The Boer and the Jackal: Satire and Resistance in Khoi Orature1
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE 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’.