By small wagon with full tent

By small wagon with full tent Dorothea Bleek’s Journey to Kakia, June to August 1913 Jill Weintroub

LLAREC: Series in visual history Centre for Curating the Archive, University of Cape Town

LLAREC Series in Visual History Series editor: Pippa Skotnes Production and design editor: Pippa Skotnes Layout and design: Cara van der Westhuizen LLAREC (Lucy Lloyd Archive, Resource and Exhibition Centre) The Centre for Curating the Archive at the University of Cape Town Hiddingh Campus University of Cape Town 31-37 Orange Street 8001 Cape Town www.cca.uct.ac.za ISBN 978-0-620-51061-5 Text copyright: Jill Weintroub Copyright for the photographs and for |xam texts is vested in various curating institutions and in individual copyright holders. No part of this publicaton may be reproduced in any format or by any means without the prior permission of the copyright holders and the publisher. Enquiries should be made to the Director of the Centre for Curating the Archive, University of Cape Town.

By small wagon with full tent Dorothea Bleek’s Journey to Kakia, June to August 1913 Jill Weintroub

This book takes a first step towards opening the archive of Dorothea Bleek to public view. It offers an introduction to the biography of Dorothea Bleek, and examines her life and scholarship in a way that brings out complexities, idiosyncrasies and unknowns. It asks that she be considered as more than the daughter of Wilhelm Bleek, but as an intellectual in her own right who made a particular contribution to the scholarship that emerged in the early years of the South African academy.

I am deeply grateful for the support and encouragement of Professor Pippa Skotnes, Director of the Centre for Curating the Archive at the University of Cape Town, whose generosity has enabled this project to become a reality. I thank the CCA’s project manager, Thomas Cartwright, and Cara van der Westhuizen for their expertise and assistance during the past months while the book was in production. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is hereby acknowledged for its financial support of this project.

Professor Carolyn Hamilton and colleagues at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at UCT are to be thanked for their interest in and engagement with some of the early drafts of these texts during our quarterly workshops in 2009 and 2010.

Finally, I thank Professor Premesh Lalu and colleagues at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, who were there as my ideas around Dorothea Bleek originated and grew, and Hannelore van Rhyneveld, whose translations of Käthe Woldmann’s letters have contributed to this work.

for Clive

Knowing the landscape

Knowing the landscape – intimately and personally – was central to Dorothea Bleek’s scholarship and research.

Her many fieldwork trips across southern Africa during the opening decades of the twentieth century were crucial to the establishment of this kind of knowledge. But her field trips were also essential to her sense of self, as she made herself in the image of her father and aunt, both celebrated students of San languages in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Her scholarship was crucial to her identity as an independent researcher working in the newly established field of ‘Native Studies’ (later African Studies) as the discipline began to emerge in the South African academy. It gave her the opportunity to step outside the narrow domestic spaces that would otherwise have been the lot of an independent woman living in suburban Newlands, near Cape Town, before and between the two world wars.

Dorothea’s fieldwork was fundamental to her lifelong project to fully understand the people she called ‘Bushmen’, and the key to that knowledge lay in experience. Her extended project of field-based research throughout southern Africa during the 1920s and 1930s was an integral part of fulfilling her life’s ambition. She remained suspicious of the ‘armchair’ scholars of Europe throughout her career, worried that their method of studying objects and people removed from the landscapes and environments in which they lived could lead to misinterpretation. Bleek’s critical references to the ‘armchair’ scholars of Europe surface at several moments in her personal correspondence. She believed that only by observing people in their environment could accurate knowledge, as opposed to distortions, be achieved. In May of 1932, for example, she expressed in a letter (BC 240 Box 4) to her friend Käthe Woldmann her doubts about the German ethnologist Professor Richard Karutz’s ability to engage with texts from the |xam notebooks without having had personal experience of the people and their landscapes: “These things are dealt with much better by people who have seen the country and its people themselves; the armchair scholars often lose their bearings,” she wrote. Later, in October of 1938, in Left: This studio portrait of Dorothea Bleek was taken in London in 1929 (BC 151 2008 #200). Details (clockwise from top left): Dorothea Bleek’s sketch map of Angola preserved inside her Angola notebook (BC 151 A3.22); Envelope addressed to Dorothea Bleek at “La Rochelle”, Newlands (BC 151); Part of a royalty statement from Methuen & Co, publishers of two of Bleek’s books on rock art (BC 151 C18).

