BY SMALL WAGON WITH FULL TENT Dorothea Bleek’s Journey to Kakia,

June to August 1913

Jill Weintroub

LLAREC Series in Visual HistorySeries editor: Pippa SkotnesProduction and design editor: Pippa SkotnesLayout and design: Cara van der Westhuizen

LLAREC (Lucy Lloyd Archive, Resource and Exhibition Centre)The Centre for Curating the Archive at the University of Cape TownHiddingh CampusUniversity of Cape Town31-37 Orange Street8001 Cape Townwww.cca.uct.ac.za

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Text copyright: Jill Weintroub

Copyright for the photographs and for |xam texts is vested in various curating institutions and in individual copyright holders. No part of this publicaton may be reproduced in any format or by any means without the prior permission of the copyright holders and the publisher. Enquiries should be directed to the director of the Centre for Curating the Archive, University of Cape Town.

BY SMALL WAGON WITH FULL TENT Dorothea Bleek’s Journey to Kakia,

June to August 1913

Jill Weintroub

for Clive

Knowing the landscape – intimately and personally – was central to Dorothea Bleek’s scholarship and research.

Her many fieldwork trips across southern Africa during the opening decades of the twentieth century were crucial to the establishment of this kind of knowledge. But her field trips were also essential to Bleek’s sense of self, as she made herself in the image of her father and aunt, both celebrated students of San languages in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Her scholarship was crucial to her identity as an independent researcher working in the newly established field of ‘Native Studies’ (later African Studies) as the discipline began to emerge in the South African academy. Her scholarship gave her the opportunity to step outside of the narrow domestic spaces that would otherwise have been available to an independent woman living in suburban Newlands, near Cape Town, before and between the two world wars.

Bleek’s fieldwork was fundamental to her lifelong project to fully understand the people she called ‘Bushmen’, and the key to that knowledge lay in experience. Her extended project of field-based research throughout southern Africa during the 1920s and 1930s was an integral part of fulfilling her life’s ambition. She remained suspicious of the “armchair” scholars of Europe throughout her career, worried that their method of studying objects and people removed from the landscapes and environments in which they lived could lead to misinterpretation. Bleek’s critical references to the ‘armchair’ scholars of Europe surface at several moments in her personal correspondence1. She believed that only by observing people in their environment could accurate knowledge, as opposed to distortions, be achieved. In May of 1932, for example, she expressed in a letter to her friend Käthe Woldmann her doubts about the German ethnologist Professor Richard Karutz’s ability to engage with texts from the |xam notebooks without having had personal experience of the people and their landscapes: “These things are dealt with much better by people who have seen the country and its people themselves; the armchair scholars often lose their bearings,” she wrote. Later, in October of 1938 in a

1. See, for example, Bleek to Woldmann 20 May, 1932, where she expresses doubts about Professor Karutz’s ability to engage with extracts from the notebooks without having had exposure to the people and landscape: “These things are dealt with much better by people who have seen the country and its people themselves; the arm-chair scholars often lose their bearings.” See also Bleek to Kirby 7 October, 1938: “I am very glad you have pointed out the dan-ger of incorrect labelling of specimens, especially to the armchair scientists of Europe, whose knowledge is merely based on that sort of object. I wish every would-be archaeologist or ethnologist would make a journey into the blue, before settling down to his study table.”

Left: This studio portrait of Dorothea Bleek was taken in London in 1929. (BC 151 2008 #200) Details (clockwise from top left): Dorothea Bleek’s sketch map of Angola preserved inside her Angola notebook. (BC 151 A3.22); Envelope addressed to Dorothea Bleek at “La Rochelle”, Newlands (BC 151); Part of a royalty statement from Methuen & Co, publishers of two of Bleek’s books on rock art (BC 151 C18).

Knowing the landscape

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letter to the Wits University musicologist Professor Percival Kirby, she commented: “I am very glad you have pointed out the danger of incorrect labelling of specimens, especially to the armchair scientists of Europe, whose knowledge is merely based on that sort of object. I wish every would-be archaeologist or ethnologist would make a journey into the blue, before settling down to his study table.”

