The Sending of the Crows

Judith Westerveld

As a visual artist interested in language and working with the legacies of Dutch colonialism, I am working on a new art project based on stories told in the southern African San languages |xam and !xun that form part of the Bleek and Lloyd Archive. A testament to the lives and cultural practices of the |xam and !xun peoples, the archive also provides a unique and rare insight into the impact of the Dutch colonisation of South Africa. It is a collection of 13,000 pages of stories and interviews in notebooks, drawings, paintings and photographs of and by |xam and !xun people, collected by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd in Cape Town in the 1870s and 80s. It is held in three main institutions: the University of Cape Town, the South African Museum, and the National Library of South Africa. It also exists in digital form on the Digital Bleek and Lloyd website and is part of UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.

Over the past few years, I have been researching different aspects of the Bleek and Lloyd Archive, as part of my artistic research into the marginalised and extinct languages of the San and Khoekhoe people within the broader context of the Dutch colonisation of South Africa. I spent time reading the notebooks, looking at the drawings and watercolours, transcribing stories and talking to archivists and scholars. My specific aim for this art project is to open this archive as an artist and to bring its stories and the impact of the Dutch colonisation of South Africa to the attention of people in the Netherlands. To this end, I am creating a series of artworks that present stories from the archive that specifically speak to Dutch colonialism in South Africa from the perspective of the |xam and !xun people. In visual, sonic, and written form, I find ways to visualise these stories and bring them into the present.

The Bleek and Lloyd Archive at the University of Cape Town consists of 155 notebooks that were written by the German philologist Wilhelm Bleek and his British sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd. They recorded personal stories and folklore told to them in |xam by several men called |a!kunta, ||kabbo, ¹kasin, Dia!kwain and |han¹kass’o, as well as a woman called !kweiten ta ||ken, who was Dia!kwain’s sister and married to kasin. The men had all been imprisoned at the Breakwater Convict Station in Cape Town for resisting the occupation of their land and retaliating the violence inflicted on them by the Dutch farmers (trekboers). As a renowned intellectual and scholar, Wilhelm Bleek had earned the respect of the British governor of the Cape Colony, Sir Henry Barkly, who agreed to release |a!kunta and ||kabbo from prison to Bleek’s home in Mowbray, for the purposes of his and Lloyd’s studies of the |xam language. After their term of penal servitude expired in mid-1871, |a!kunta and ||kabbo stayed with Bleek and Lloyd for another two years, committing many stories to paper. In 1873, ¹kasin and his brother-in-law Dia!kwain were released to the household in order for Bleek and Lloyd to continue collecting |xam folklore. In 1874 they both returned to Mowbray as free men, bringing their relatives with them, and staying for another two years to record more stories. |han¹kass’o, ||kabbo’s son-in-law, came to Mowbray in 1878 and worked only with Lucy Lloyd, as Wilhelm Bleek had passed away in 1875.

From 1879, four young boys, called !nanni, Tamme, |uma and Da, who spoke another San language, !xun, also formed part of the household. They had been abducted from their families in Namibia by the Makoba and then traded and enslaved to various white settlers in the region, before arriving in Cape Town. William Coates Palgrave, the Cape Colony’s commissioner to Namibia placed them in the care of Lucy Lloyd, as he was aware of her desire to learn the !xun language. As well as the stories the boys told her, they also made many drawings and watercolours of animals, plants, and scenes of domestic life as they remembered it from their home. The drawings and watercolours were annotated by Lloyd, forming another way of language learning, as well as a way for the children to communicate the trauma of losing their world, which they could not fully express in words. They are kept at the Iziko South African Museum and the National Library of South Africa in Cape Town.

Bleek and Lloyd learned and wrote down the |xam and !xun languages, first as lists of words and phrases and then the stories that |a!kunta, ||kabbo, ¹kasin, Dia!kwain, |han¹kass’o, !kweiten ta ||ken, !nanni, Tamme, |uma and Da told them about their lives, history, folklore and remembered beliefs and customs. They devised phonetic alphabets to transcribe the stories into |xam or !xun, and translated them into English in accordance with the storytellers, who carefully checked and corrected the transcriptions and translations. Each page is folded in half, with |xam or !xun on one side and English on the other.

As the men came and went, bringing with them relatives such as ¹kasin’s wife !kweiten ta ||ken and their children, hundreds of stories were recorded. Legends passed down from generation to generation, stories about the land, the rain, the history of the first people, and the origin of the moon and stars, as well as accounts that speak of the genocidal violence perpetrated against them by the Dutch and English colonists, who threatened their lives, their way of life and their language. The |xam language is now no longer spoken, and the !xun language is spoken by only about 15,000 people in small communities in Namibia, Angola, Botswana and South Africa.

Reading through story after story, what struck me is that they present the perspective of the |xam and !xun people in their own language and in their own words. Their voices are not hidden in the writing of the coloniser or misconstrued by an interpreter and only found when reading against the grain, as I often do in my attempts to draw attention to the gaps, silences, and contradictions in dominant historical narratives.