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Below: This studio portrait of the Bleek family was taken in Charlottenburg, Berlin, in 1899. It shows Jemima Bleek seated second from the right, with her daughters (from left) May, Helma, Margie, Dorothea and Edith (BC 151 B12.22).

Cameos: Dr Wilhelm Bleek and Dr Lucy Lloyd.

Opposite page, top: Detail of a charcoal rubbing of a rock engraving made by Dorothea Bleek while doing fieldwork at Sandfontein (now Buitepos) in the South West Africa Protectorate during 1920 to 1921 (Iziko SAM WDB_01_5RB).

Middle and bottom: Details of a sketch book and rock art sketches preserved among Dorothea Bleek’s papers at the University of Cape Town (BC 151 G3.1).

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a letter to the University of the Witwatersrand musicologist Professor Percival Kirby, she commented: “I am very glad you have pointed out the danger of incorrect labelling of specimens, especially to the armchair scientists of Europe, whose knowledge is merely based on that sort of object. I wish every would-be archaeologist or ethnologist would make a journey into the blue, before settling down to his study table” (BC 750 A).

Schooled in Germany and Switzerland in the second half of the nineteenth century, Bleek may well have been exposed to the ‘Volksgeist’ tradition of Johann Gottfried Herder.

While studying to be a teacher in Berlin, she may have heard about the ‘Kulturvölker’ vs ‘Naturvölker’ philosophy of the ethnologists of imperial Germany, of which Adolf Bastian, director of the Völkerkunde Museum in Berlin and later a professor at Berlin University, was a leading proponent. Bastian, who had spent twenty-five years in the field, believed ‘elementary ideas’ (‘Elementargedanken’), which were identical and shared by all peoples but were hidden behind humanity’s cultural diversity, could with difficulty be observed through careful, empirical study in the field. ‘Völkergedanken’ or patterns of thought resulting from interaction with the environment or other groups emerged within identifiable zones where geographical and historical influences shaped specific cultures. H. Glenn Penny (2008), in an investigation of the history of German language studies, has suggested that for intellectuals such as Bastian this interaction was the basis of all historical development, and it could be observed most readily in certain geographical areas such as rivers, coastlines, and mountain passes. Understanding the unique environmental context in which each culture took shape was, for Bastian, critical for gaining insight into the universal character of the original human being (Bunzl and Glenn Penny 2003).

In her turn, Bleek believed the San were ‘natural’ (‘Natürlich’) people, the ‘original man’ (‘Urmenschen’) and the ‘earliest type of man that still exists’. They could best be understood by close study of their interactions with other people in their environment,

and within the particular landscapes in which they lived. As with language, she believed their interactions in the landscape and with other people provided essential clues as to the particular nature of their being.

Dorothea Bleek had grown up hearing the |xam and !kun languages spoken around her. She was born on 26 March 1873, the fourth in a line of five daughters. From birth she shared her Mowbray home with her parents, siblings and aunts as well as a succession of |xam prisoners whom her father and aunt had interviewed in a project to study their language, folklore and cosmology.

She was two years old when her father died, leaving the household grief-stricken but determined to continue the work. Dorothea Bleek would have been six years old and much more aware of what was going on around her when the !kun children arrived at Charlton House in Mowbray. In the absence of documentary evidence, one cannot imagine what kinds of interactions the six-year-old Dorothea would have engaged in with them. Tamme, !nanni, |uma and Da were refugee children who had been taken from their native northern Namibia and eventually found their way to Cape Town in 1879 and 1880. Of all the informants visiting the household, I would like to speculate that it was their presence that made the biggest impression on the young Dorothea. For a start, they were closest to her in age. Second, Aunt Lucy encouraged them to draw and sketch, and the young Dorothea may have been allowed to participate, or she may have watched as they made the watercolour drawings for which they are now most remembered.

These two years in which the !kun children shared her home (four in the case of Da) may well have been crucial ones in directing the young Dorothea to her later scholarship.

At that young age she no doubt developed an ear for their language which stood her in good stead later when she helped her Aunt Lucy edit some of the notebook texts for inclusion in the book Specimens of Bushman folklore (1911), and later still on the many field trips she embarked on years later.

