https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7452-5083
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ABSTRACT
This study examines songs incorporated into stories that were collected by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd from their ǀXam-speaking consultants in late nineteenth century South Africa. Although many of the stories in the Bleek–Lloyd corpus have been discussed by scholars in the fields of literature, anthropology, and history, no evidence exists that any of the songs have been performed since they were transcribed in 1879. This study aims to re-introduce several songs in the ǀXam language formerly spoken by small communities of San people from the northernmost sector of South Africa. We hope that these songs will be adopted by South African choirs to enrich their repertoires. Moreover, we aim to present ǀXam songs as the earliest examples of transcribed music in South Africa based on the melodic possibilities of the musical bow. We attempt to contextualise the songs through descriptions of the !Ui languages, music making of !Ui-speaking people, and influence of pitch production of the musical bow on the song melodies. Finally, we compare two sets of notated melodies of ǀXam songs separated by several years and present them as examples of music influenced by the musical bow in South Africa.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Bushmen of the Kalahari, !Gubi Tietei (1995).
3 See Appendix 4 for notes on ǀXam sounds.
4 Since the discovery of Nǀuu, various linguists have worked on documenting and describing the language and its grammar (Collins and Namaseb Citation2011) and compiling a dictionary (Sands and Jones Citation2022).
5 The notebooks of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd (as well as Dorothea Bleek) are available online at http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za (last accessed Sept 15, 2023). The digital archivist assigned the notebooks unique numbers, presented here in square brackets for reference.
6 One of the authors of this article (Du Plessis) is currently engaged in a study of the language, which should enable translations that accurately reflect its numerous subtle distinctions of tense, aspect, modality, and evidentiality and respect the many nuances and implications of its clausal dependencies.
7 Although his work was only belatedly published in 1905, Stow conducted his fieldwork at approximately the same time that Lloyd was working with ǀHangǂkassō (Kirby Citation1936a: 218).
8 No orthography existed for ǀXam, and the work of Bleek and Lloyd included a long and constantly evolving process of trying to understand the phonetics and phonology of the language and devise methods of representing its phonemes. Consequently, their spellings are highly variable. The original spellings are preserved in any direct quotations from the manuscripts. Thus, some quotes use ‘goura’ instead of ‘gora’. Henry Balfour noted that colonists variously represented the indigenous name for the gora as ‘goura, gowra, goorra, gurah, gcurra, gcorra, gora, gorah, gorrah, t’Gorrah, t’goerra, korá’ (Citation1902: 157).
9 The sentence meaning ‘I [sic] shall make a bow’ (more correctly, ‘you (sg) will make a bow’) is contrasted with ‘I made a bow’ to establish how the future and past tenses are expressed.
10 The thomo is similar to the traditional uhadi of the Xhosa-speaking people.
11 Lloyd spelled this as ‘ǃkummi’; however, she had a habit of representing the lax vowel [ʌ] using the letter ‘u’ with a doubled consonant after it She occasionally added a note on a dictionary slip to explain that this was ‘the sound of “u” in English “bun”’ (from the unpublished manuscript dictionary slips of Bleek and Lloyd (Citation1870–1875; 1875–1884), Bleek Collection (BC 151), University of Cape Town Libraries).
12 Bleek’s later notebooks have been scanned and are now also available online at http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za.
13 For discussion of this fieldwork, see Bank (Citation2006).
14 The ǀ'Auni and Naro were living close together in the 1930s, and, as Olivier (Citation2006: 8) noted, they seem to have shared a common culture, including musical traditions.
15 Using the best portable technology available at the time, Dorothea Bleek made a number of recordings onto wax cylinders. These have been restored and digitised and are now available in the Special Collections of the University of Cape Town Libraries. However, the words in these dancing songs are too few and indistinct to enable identification of the languages.
16 This compact disc, ‘Extinct South African Khoisan Languages’ Citation1997, is a compilation of early recordings from the archives. The accompanying booklet provides details about the performers, when the recordings were made, and in some cases, transcriptions of the lyrics into Afrikaans.
17 So-called San communities are by no means homogeneous, and the languages spoken by hunter-gatherer communities in other parts of southern Africa are entirely unrelated to ǃUi-Taa.
18 Some researchers incorrectly attributed this photograph to Wilhelm Bleek, who passed away in 1875. Others mistakenly stated that ǀUma was ǀXam (e.g., Vogels and Lenssen-Erz Citation2017), despite Lloyd’s notebook entries, which are available on The Digital Bleek and Lloyd.
19 Latest census reports for South Africa are available online at http://www.statssa.gov.za.
20 The app, Saasi Epsi, can be downloaded from https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.sadilar.mdaf&hl=en.
21 Out of respect for ǀXam speakers and a desire for authenticity, we postpone attempts to read any ‘deeper’ meanings into the lyrics until we have a thorough understanding of the language.
22 Although Bleek and Lloyd noted the Moon’s use of ‘special clicks’ in some stories, there is no indication of their occurrence in this particular song. The words of this song are the same as in No. 9, whereas the melody differs.
23 Ant pupae.
24 In her revised transcriptions, Dorothea Bleek used a colon after a vowel (e.g. a:) to indicate length. Some nouns and verbs have additional morphology in the form of suffixes. In such cases, Bleek and Lloyd used a trema for vowels (e.g. ä) to indicate that they were not the offglide of a diphthong but a separate element. An example occurs in the name of the Moon’s wife, ǁKo̰öng.
25 Kirby (Citation2013 [Citation1934]: 262).
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Notes on contributors
Alethea de Villiers
Alethea de Villiers is Professor of Music at Nelson Mandela University. Her research interests and publications are in the fields of music education policy, multicultural education, democratic citizenship, contemporary commercial music (CCM), and cultural studies.
Menán du Plessis
Menán du Plessis is a linguist in the field of comparative African languages, focusing on diverse ‘Khoisan’ languages. Her book, Kora: A Lost Khoisan Language of the Early Cape and the Gariep, was published in 2018, and she is currently compiling a grammar book and dictionary of the ǀXam language.