Specimens of Bushman Folklore

Specimens of Bushman Folklore
Author Wilhelm H. I. Bleek and Lucy C. Lloyd
Publisher G. Allen
Publication date
 1911

Specimens of Bushman Folklore is a book by the linguist Wilhelm H. I. Bleek and Lucy C. Lloyd which was published in 1911. (For the appropriate use of the terms "Bushman", "San", etc. to describe the indigenous inhabitants of Southern Africa, see here.)

The book records eighty-seven Xam Bushman legends, myths and other traditional stories. The stories were collected through interviews with various |Xam narrators, chief among them |A!kunta, ||Kabbo, Diä!kwain, !Kweiten ta ||ken and |Han≠kasso. (The punctuation and other marks represent various clicks, for which the Khoisan languages are well-known. Xam itself is now extinct.)

These tales were written down and translated by Bleek and his sister-in-law Lloyd. Bleek died in 1875, but Lloyd continued transcribing Xam narratives after his death. It is thanks to her efforts that some of the narratives were eventually published in this book, which also includes sketches of rock art attributed to the Bushmen people and some Xun narratives.

Specimens of Bushman Folklore has been considered the cornerstone of study of the Bushmen and their religious beliefs. Laurens van der Post describes the book (and Dorothea Bleek's Mantis and His Friend) as "a sort of Stone Age Bible" in the introduction to The Heart of the Hunter (1961), a follow-up to The Lost World of the Kalahari.

Specimens of Bushman Folklore, as well as the situation of the Bushmen during their disappearance in South Africa and the lives of Bleek and Lloyd, have been covered in a Dutch documentary series called The Broken String.

Further reading

Banks, Andrew. Bushmen in a Victorian World. Cape Town: Double Storey, 2006.


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