The Courage of ||kabbo: from landscape to literature

It is just over a century since Lucy Lloyd, on behalf of herself and Wilhelm Bleek, published the book Specimens of Bushman folklore, the realisation of a lifetime’s work in the study of |xam and !kun, two Bushman languages of southern Africa. 

In the preface to the book, published by George Allen and Company and sold at a price of £1.1s, Lucy Lloyd, then 76 years old, wrote: “With all its shortcomings, after many and great difficulties, this volume of specimens of Bushman folk-lore is laid before the public ... the selections which have been made for it form but a very small portion of the Bushman native literature collected.” 

In the decades since, Bleek and Lloyd’s work, gleaned from interviews with |xam prisoners released from the Breakwater Prison in Cape Town in the late 19th century to stay at their Mowbray home, has come to be regarded as seminal to the study of the Bushmen, or San. It has been a deep well of inspiration to renowned South African artist and professor Pippa Skotnes, who has written and edited several books drawn from the archival holdings related to the San, including Claim to the country: The archive of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd which includes the first publication (in digital form) of all Bleek and Lloyd’s notebooks.

Now Skotnes has curated an exhibition called Landscape to literature, originally conceived to mark the centenary of the publication of Specimens of Bushman folklore in 2011, which opens for a two-month run at Origins Centre on the campus of the University of the Witwatersrand on 10 February. The exhibition includes contributions by Stephen Inggs, Richard Mason and Jośe Manuel de Prada-Samper.

The display of photographs, original texts, notebooks, newspaper reviews and maps honours Bleek and Lloyd’s vision and the courage of their |xam teacher, ||kabbo, who remained in Cape Town, far from home and family, to make his stories known. The exhibition also recognises the story of Dia!kwain, related as it is to a broader story of genocide reported on by the colonial magistrate Louis Anthing, and imagines something of the transition that was made from landscape to literature via the living room of Bleek and Lloyd’s Mowbray home.

The exhibition will be available for public viewing from Mondays to Fridays and on Saturday mornings.