Dorothea Bleek’s life and work are a memorial to the passion and dedication with which she continued the research begun by her father and aunt, and to the additional research she undertook into the lives and languages of southern African people. For her entire adult life, she worked at continuing and expanding the “Bushman researches” embarked upon by her father and her aunt in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Following closely in the footsteps of both, Dorothea Bleek substantially extended their city-based work by embarking on extensive field trips throughout southern Africa as part of her project ‘to continue and work well out’ the ‘joint Bushman studies’ begun by Dr Wilhelm Bleek and Dr Lucy Lloyd in 1870 (BC 151 B3.6).

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From Kanye to the Desert

Dorothea Bleek’s 1913 trip to Kakia, and other moments from her archive

Towards the end of June 1913, Dorothea Bleek and her friend Margarethe Vollmer caught the train from Cape Town to Lobatse, a border town in what is now Botswana.

This first leg of their journey covered some 695 miles, following the great Bechuanaland Railway northwards through the eastern edge of Bechuanaland before crossing into the then Rhodesia on its way to Victoria Falls.

Their destination was Kakia (now Khakhea), a village situated roughly halfway between the regions now demarcated as the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park to the north and the Khutse Game Reserve to the south-west. Dorothea’s aim was to collect language samples from the ‘Masarwa’, a group of people whom she described as ‘dwelling within walking distance of their Bechuana masters’. That they had no ‘Bushman name’ of their own but used a ‘Sechuana word denoting any kind of Bushman’ to identify themselves, suggested to Bleek that these people had lived ‘in subjection’ to other groups for a long time (Bleek 1929).

It was nine years since Dorothea Bleek’s return to South Africa in 1904. She had arrived in Cape Town, followed by her mother and sisters Edith and Helma, and returned to the family home at Charlton House, Mowbray, soon after the end of the South African War. Shortly thereafter, she took a teaching position at Rocklands Girls’ School in Cradock in the eastern Cape. For Dorothea at least, the call to return to South Africa had been strong. Her teaching position in Cradock placed her close to landscapes rich in rock art and her trips into the field with her colleague Helen Tongue in search of rock art sites gave her a taste of the thrill of fieldwork. These adventures culminated in their painted reproductions being exhibited in both Cape Town and London in 1908, and also in a volume of rock art copies published with the title Bushman paintings (1909). While M. Helen Tongue was cited as the author and main copyist for the book, Dorothea was credited for contributing the explanatory text that accompanied the reproductions. In addition, Dorothea and elder sister Edith contributed a jointly written essay titled “Notes on the Bushmen”. Their collaboration featured a collection Bottom right and opposite: Dorothea Bleek and Margarethe Vollmer with unidentified members of their transport crew pose on their “small wagon with full tent” for a photograph taken by Bleek’s guide and interpreter Ompilletsi. Intriguingly, Bleek recorded the moment in her diary (see pages 28, 33 and 41). (Iziko SAM 965) Top right: The cover of the notebook in which Dorothea Bleek recorded her Kakia diary (BC151 A3.6).

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Dorothea Bleek’s deep interest in rock art is reflected in the many sketches and reproductions preserved among her papers. Here are shown (top row) details of watercolour reproductions produced by Helen Tongue when they travelled together in 1905-1907 (Iziko SAM); (middle row) charcoal rubbings of geometric etchings which Dorothea Bleek found in the field at BabiBabi near Sandfontein in 1920 (Iziko SAM); (bottom row) sketches preserved among her papers at UCT (BC151 G3.1); and (opposite) a reproduction produced by Helen Tongue at Buffelsfontein, which she described in her book as a ‘curious painting of a vulture attacking a dead eland’ (Tongue 1909: 14).

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of anecdotes drawn from childhood memories of their family home shared with a series of |xam and !kun informants.

With the rock art book successfully published, Dorothea’s attention turned to the |xam language. In 1910 and 1911 she travelled to the northern Cape in search of descendants of the people interviewed by Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek. She travelled through the dry Prieska and Kenhardt districts, reaching as far as Gordonia, Griqualand West, the southern Kalahari and the lower reaches of the Malopo River. There, she had gathered samples of the language of the Xatia people, which Dorothea described in the introduction to her book Comparative vocabularies of Bushmen languages (1929) as “merely a dialect of the |auni speech”, as well as the language spoken by the ||η-!ke, which Bleek translated as “home people”. What she already knew of the |xam language spoken by the ‘colonial Bushmen’ who had been interviewed by her father and aunt allowed Dorothea Bleek to classify these newly sampled language variations as part of a ‘southern’ group of San languages.

