Dealing with Evils.

Since the subject of my essay is a little group of four Khoisan tales (taking up just over 20 small pages of print) that were told, recorded and published in Afrikaans, I shall touch briefly on some aspects of the development and function of this language in South Africa. Languages become powerful usually through the politically dominant position of their speakers, and what could be termed “white” Afrikaans is no exception to this pattern. In an essay titled “Building a Nation from Words: [on] Afrikaans language, literature and ethnic identity [from] 1902-1924,” Isabel Hofmeyr refers to the

diversity of the [Dutch-Afrikaans] dialect [as having] partly to do with the historical trajectory of the lowland Dutch dialect spoken by the seventeenth-century [white] settlers [in South Africa]. In confronting the language of the slaves [that had been brought here] – Malay and Portuguese creole – along with Khoisan speech, this Dutch linguistic cluster had partly creolised. In later years it picked up shards of German, French and Southern Nguni languages and a goodly layer of English after 1806. (96)

Then followed a struggle by white speakers of the language, waged mainly against English colonial denigration, to establish Afrikaans as a language of what the historian-philosopher-anthropologist Ernst Gellner terms “high culture” – which in the South African context meant establishing it as a middle-class, “white” language, distinct from the Afrikaans spoken by those classified “non-white.”[12] To this day the term ‘Afrikaans’ (including of course its associate, ‘Afrikaner’) is all too frequently taken as demarcating a “white” racial-linguistic identity.[13] As spoken by whites and eventually established as one of the two “official languages” of the apartheid dispensation, Afrikaans thus became the marker of white domination, whereas, as spoken by other (darker) South Africans, it became the marker of their subjugation. Introducing a 1933 publication, The Early Cape Hottentots, the anthropologist Schapera noted:

In Little Namaqualand descendants of the old Naman are still found in fairly considerable numbers. Here, too, their tribal cohesion and culture have been completely destroyed by contact with the Europeans, and they have also absorbed a good deal of white blood. A few of the older people still know their own language, but the great majority now speak only Afrikaans, the regular medium of intercourse even amongst themselves. (xiv-xv)[14]

Along with this linguistic domination (and the political domination of which it is the marker) went another sort of domination, which the South African born novelist Bessie Head (in an essay) described in the following terms:

A sense of history was totally absent in me and it was as if, far back in history, thieves had stolen the land and were so anxious to cover up all traces of the theft that correspondingly, all traces of the true history have been obliterated. We, as black people, could make no appraisal of our own worth; we did not know who and what we were, apart from objects of abuse and exploitation. (66)

Given this truth, all possible forms of re-attribution and recognition, whatever the ironies and complicities involved in such work, do need to be undertaken. Focusing on such a neglected South African cultural resource as the Khoisan Dwaalstories can be a small contribution to the reconfiguration of the past and (even, perhaps) the present of South African society.[15] As a mere exercise in romantic nostalgia it would not be worth undertaking, however; the only worth-while aim would be to recognise in these tales a time-transcending contribution to present-day social realities,[16] which (as I hope to demonstrate) they do certainly offer.

These Dwaalstories (a title meaning meandering, or wanderers’, tales) are particularly significant in offering a portrayal of a Khoisan society (or societies – the stories seem to depict a degree of cultural variation) as fraught with its (or their) own social tensions. All too common is the tendency amongst present-day commentators to see those societies as pure, utterly harmonious and socially blameless communities – a perspective I find problematic because such romantic idealisation is finally a form either of condescension or of misrepresentation in that it denies full human status (which must include recognition of the harmful capacities of individuals and societies) to the Khoisan. As E. N. Wilmsen puts it, this leads to the position where the Khoisan “can be pan-human only by being pre-human” (19). In a comment I see as paralleling Wilmsen’s, Anne Solomon insists that “interpretations of the rock art which prioritise the transcendent at the expense of the mundane must be seen as unacceptable; and an approach which emphasises or proceeds from the religious is as much a ‘tranquil’ account that conceals historical realities” (56).

But it may not be necessary to dichotomise the religious (both as the transcendent and as the moral dimension) from the historical, in the way that Solomon suggests here. For, in stories like the Dwaalstories – simultaneously social documentation and social assessment – these perspectives coexist in mutually enriching ways. In his major essay “A Review of African Oral Traditions and Literature,” Harold Scheub says that “myth is a metaphor, and because of that it is a narrative device” (3). This may be taken to mean that in myths which represent “recognisable” social formations and events, the process of recognition or understanding follows the thread or clue that the story-line provides.