Schooled in Germany and Switzerland in the second half of the nineteenth century, Bleek may well have been exposed to the ‘Völksgeist’ tradition of Johann Gottfried Herder. While studying to be a teacher in Berlin, she may have heard about the ‘Kulturvölker’ vs ‘Naturvölker’ philosophies of the ethnologists of imperialist Germany, of which Adolph Bastian, director of the Völkerkunde Museum in Berlin and later a professor at Berlin University, was a leading proponent. Bastian, who had spent twenty-five years in the field, believed “elementary ideas” (‘Elementargedanken’), which were identical and shared by all peoples but were hidden behind humanity’s cultural diversity, could with difficulty be observed through careful, empirical study in the field. ‘Völkergedanken’ or patterns of thought resulting from interaction with the environment or other groups emerged within identifiable zones where geographical and historical influences shaped specific cultures. H. Glenn Penny (2003, 2008), in his investigation of the history of German language studies, has suggested that for intellectuals such as Bastian this interaction was the basis of all historical development, and it could be observed most readily in certain geographical areas such as rivers, coastlines, and mountain passes. Understanding the unique environmental context in which each culture took shape was, for Bastian, critical for gaining insight into the universal character of the original human being.

In her turn, Bleek believed the San were ‘natural’ (‘Natürlich’) people, the ‘original man’ (‘Urmenschen’) and the ‘earliest type of man that still exists’. They could best be understood by close study of their interactions with other people in their environment, and within the particular landscapes in which they lived. As with language, she believed

Below: This studio portrait of the Bleek family was taken in Charlottenburg, Berlin, in 1899. It shows Jemima Bleek seated second from the right, with her daughters (from left), May, Helma, Margie, Dorothea and Edith(BC 151 B12.22).Cameos: Dr Wilhelm Bleek and Dr Lucy Lloyd.Opposite page, top: Detail of a charcoal rubbing of a rock engraving made by Dorothea Bleek while doing fieldwork at Sandfontein (now Buitepos) in the South West Protectorate during 1920 to 1921 (Iziko SAM WDB_01_5RB).

Middle and bottom: Details of a sketch book and rock art sketches preserved among Dorothea Bleek’s papers at the University of Cape Town (BC 151 G3.1).

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their interactions in the landscape and with other people provided essential clues as to the particular nature of their being.

Dorothea Bleek had grown up hearing the |xam and !kun languages spoken around her. She was born on 26 March, 1873, the fourth in a line of five daughters. From birth she had shared her Mowbray home with her parents, siblings and aunts as well as a succession of |xam prisoners that her father and aunt had interviewed in a project to study their language, folklore and cosmology.

She was two years old when her father died, leaving the household grief-stricken but determined to continue the work. Dorothea Bleek would have been six years old and much more aware of what was going on around her when the !kun children arrived at Charlton House. In the absence of documentary evidence, one cannot imagine what kinds of interactions the six-year-old Dorothea Bleek would have engaged in with the !kun children who arrived in 1879 and 1880. Tamme, !nanni, |uma and Da were refugee children who had been taken from their native northern Namibia and eventually found their way to Cape Town. Of all the informants visiting the household, I would like to speculate that it was their presence that made the biggest impression on the young Dorothea. For a start, they were closest to her in age. Second, Aunt Lucy encouraged them to draw and sketch, and the young Dorothea may have been allowed to participate, or she may have watched as they made the watercolour drawings for which they are now most remembered.

These two years (four in the case of Da) in which the !kun children shared her home may well have been crucial ones in directing the young Dorothea to her later scholarship. She may at that young age have developed an ear for their language which stood her in good stead later when she helped her Aunt Lucy edit some of the notebook texts for inclusion in the book Specimens of Bushman folklore (1911), and later still on the many field trips she embarked on years later.

Dorothea Bleek’s life and work is a memorial to the passion and dedication with which she continued the research begun by her father and aunt, and to the additional research she undertook into the lives and languages of southern African people. For her entire adult life, Bleek worked at continuing and expanding the “Bushman researches” embarked upon by her father, Dr Wilhelm Bleek, and her aunt, Dr Lucy Lloyd, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Following closely in the footsteps of both her father and her aunt, Dorothea Bleek substantially extended their city-based work by embarking on extensive field trips throughout southern Africa as part of her project ‘to continue and work well out’ the ‘joint Bushman studies’ begun by Bleek and Lloyd in 1870.

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Towards the end of June 1913, Dorothea Bleek and her friend Margarethe Vollmer caught the train from Cape Town to Lobatse, a border town in what is now Botswana. This first leg of their journey covered some 695 miles, following the great Bechuanaland Railway northwards through the eastern edge of Bechuanaland before crossing into the then Rhodesia on its way to Victoria Falls.

