Town Cape of University Annotations of loss and abundance An examination of the !kun children’s material in the Bleek and Lloyd Collection (1879 – 1881) Marlene Winberg The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgementTown of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Cape Published by the University ofof Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University 2 Marlene Winberg WNBMAR001 A dissertation presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree of Master of Art in Fine Art. Faculty of the Humanities University of Cape Town 2011 This work has not been previously submitted in whole, or in part, for the award of any degree. It is my own work. Each significant contribution to, and quotation in, this dissertation from the work, or works, of other people has been attributed, and has been cited and referenced. Signature: Date: Acknowledgements I gratefully acknowledge the role of my two supervising professors: Pippa Skotnes from the Department of Fine Art and Carolyn Hamilton from the Department of Social Anthropology, as well as all the participants in the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative, who helped in the development of the ideas expressed in this thesis. I am grateful to José Manuel Samper-de Prada, post- doctoral research fellow at The Centre for Curating the Archive, for our insightful discussions. I acknowledge the financial support given to me by the Mellon Foundation, the National Research Foundation, Ford Foundation and UCT’s Jules Kramer Award. 3 Contents Declaration & Acknowledgements 2 Abstract 4 Definitions and explanation of terms 5 Preface 6 Introduction 8 Chapters: 1. A pre-colonial wilderness 18 An overview of the socio-economic conditions in northern Namibia and the Cape Colony during the children’s childhoods (1870s) 2. Lucy Lloyd in the !kun collection 30 A discussion of how the conditions of production and Lucy Lloyd’s background may have influenced the making of the collection 3. The children of the archive – !nanni, Tamme, |uma and Da 42 A reconstruction of !nanni’s family life in his country, in relation to the other three children, their narratives, maps, drawings and paintings 4. A visual exploration of !nanni’s map of the Bushman country 58 Conclusion 68 List of figures 69 References 70 4 Abstract Abstract The Bleek and Lloyd Collection is an archive of interviews and stories, four !kun children laid down an account of their personal and historical drawings, paintings and photographs of and by |xam and !kun individuals, experiences, through their texts, paintings and drawings in the Bleek collected by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd between 1870 and 1881 in and Lloyd project to record Bushmen languages and literature. Cape Town. In order to do this, I have investigated the historical and socio- My dissertation focuses on the !kun children’s material in the archive, economic conditions in the territory now known as Namibia during the created by Lucy Lloyd and the four !kun boys, !nanni, Tamme, |uma and period of their childhoods, as well as the circumstances under which the Da, who lived in her home in Cape Town between 1879 and 1881. children were conveyed to Cape Town and eventually joined the Bleek- Until very recently, their collection of 17 notebooks and more than Lloyd household. I have looked at Lucy Lloyd’s personal history and 570 paintings and drawings had been largely ignored and remained examined the ways in which she shaped the making of the collection a silent partner to the larger, |xam, part of the collection. Indeed, in a in her home. I suggest that a consideration of the loss and trauma major publication it was declared that nothing was known about the experienced by Lloyd may have predisposed her to recognition and boys and stated that “there is no information on their families of origin, engagement of, or at least, accommodation of, the trauma experienced the conditions they had previously lived under, or the reasons why they by the !kun boys. ended up in custody” (Szalay 2002: 21). I have reconstructed the conditions of production of the textual This study places the children centre stage and explores their stories and visual material in Lloyd’s home in Mowbray. More specifically, the from a number of perspectives. I set out to assess to what extent the dissertation highlights differences in the recording strategies which Lloyd employed in her work with the !kun children and |xam adults. These differences, manifest in the marked integration of images and text in the case of the !kun boys, are themselves suggestive of Lloyd’s ANGOLA O ka sensitivity to the children’s trauma and their inability to articulate va ngo themselves verbally. I have made a close reading of several of the more complex images Tsintsabis o ak at and of the textual material. I have used these materials in conjunction m O a with secondary sources to reconstruct the children’s family lives and b m a broader environment in north-east Namibia. My methodology reveals r u m that what appears at first to be the arbitrary phrases and words of Lucy O Lloyd’s language-learning exercise contain elements of the boys’ own Windhoek personal and historical stories. It became apparent that the fragmented material contained much substance when read against the paintings Walvis Bay BOTSWANA and drawings. My research of other, germane material included 19th century archival documents that provided further clues and information about the children’s backgrounds and how they came to Cape Town NAMIBIA and Lucy Lloyd’s home. I have presented my reading of the children’s losses as embodied in these visual and textual documents, losses made resonant by the abundance of memory and knowledge of home that appears in the archive. SOUTH AFRICA Figure 1: A map showing the traditional distribution of the !kun language in north-east Namibia and southern Angola, north and south of the Okavango River. (König and Heine 2008) 5 Explanation of Terms and Definitions Definitions and Explanation of Terms I acknowledge the Penduka Conference in Windhoek in 2001, where known today as the Tsumeb District, north of Grootfontein and lying to the representatives of Angolan, Namibian and immigrant South African the south of the Okavango River.) !xun speakers and their language committees changed the conventional Furthermore, I have used the word Bushmen as in Lloyd’s original spelling of the language name ‘!Kun’ (also known as ‘!Kung’) to ‘!Xun’. I usage and have tried, as far as possible, to refer to Khoisan speakers by have used Lucy Lloyd’s spelling of the language name throughout this their own group and language name, as is the preferred reference in the dissertation for the sake of consistency – !kun, which takes the click as communities with whom I have spent time. the first letter of the name and therefore does not capitalise the second I have used the country name, Namibia, throughout my dissertation, as letter as has become a custom in literature about the archive. it has been known since its independence in 1991. During the nineteenth !kun is classified by linguists as part of the northern branch of the century, the country between the Cunene and Kavango Rivers in the Khoisan family of languages in southern Africa. It consists of a wide range north, the Orange River in the south and the Kalahari Desert in the east of linguistic varieties, with one branch being spoken in southern Angola had not yet become generally known by one, single name. The central and northern Namibia and another branch being spoken in north-west part was generally referred to by settlers as Damaraland, or Hereroland, and north-east Namibia, the latter being referred to as Ju|’oan (Biesele with Ovamboland north of the Etosha Pan and Great Namaqualand (or 1993). Namaland) in the southern parts (Stals 1991). In their most recent study of the !kun languages in Angola and I am mindful of the ongoing process by scholars and civil society Namibia, Christa König and Bernd Heine (2008) describe the language organisations to refigure the archive (see Hamilton et al 2002) as an L-complex, that is, as a cluster of speech forms that are connected and challenge the sense of finality and cohesion that comes with an by a chain of mutual intelligibility, with speakers at the extreme ends of unproblematised use of the word ‘archive’. I therefore give preference the chain not understanding one another. They report that no clear-cut to the word ‘materials’ to describe the notebooks, photographs, drawings language boundary that separates the various !kun varieties has been and paintings made by Lucy Lloyd and the four !kun children under identified so far, but rather that they consist of a wide range of dialects. investigation in this dissertation, or use the term ‘making of the archive’ to The authors suggest that there is no appropriate information on what a indicate archive as a process rather than a fixed entity. The !kun materials !kun dialect is, how it should be separated from other dialects, or on how are part of the larger body of materials known as the Bleek and Lloyd many dialects there are. Thus far, scholars have identified eleven dialects Collection. I will refer to the !kun part of these materials as ‘Lucy Lloyd spoken across the mentioned region, as indicated in the map (Figure 1). and the !kun children’s collection’, to indicate the children and Lloyd’s Little research has been done on the dialects spoken around the broad collective ownership and participation in the making of the archive.