Scheub offers ways of considering what he terms “tales that [. . .] have epic dimensions” (14) – a description which I believe fits the Dwaalstories, or which I would like to extend to apply to them. To Scheub such tales (with “epic dimensions”) transcend the schismatic distinction between what is considered either religious or historical material, as well as between materials classified either oral or literary – in an argument I find compelling and liberating. Scheub writes that

the refocusing of attention from things done to who does them is critical, not only to an understanding of the oral tradition and its permutations, but to a comprehension of its ties with literature.

While Trickster and Hero[ine?] stand alone, each yearns to be an insider. But it is not being on the inside that is important, it is becoming an insider. Being an insider means accepting the society as it is. Becoming one means altering the society to accommodate what an individual stands for, not the other way round. The shift is revolutionary. (14)

For, in creating such redefinitions, “the hero’s vision and his [or her] struggle have to do with the future” (14). In “this breaking of a cyclical pattern,” Scheub writes, “the epic character moves away from the tale character towards the historical figure. [. . .] But the break is the thing, for it allows the introduction of realism into the oral narrative” (15).[17] In what follows I shall attempt to indicate that Hendrik’s Dwaalstories exemplify the kind of tale that Scheub refers to as simultaneously “religious” and “historical,” and as transcending the oral-literary divide.

The Dwaalstories were four among those (the others now lost) told by a venerable old man of at least a hundred years old, a narrator identified as a Bushman (i.e. San) by the white Afrikaans writer Eugène Marais,[18] who recorded them. Of the teller, we know only his advanced age and his Afrikaans name, Hendrik, as well as the fact that he was an itinerant visitor to the farm in the Waterberg region (in the Northern Province of present-day South Africa) where Marais, himself at this time something of a pariah due to his hopeless morphine addiction, stayed. It is likely that Marais’s friend Tindall, son of a Wesleyan missionary who was a pioneering student of Khoisan languages in northern South Africa and Namibia, first interested Marais in these cultures (Rousseau 170). Marais was also interested in the success another early Afrikaans writer, Von Wielligh, had achieved in collecting and publishing Khoisan tales in Afrikaans (Rousseau 194). A visit to Marais by a friend, the German artist Erich Mayer, in 1913 resulted in a fine ink portrait of “Ou [=old] Hendrik” (as the storyteller was known). It was perhaps at this time that Marais first heard the Dwaalstories.[19] The tales were first (serially and separately) published in 1921, in a popular Afrikaans women’s or family magazine, Die Huisgenoot.

Marais acknowledges regretfully that he never recorded any of the stories verbatim, but testifies that he did write down “a few” immediately after the telling. These details (and what follows) are mentioned in Marais’s introduction to the first collected edition of the Dwaalstories, published in 1927 with the abovementioned portrait of Old Hendrik (who had died at “over a hundred years old,” shortly after this likeness was sketched in 1913) as its frontispiece. In this introduction, Marais refers prominently and knowledgeably to Bleek’s transcriptions of a San language (discussed earlier in this article). Marais draws a distinction between San tales which, imperfectly transliterated into Afrikaans, are near-gibberish, and those which have the power to move their listeners imaginatively. Marais seems to assign the stories to a children’s audience (and, it would seem, one of white Afrikaans children!), yet his references to Bleek, to the complexities of San storytelling and to European “equivalents,” as well as the trouble he took both in recording the tales and in scrupulously acknowledging the authorship of “Old Hendrik,” indicate a definite recognition of their value.

The ironies of undervaluation and exploitation are more evident in the later white Afrikaans literary establishment’s reception of the tales than in Marais’s dissemination of them. Quite simply attributing the excellence of the stories entirely to Marais himself, the doyen of Afrikaans poets, N. P. Van Wyk Louw, wrote that Marais “here [i.e. in the Dwaalstories], in ‘visions,’ caught occasional glimpses of what Afrikaans [literary] art can be. Purer than he ever managed to convey in [his] poetry” (Louw 136; my translation of the Afrikaans original). One later critic suspects that Louw may have alluded (in choosing the term ‘visions’) to Marais’s well known morphine addiction – a point she then simply extends to the speculation that Hendrik may have told the tales while under the influence of marijuana (Gilfillan 153-156). A contemporary Afrikaans literary critic even told Marais’s biographer, Rousseau, that he “could not believe that Marais had himself written the tales” (Rousseau 262) – denying (it seems) both Marais and Old Hendrik the verbal capacity to have composed these masterpieces! The poem quoted at the end of the present essay was by Marais himself attributed to the character “Joggom Konterdans” who is an artist-figure featuring in the tale told to him by Hendrik. For generations this poem has been taught in South African schools as a composition by Eugène Marais who was (as he himself insists) its transcriber. Few pupils were ever taught that the poem had been taken from its context in one of the Dwaalstories, let alone that the original visionary or poet was a Khoisan person expressing an imaginative and conceptual understanding particular to his own, now neglected or half-buried South African culture.