Their destination was Kakia (now Khakhea), a village situated roughly halfway between the regions now demarcated as the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park to the north, and the Khutse Game Reserve to the south west. Dorothea’s aim was to collect language samples from the ‘Masarwa’, a group of people whom she described as ‘dwelling within walking distance of their Bechuana masters’. That they had no ‘Bushman name’ of their own but used a ‘Sechuana word denoting any kind of Bushman’ to identify themselves, suggested to Bleek that these people had lived ‘in subjection’ to other groups for a long time.

It was nine years since Dorothea Bleek’s return to South Africa in 1904. She had returned to Cape Town, followed by her mother and sisters Edith and Helma, to the family home at Charlton House, Mowbray, soon after the end of the South African War. Shortly thereafter, she had taken a teaching position at Rocklands Girls’ School in Cradock in the eastern Cape. For Dorothea at least, the call to return to South Africa had been strong. Her teaching position in Cradock placed her close to landscapes rich with rock art and her trips into the field with Helen Tongue in search of rock art sites gave her a taste of the thrill of fieldwork. These adventures culminated in their painted reproductions being exhibited in both Cape Town and London in 1908, and also in a volume of rock art copies published under the name Bushman paintings (1909). While M. Helen Tongue was cited as the author and main copyist for the book, Dorothea was credited for contributing the explanatory text that accompanied the reproductions. In addition, Dorothea and elder sister Edith contributed a jointly written essay titled “Notes on the Bushmen”. Their collaboration featured a collection of anecdotes drawn from childhood memories of their family home shared with a series of |xam and !kun informants.

Bottom right and opposite: Dorothea Bleek and her friend Margarethe Vollmer, with unidentified members of their transport crew, pose on their “small wagon with full tent” – the means by which they travelled through the desert to Kakia in 1913 (Iziko SAM 965) (Photograph by Ompilletsi – see text on page 31.) Top right: The cover of the notebook in which Dorothea Bleek recorded her Kakia diary (BC151 A3.6).

From Kanye To The Desert – Dorothea Bleek’s 1913 trip to Kakia, and other moments from her archive

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Dorothea Bleek’s deep interest in rock art is reflected in the many sketches and reproductions preserved among her papers. Here are shown (top row) details of watercolour reproductions produced by Helen Tongue when they travelled together in 1905-1907 (Iziko SAM); (middle row) charcoal rubbings of geometric etchings which Dorothea Bleek found in the field at BabiBabi near Sandfontein in 1920 (Iziko SAM); (bottom row) sketches preserved among her papers at UCT (BC151 G3.1); and (opposite) a reproduction produced by Helen Tongue at Buffelsfontein, which she described in her book as a ‘curious painting of a vulture attacking a dead eland’.

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With the rock art book successfully published, Dorothea’s attention turned to the |xam language. In 1910 and 1911 she travelled to the Northern Cape in search of descendants of the people interviewed by Lucy and Wilhelm. She travelled through the dry Prieska and Kenhardt districts of the Northern Cape, reaching as far as Gordonia, Griqualand West, the southern Kalahari and the lower reaches of the Malopo River. There, she had gathered samples of the language of the Xatia people, which Dorothea described in the introduction to her book Comparative vocabularies of Bushmen languages (1929) as “merely a dialect of the |auni speech”, as well as the language spoken by the ||η-!ke whom Bleek translated as “home people”. What she already knew of the |xam language spoken by the ‘colonial Bushmen’ who had been interviewed by her father and aunt, allowed Dorothea Bleek to classify these newly sampled language variations as being part of a ‘southern’ group of San languages.

For these early trips, the guiding motivation had been to try to find descendants and/or relatives of the men and women her father and aunt had interviewed during their ‘Bushman researches’ at Mowbray from 1870 to 1884. The trips also provided an excellent opportunity for Dorothea to put her language training into practice for the first time. It was a chance to put her knowledge, acquired formally through several years of study at universities in Europe and England as well as informally while working on the notebook texts with Lucy Lloyd, into practice on African soil. While in Europe, Dorothea had studied African languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and at the School of Oriental Studies in Berlin. At Charlottenburg near Berlin, and in London, Dorothea and Lucy had worked together closely with the |xam and !kun narratives gathered so many years previously in the sitting room at Charlton House. Lucy Lloyd had been determined that these should be published and, with Dorothea’s help, spent years translating and editing extracts from the thousands of pages of narratives for publication. After years of struggle, the book appeared eventually in 1911 under the title Specimens of Bushman folklore. For Lucy, its appearance gave substance to ||kabbo’s wish that the stories of his people become known by way of books.

