively assem- ble to dealings with the colonial order. As bled, ordered and put to use was differ- Connert and Combe in their discussion ent. This difference, I have suggested, of the genre put it, the primary function may lie in the different social and cultural of satire is ‘the process of unsettling hi- structures of Bushman and Khoi societies, erarchies’ (1995: 15). Conversely, the ab- where a hierarchically stratified pastoral sence of satire as a discursive resource in society, as in the case of the Khoi, may |Xam culture would be keyed to a more correlate with a culture in which mockery egalitarian, classless social order in which and satire flourished. These were cultural such discursive strategies would have had modes that were well suited to challenge no purpose. Roger Hewitt, in his early the authority of the powerful and assert seminal study of the |Xam archive, notes the agency of the weak, at least in an im- the limited discursive engagement of the aginary, fictional domain. In using animal |Xam with the violent settler order which proxies to mock the new Boer masters was imposing itself on their land: who were imposing their violent order on

© Wittenberg and CMDR. 2014 88 Wittenberg the Northern Cape region, the Khoi were “Khoisan” to refer to both Khoi and Bushman thus able to reinvent an ancient but ver- societies collectively, this does not imply that satile figure in their folklore, the jackal these two groupings are conflated. 4 trickster, and make him the imaginative All direct references to the Bleek and Lloyd vehicle for symbolic re-ordering of colo- notebooks refer to the Digital Lloyd and Bleek resource, see Skotnes 2007. Most significant nial power relations in which they, and stories in the archive are published in Lloyd’s not the Boer could emerge triumphant. Specimens (1911) and Lewis Williams’s anthology (2000).

Endnotes 1 The support of the National Research References Foundation of South Africa (NRF) as well as Adhikari, Mohamed. 2008. ‘Streams Of blood the research fund of the University of the and streams Of money’: New perspectives Western Cape is gratefully acknowledged. A on the annihilation of the Herero and much earlier, considerably different version of Nama peoples Of Namibia, 1904–1908,’ this paper was published in the South African Kronos: Journal Of Cape History 34: Journal for Folklore Studies 22 (1): 1–13, 303–320. 2012. Baines, Thomas. 1879. The story of a dam. 2 This famous archive of stories, personal Folk-lore Journal 1: 69–79. testimony and paintings was assembled by ---. 1880. ‘The lion and the jackal’. Folk-lore the German philologist Wilhelm Bleek and Journal 2: 54–57. his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd in the 1870s. Ball, S. 2003. Satire and the Postcolonial Novel. Their informants were /Xam prisoners who London: Routledge. were serving sentences for stock-theft, murder Bendix, Regina. 1997. In Search of and other offences in the Breakwater prison Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore in Cape Town. What had originally been Studies. Wisconsin: Wisconsin UP. conceived of as a purely linguistic project to Bank, Andrew. 2006. Bushmen in a Victorian record a vanishing language, evolved into World: The Remarkable Story of the Bleek- a massive and rich 12 000 page record of a Lloyd Collection of Bushman Folklore. Cape culture, its mythology and vanishing way of Town: Double Story. life. For a good general introduction see Neil Biesele, Megan. 1993. Women like Meat. Bennun’s The Broken String. The Last Words The Folklore and Foraging Ideology of the of an Extinct People (2005), and Andrew Kalahari Ju |’hoa. Johannesburg: Wits Bank’s careful historical contextualisation University Press. (2006). See also Pippa Skotnes’s numerous Bleek, W.H.I. 1864. Reynard the Fox in publications, most recently Claim to the South Africa, or Hottentot Fables and Tales. Country (2010). London: Trübner. 3 The use of racial terminology is complex and Carruthers, Jane and M. Arnold. 1995. The fraught in Southern African studies. The term Life and Work of Thomas Baines. Cape “Bushman” instead of the term “San” is now Town: Fernwood Press. again widely in use, though guardedly. I have Connert, B and K. Combe (eds). 1995. also referred to the /Xam when my comments Theorising Satire: Essays in Literary Criticism. have been limited to this group. Instead of New York: St Martin’s. Bleek’s and Schultze’s use of “Hottentot”, I Dubow, Saul. 2006. A Commonwealth of have obviously used another less offensive Knowledge: Science, Sensibility and White term, choosing the generic, widely accepted South Africa. New York: Oxford University word “Khoi”, or Nama and Koranna when Press. referring specifically to these Khoi groupings. Dyll-Myklebust, Lauren. 2011. ‘Lodge-ical’ Where I have used the synthetic term

thinking and development communica- nineteenth century. Unpublished PhD tion: !Xaus Lodge as a public-private- thesis. Oxford: Oxford University. community partnership in tourism. Parkington, J. 2010. ǁKabbo’s sentence: In P. Unpublished PhD thesis, Durban: Skotnes. Claim to the Country. The Archive of University of KwaZulu Natal. Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. Cape Town: Elphick, R. 1977. Kraal and Castle. Khoikhoi Jacana. 75–89. and the Founding of White South Africa. New Penn, N. 2005. The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist Haven: Yale University Press. and Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier Guenther, M. 1994. The relationship of in the 18th Century. Cape Town: Double Bushman art to ritual and folklore: In Storey. T. Dowson and D. Lewis-Williams (eds). Schmidt, Sigrid. 1989. Catalogue of the Khoisan Contested Images. Diversity in South African Folktales of Southern Africa. Hamburg: Rock Art Research. Johannesburg: Wits Helmut Buske Verlag. University Press. 257–274. Schultze, Leonhard. 1907. Aus Namaland und Hewitt, Roger. 1986. Structure, Meaning and Kalahari. Bericht an die königlich Preussische Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin über Johannesburg: Wits University Press. eine Forschungsreise im westlichen und zen- Lloyd, Lucy (ed). 1911. Specimens of Bushman tralen Südafrika in den Jahren 1903–1905. Folklore. London: George Allen and Jena: Gustav Fischer. Unwin. Skotnes. P. 2007. Claim to the Country. The Lewis-Williams, D. 2000. Stories that Float from Archive of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. Afar: Ancestral Folklore of the San of Southern Cape Town: Jacana. Africa. College Station: Texas A&M Skotnes, P. et al (eds) 2007. The Digital University Press. Bleek and Lloyd. Available as an optical computer disk in Skotnes (2007), as well Maingard, L.F. 1962. Korana Folktales. as online: Mbembe, A. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkely: Wittenberg, H. 2012. Wilhelm Bleek and the University of California Press. Khoisan imagination: A study of censor- McGranaghan Mark 2012. Foragers on the ship, genocide and colonial science. frontiers. The |Xam Bushmen of the Journal of Southern African Studies 38(3): Northern Cape, South Africa, in the 667–679.