After careful consideration and thorough research I have selected and transcribed ten stories from the archive to work with that are told by |a!kunta, Dia!kwain, |han¹kass’o, !kweiten ta ||ken and |uma, which describe how they perceived and encountered the Dutch colonists (the ‘Boers’). In other words, these stories present a rare perspective on Dutch colonialism in South Africa, told in the storytellers’ own words and in their own languages. Although elements of the stories have inevitably been lost in translation, they remain rare first-person accounts of what happened to the |xam and !xun in the 19th century – how their world was affected and changed forever by the arrival of the Dutch colonists – but also of the unique way in which they saw the world. They are stories in which fable and reality, dreams, and visions, past and present, are intertwined.

The series of artworks that I will produce as part of this project will be diverse in their form, ranging from film, photography, works on paper, a live performance, a sculptural installation, and an artist publication. Each work will focus on a specific story or fragments of multiple stories. In visual, sonic, and written form I am creating dialogues with these stories, finding ways to bring them into the present. For example, I am trying out ways of retelling the stories and translating the writing into sound, exploring how to give voice to stories in a language that is no longer spoken. I am also creating images to visualise the stories by making my own series of watercolours inspired by those I have seen in the collection.

Questions that inform my interactions with the stories are: What if the Dutch colonists had learned the Indigenous languages, instead of imposing their own? What if we started this learning process now? How to give a voice to stories in a language that seems to be frozen in history, in an archive? By creating my own images and using text and sound, I make the ten stories visible and audible beyond their archival form.

In November 2022, I participated in the See Studio led by Zahira Asmal and her agency The City. It brought together ten people based in Cape Town and the Netherlands who, through their various creative disciplines, show the impact of the past on the present, as well as the desire to rewrite and reclaim, to remember and to honour for a more just and equitable future. I was invited to explore the theme Invisible Hybridity: A journey into Music, Language and Literature of the Cape together with Uzair Ben Ibrahim, whose work as a linguist and performance poet is invested in the revitalisation and utility of Arabic-Afrikaans. The theme, and our shared interest in reimagining languages that seem to be frozen in history, encouraged me to bring my artistic research into the |xam and !xun stories in the Bleek and Lloyd Archive into the context of See Studio, to further explore how to bring these stories into the present.

As part of my presentation at the end of the See Studio, I initiated a sonic workshop based on two |xam stories I had selected from the Bleek and Lloyd Archive, about crows sent to look for missing men. They are told by the brother and sister !kweiten ta ||ken and Dai!kwain. The narrative that forms the basis of both stories was passed on to them by their mother ≠kamme-an, who in turn heard it from her mother, Dai!kwain explained, and who he thinks must have heard it from her mother before her. The story told by !kweiten ta ||ken is called The !kagen ka Kkomm’s Story and the |hunn ta kkomm’s Story, or The Crow’s Story: the Crows are sent out to search for husbands. It is in |xam in the Katkop dialect and was written down by Lucy Lloyd (L VI.-2. 3975-3996). The story told by Dai!kwain is called The Sending of the Crows, or, Crows sent out to look for husbands. The story is written down by Lucy Lloyd but is part of the collection of Wilhelm Bleek’s notebooks in the archive (BXXVI.2473-2486).

In both stories three crows, |xuru, !gauru and !kagen, are sent out one by one by |xam women to find out what has become of their husbands, who have not returned from hunting. They hang fat round the necks of the crows as food for their journey, which turns the crows’ neck and breast feathers white. In !kweiten ta ||ken’s story the third crow, !kagen, sees stones roll down the mountain and bury the men, and it tells the stones to part and the men return home to their families that are starving. In Dai!kwan’s story !kagen sees the men lying dead in the veld and returns home to tell the women the tragic news that their husbands have been killed by a Boer commando. Fable and reality intertwine. A story from the past, from the early days of the |xam, that describes the origin and interrelatedness of people and animals, intertwines with the violent colonialism of the |xam’s present. For the |xam, storytelling not only brought the past into the present, but also formed a space in which past events and characters entered relationships with those of the present.

During the sonic workshop, I asked the group of participants to engage in a dialogue with these two stories and create their own response to them. It was powerful to hear how the participants brought the past events and characters of the story into relationship with those of the present through different languages and sounds, from different perspectives and lived experiences. The responses, and how they were contextualised during the workshop, do justice to the complexities that envelop the |xam language, as well as honouring the language and the people who spoke it. The polyphonic approach of the sonic workshop gave these stories a voice again, beyond their English translation, and brought them into the present.

Below is the artistic representation I created of the sonic workshop, in which you can see three visual layers coming together. The foundation is formed by images of the two stories of the crows in the original notebooks, in |xam on the one side of the folded page and English on the other, with additional notes on the left-facing page. Above these are text fragments of the sonic responses to the story made by participants in the workshop. These are a collection of words, sounds, poems, questions, observations, and musings in different languages, namely |xam, English, Afrikaans, isiXhosa and Khoekhoegowab. The texts are combined with photographs of watercolours I have made over the past years that visualise the story for me, literally making it visible.

Judith Westerveld participated in the See Studio 2022. It was led by Zahira Asmal and produced by The City in partnership with Het Nieuwe Instituut and the Research Centre for Material Culture, with support from the Creative Industries Fund and DutchCulture.