For these early trips, the guiding motivation was to try to find descendants or relatives of the men and women her father and aunt had interviewed during their ‘Bushman researches’ at Mowbray from 1870 to 1884. The trips also provided an excellent opportunity for Dorothea to put her language training into practice for the first time. It was a chance to apply her knowledge, acquired formally through several years of study at universities in Continental Europe and England as well as informally while working on the notebook texts with Lucy Lloyd, to conditions on African soil. While in Europe, Dorothea had studied African languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and at the School of Oriental Studies in Berlin. In Charlottenburg (near Berlin), and in London, Dorothea and Lucy Lloyd had worked together closely with the |xam and !kun narratives gathered so many years previously in the sitting room at Charlton House.

Lucy had been determined that these should be published and, with Dorothea’s help, spent years translating and editing extracts from the thousands of pages of narratives for publication. After years of struggle, the book appeared eventually in 1911 under the title Specimens of Bushman folklore. For Lucy, its appearance gave substance to ||kabbo’s wish that the stories of his people become known by way of books.

Freed from the task of shepherding the texts through the presses, Lloyd thereafter returned to Cape Town and Charlton House in 1912. Both Lucy and Dorothea must have been glad to be reunited. It meant that they could resume their mentoring and learning programme, and that Dorothea could draw on Lucy’s detailed knowledge and Left: This snapshot of Dorothea Bleek is thought to date to 1904, the year she returned to Cape Town from Europe (BC 151 2008 #198). Background: A notebook cover and inside page of one of Dorothea Bleek’s rock art notebooks (BC151 A3.24).

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close experience of spoken |xam and !kun languages for a few more months. It was an opportunity that would end with Lucy’s death in August of 1914.

Dorothea planned and executed her first language field trips in 1910 and 1911 despite the loss of her mother Jemima, who had died in October of 1909 at the farm near Somerset West of her daughter Helma (Wilhelmina) and her husband Henry Hepburn Bright. Dorothea’s 1910 trip was undertaken in collaboration with the South African Museum in Cape Town. Bleek assisted the museum modeller James Drury to identify people deemed to be ‘pure Bushmen’. These people were used as models to produce life casts for display in the museum. The Northern Cape and southern Kalahari trips would be the first of a series of expeditions which Bleek engaged in throughout her life. Dorothea, it turned out, would be the only Bleek daughter who successfully expanded the familial project of home-based anthropology into a field study spanning a large part of the southern African landscape, with forays into Angola and Tanganyika as well.

In terms of knowledge production, Dorothea built on the linguistic work of her father, and extended the interests in social life and culture which Lucy Lloyd had begun to explore in her interactions with the |xam prisoners all those years previously.

Perhaps Dorothea was influenced by Lucy’s sympathetic engagement with the lifeways, rituals, daily life and family arrangements of her |xam informants. Dorothea’s research also extended that of her father, whose language research had focused mainly on the myths, legends and folklore of the San people, and tried to link them to other groups on the basis of their shared phonetic and grammatical structure. This was in line with Wilhelm’s schooling in the ancient discipline of philology, which sought to trace the origins of and interconnections among humans across the world through the study of language and folklore.

For Dorothea, the samples of San languages that she documented and studied, along with the bodies, rituals, folklore and material culture, provided the material for a search for the essence or soul of a people. Dorothea built a career based on studying the people she called ‘Bushmen’. Long before it became acceptable scholarly practice to do so, she used the narratives collected by her father and aunt to interpret rock paintings, which she described as the most important historical documents left by the earliest inhabitants of the country. Along with rock art, she studied the languages of the San and, through observing the San in their ‘natural’ environment, developed a particular impression of the people’s essence and spirit.

Top right: A view of Charton House, the Bleek family home at Mowbray near Cape Town.

Below: Pages from one of the research notebooks in which Dorothea Bleek recorded her 1928 trip to rock art sites identified decades earlier by George Stow (BC151 A3.24-26).