Yet it is, of course, impossible to establish what was lost – or gained – by the mode of transcription of these stories. Marais himself ends his introduction to the 1927 edition by regretting that much of value was lost because of the delay between his initial hearing and subsequent recording of the stories. He refers to unusual “Afrikaans-Bushman words and expressions,” not all of which he could recall, and adds observations on the inevitable impoverishment (in the transition from oral to literary mode) of the recorded version of the tales because of the absence of appropriate accompanying gestures, natural mimicry and (facial) expressions (Marais 1927: 7; my translations). Marais’s awareness of translation as a form of betrayal (tradurre tradire, as the Italians say) is therefore fairly sophisticated.

Scheub’s may (again) here be a useful perspective: he reminds us that “in ancient Egypt, the craft of the scribe was ‘the greatest of all professions’; [. . .] the scribe was the mediator between the oral performer and his audience.” Scribes, Scheub tells us, “felt free to rephrase, rearrange and transpose.” In this, he sees a metaphor for the transition from the oral to the literary mode, and a model of their possible mutual enrichment – “The two media continued their parallel development; [. . .] there is no unbridgeable gap between them; they constantly nourish each other” (Scheub 16).

Putting the above suggestions to the test brings one to the stories themselves and to the brief illustrations from them that can be contained in an article like this. The thematic outlines of the four Dwaalstories, are as follows: in the first one, the exposure of untested fame as undeserved, meeting the braggart’s severe punishment for betraying his social responsibility at a time of crisis; in the second, the non-violent overthrow of unearned power; and, in the last two tales, unrecognised (female) excellence winning through. Because of constraints of space, it is only possible to summarise briefly the greater part of the most substantial of the four stories, the one that Marais placed second in the published collection, which bears the title “The Song of the Rain.” The story is subtitled “A Coranna Wander-story,” a reference which identifies it explicitly with a Khoikhoi group (the Coranna). Although Marais consistently refers to “Bushman stories” and to “Old Hendrik” as a “Bushman,” details such as references to the keeping of livestock and to settled dwellings, as well as a reference to Heitsi-Eibib, the great (mythical) hero-ancestor of the Khoikhoi (in this and in one other story) point to their being of Khoikhoi origin – but then, the distinction between San (or Bushman) and Khoikhoi was (and is still) often blurred, both in fact and in description.

“The Song of the Rain” tells of a period of great suffering and near-starvation amongst the members of a smallish community, due to a terrible drought. The emergency resource that should be made available to all members of the community during such a crisis – a fountain or water-hole which never dries – was given into the keeping of the foremost musician and composer of this small social group, with express orders to guard it from common use, but to allow access to the water by other members of the community during any critical drought. Yet this man has grown arrogant and selfish and has come to see his caretaker’s role as that of an owner with a personal possession, refusing to share the resource.[20] The other (ageing) man who might defeat the usurper in a musical contest is unequal to the task, himself a foolish and vain person. Quietly, secretly, however, an outsider-figure by the name of Krom [or Bent – i.e. crooked, or crippled] Joggom Konterdans – whose full name seems to signify the stigma he bears as a hump-backed person, as well as his innovative, inventive genius in its allusion to the art of dancing “differently”– sets about constructing a new musical instrument according to the ancient lore of his people.

When the instrument is at last complete and the composition is performed, “Counterdance” (as one might render his last name in English) is recognised by the old grandmother and cultural authority of the community (who is named Nasi-Tgam) as their potential saviour. I now cite my own English translation (from the Afrikaans original) of the concluding part of the story (Marais 19-21; my unpublished translation 9-10):

And she handed him the small mirror which she long ago polished from the black horn of a rhinoceros, as well as the great copper neck-ring of Heitsi-Eibib.

And that morning when the light dawned Counterdance sat at the Steep Stone inside the yard fence of the Berry Trees; this is at the tip of the Skew-water; he had turned his back towards the yard-side. And in front of him he had propped up the rhinoceros horn mirror, so that he could see everything behind him; and his whole body was gleaming with the tail-fat. And around his head dangled three tassels of mongoose skin; and around his neck was the great copper neck-ring of Heitsi-Eibib.

And he composed the Song of the Rain.

And Jacob Tame-One [the tyrant-figure who refuses to share the water: I have freely translated his name from the Afrikaans], when he took the trumpet and opened his mouth wide to blow it, was suddenly dumb-struck. And his little ones rushed from the yard-side shouting: “Our Dad, our Dad, there’s someone on the marker stone at the Skew-water who shows only his back. And the people are dancing in their shelters.”