Freed from the task of shepherding the texts through the presses, Lloyd had thereafter returned to Cape Town and Charlton House in 1912. Both Lucy and Dorothea must have been glad to be reunited. It meant that they could resume their mentoring and learning programme, and that Dorothea could draw on Lucy’s detailed knowledge and close experience of spoken |xam and !kun languages for a few more months. It was an

Left: This snapshot of Dorothea Bleek is thought to date to 1904, the year she returned to Cape Town from Europe (BC 151 2008 #198). Background: A notebook cover and inside page of one of Dorothea Bleek’s rock art notebooks (BC151 A3.24).

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opportunity that would end with Lucy’s death in August of 1914. Dorothea Bleek had planned and executed her first language field trips in 1910 and

1911 despite the loss of her mother Jemima, who had died in October of 1909 at the farm near Somerset West of daughter Helma (Wilhelmina) and her husband Henry Hepburn Bright. Dorothea’s 1910 trip was undertaken in collaboration with the South African Museum in Cape Town. Bleek assisted the museum modeller James Drury to identify people deemed to be ‘pure Bushmen’. These people were used as models to produce life casts for display in the museum. The Northern Cape and southern Kalahari trips would be the first of a series of expeditions which Bleek engaged in throughout her life. Dorothea, it turned out, would be the only Bleek daughter who successfully expanded the familial project of home-based anthropology into a field study spanning a large part of the southern African landscape, with reach into Angola and Tanganyika as well.

In terms of knowledge production, Dorothea built on the linguistic work of her father, and extended the interests in social life and culture which Lucy Lloyd had begun to explore in her interactions with the |xam prisoners all those years ago. Perhaps Dorothea was influenced by Lucy Lloyd’s sympathetic engagement with the lifeways, rituals, daily life and family arrangements of her |xam informants. Dorothea’s research extended that of her father’s, whose language research had focussed mainly on the myths, legends and folklore of the people, and tried to link them to other groups on the basis of their phonetic and grammatical structure. This was in line with Wilhelm’s schooling in the ancient discipline of philology, which sought to trace the origins and interconnections among humans across the world through the study of language and folklore.

For Dorothea, the samples of San languages that she documented and studied, along with the bodies, rituals, folklore and material culture, embodied a search for the essence or soul of a people. Dorothea Bleek built a career based on studying the people she called ‘Bushmen’. Long before it had become acceptable scholarly practice to do so, she had used the narratives collected by her father and aunt to interpret the rock paintings that she described as the most important historical documents left by the earliest inhabitants of the country. Along with rock art, she studied the languages of the San, and through observing the San in their ‘natural’ environment, developed a particular impression of the people’s essence and spirit.

A decade after the death of her father, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, however, Dorothea and her family took leave of the familiar landscapes of the

Top right: A view of Charton House, the Bleek family home at Mowbray near Cape Town.Below: Pages from one of the research notebooks in which Dorothea Bleek recorded her 1928 trip to rock art sites identified decades earlier by George Stow (BC151 A3.24-26).

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Left: This cabinet print from the Bleek family album is inscribed in Dorothea Bleek’s hand: “My boarding school, at Bonn, from the garden. D.B.” (BC151 2008 #195).Above: A ‘carte de visite’ portrait of Dorothea Bleek taken by Theodor Penz Photograph Atelier of Charlottenberg, Berlin, dated to 1899 (BC151 2008 #179).Opposite page:Right: The cover of Dorothea Bleek’s research notebook recorded at Windhoek jail in November 1920. (BC151 A3.12) Top left: Helma and Jemima Bleek photographed in Berlin in 1903 (Scott Deetz 2007: 75). Bottom left: A studio portrait taken by the photographer Theodor Penz of Charlottenberg, annotated on the back with the names Doris, Helma and Margie. It is dated to 1899. Dorothea Bleek was 25 at the time, and it was the year Margie Bleek began her medical studies in Zurich. (BC151 2008#196)

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