And Jacob Tame-One made a grab for his panga, and he shouted for the warriors, but there was no reply. He heard them saying: “Klips! [i.e. “Gosh!”] That is a Master musician, that one.”

And Tame-One struck the big drum, and he called out: “Today I’ll invite all the vultures! Today will be the great battle of the Berry Trees!” And he crept up on Counterdance behind the thorn shelter of the Skew-water.

And Counterdance sang the Song of the Rain, and he played his violin [the stringed instrument he had so painstakingly constructed].

And Tame-One saw his own people go to meet him [Counterdance], and they danced and spoke admiringly to Joggom Counterdance. And at the top of the hill he saw the old crone Nasi-Tgam and she spread the black skin cloak out wide, and behind her followed the people from all the other yards, with calabashes and ostrich egg-shells ready for the water, and he felt his heart weakening.

And Bent Joggom Counterdance played the Song of the Rain, and he peeped into the mirror.

And then Jacob Tame-One tossed his panga into the Skew-water, and sat down in the dust, and he called out: “My children, my children, your old father’s riding-horse is dead!”

And on that day the old crone Nasi Tgam re-intoned the Law of the Berry Trees, and it was Bent Joggom Counterdance who distributed the water.

The Song of the Rain

(By Bent Joggom Counterdance)

First she peeps slyly over the mountain-top,

And her eyes are shy;

And she laughs softly.

And from far off she beckons with one hand.

Her bracelets shimmer and her necklaces shine,

She calls softly.

She tells the winds of the dance.

And she invites them, for the yard is wide and the wedding grand.

The big game rush up from the plain.

They dam up on the hilltop.

Their nostrils stretch wide,

And they swallow the wind;

And they bend down, to see her faint tracks in the sand.

The little folk under the earth hear the drag of her feet,

And they creep closer and sing softly:

“Our Sister! Our Sister! You’ve come! You’ve come!”

And her necklaces shake,

Until even the ancient ones on their sleeping mats wake up in the night

And they talk in the dark;

And her copper ring catches the last light of the sun.

On her forehead is the fiery plume of the mountain eagle;

She steps down from the heights;

She spreads out the grey kaross with both her arms;

The wind loses its breath.

Oh, the dance of our Sister!

Thus ends this tale and my citation of my translation, in which I left the term “kaross” (a skin cloak or blanket) untranslated.

Scheub says that “African oral and literary works have had as their central aim the work of transforming the order prevailing in reality” (Scheub 46; emphasis added). He goes on: “the performance is not simply a reflection of that culture; it is the essence of an experience of history and art. The work of art bridges the generations” (Scheub 46).[21] These words seem eminently applicable to “The Song of the Rain,” and to the other Dwaalstories. As a presentation of the possibility of the transcendence of brute power by creativity, of the idea that creative energy and vision are as socially necessary and fulfilling as rain is to the earth, bringing relief in times of dire need, it is hard not to feel the power and value of this tale – both its enduring relevance and its testimony to the value of the well-nigh vanished culture from which it emanated. Its intimation of the unsuspected potential carried by a fully attuned artistic vision (characterised by its delicacy, ecological and social sensitivity and by the exhilaration it evokes by means of an imaginative insight shown capable of dethroning the brute orders and demands of the merely mighty) is a notion that the members of the human race keep on forgetting and constantly need to be reminded of.

The ironies of the survival of the Dwaalstories in the language of a people in many instances so hostile to the Khoisan themselves are plentiful, but the sense of wonder that these stories generate remains undiminished. Through all their meanderings the tales have retained – as well as proved – the vitality of a culture recognisably wise, playful and celebratory in its pursuit of the joy of survival, though not without social stresses and individuals who exacerbate or cause them. Without inducing mere self-indulgent nostalgia in their readers (since the Dwaalstories depict quite tough social struggles, adjustments and tensions), these four stories give enlightening glimpses of a Khoisan culture that is (still) inclusive and self-adjusting, probably at a stage pre-dating major Euro-colonial or rival ethnic incursion. That we can still, today, catch the vivid glimpses of that vanished lifestyle in a language that was and was not its own, is unsettlingly ironic – and yet almost miraculous. I conclude on the expression of a desire by //Kábbo (a name which means “dream”), one of Bleek’s San informants, a wish rendered as follows in English: “that I may listening turn backwards (with my ears) to my feet’s heels, on which I went; while I feel that a story is the wind” (qtd. in Bleek and Lloyd 303). How astonishingly that image expresses the Dwaalstories’ elusive, enriching and ever-free qualities.

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___. Morning Yet on Creation Day. London: Heinemann, 1975.

___. “What Has Literature Got to Do with It?” Hopes 154-170.

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