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Left: This cabinet print from the Bleek family album is inscribed in Dorothea Bleek’s hand: “My boarding school, at Bonn, from the garden. D.B.” (BC151 2008 #195).

Above: A ‘carte de visite’ portrait of Dorothea Bleek taken by Theodor Penz Photograph Atelier of Charlottenburg, Berlin, dated to 1899 (BC151 2008 #179).

Opposite page: Right: The cover of Dorothea Bleek’s research notebook recorded at Windhoek jail in November 1920 (BC151 A3.12).

Top left: Helma and Jemima Bleek photographed in Berlin in 1903 (Scott Deetz 2007: 75).

Bottom left: A studio portrait taken by the photographer Theodor Penz of Charlottenburg, annotated on the back with the names Doris, Helma and Margie. It is dated to 1899.

Dorothea Bleek was 25 at the time, and it was the year Margie Bleek began her medical studies in Zurich (BC151 2008#196).

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A decade after the death of her father, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, however, Dorothea and her family took leave of the familiar landscapes of the Cape and Charlton House and relocated to Europe. Here they would remain for some twenty years, where Jemima and her daughters could count on the support of Wilhelm Bleek’s family in their daily lives. In Europe, the Bleeks divided their domestic and educational lives between Berlin and Clarens in Switzerland. All of the younger Bleek women became fluent in French and German and spoke English at home. A photograph in the Bleek-Lloyd collection hints that Dorothea spent some time at a boarding school in Bonn. All of the Bleek daughters achieved excellent levels of education. Margarethe (Margie) attended medical school in Zurich while Wilhelmina (Helma) studied music and trained as a concert pianist. Margie died tragically in 1902, aged 31, of a fever contracted during her medical training. Mabel (May) married and remained in Germany. She lived in Halle, which eventually became part of East Germany after World War Two, until her death in 1953. Helma returned to Cape Town where she and Dorothea would live in close proximity and later share a home in the southern suburbs. Their ‘Bushman’ inheritance in some way or other touched the other Bleek daughters as well later in life, although only for Dorothea would it become a lifelong passion. Helma would deploy her musical knowledge to assist Dorothea years later to produce a musical score for a song recorded on a wax cylinder during one of her expeditions into the field. Edith, as we have seen, collaborated with Dorothea to produce the essay that became part of Helen Tongue’s Bushman paintings in 1909.

Dorothea may, during her tertiary education in the closing years of the nineteenth century, have come across the ‘Kulturvölker’ vs ‘Naturvölker’ model offered by the early ethnologist Adolf Bastian, which he used to distinguish the many and varied peoples of the world that exploration was beginning to reveal. Much of Dorothea’s field practices and methods suggest she followed Bastian’s insistence on extensive fieldwork in which the researcher would exhaustively collect samples of material evidence from the field. These would be preserved for comparison and interpretation at a later time.

Following the ‘Volksgeist’ tradition, Dorothea went in search of the ‘elemental’ ideas of ‘natural’ peoples. These were difficult to discern but could, with careful observation, be revealed through close study of ‘natural’ people in their environments and landscapes.

According to Bastian, the elementary ideas of a people could, after careful study, be revealed through their interactions in their environments, among themselves and with other groups. Thus Bleek’s engagement with the landscapes she passed through and the people she encountered was complex and winnowed by a range of conflicting and contradictory ideas.

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By 1913 it was a fairly well-established pattern for Bleek to travel with a companion, sometimes, but not always, someone who was engaged in research like herself. Her first field trips in search of rock art were in the company of fellow teacher Helen Tongue. In 1910 and 1911, she travelled with the young journalist Olga Racster, and later with the botanist Maria Wilman, a fellow scientist who would publish on rock engravings of the Northern Cape and who later became director of the McGregor Museum in Kimberley. On a later trip to Angola, Bleek travelled again with a botanist, this time Mary Pocock.

By 1913, then, as she packed up and made ready to set out for Kakia, Dorothea was no stranger to the rigours, excitement and perhaps also freedoms of travel. Journeying by ox wagon through desert areas was not a new experience. She was beginning to develop a style and pattern of doing things that would harden over the years into a more clearly defined and formalised practice of fieldwork. She knew already that it would be necessary to distribute ‘gifts’ in exchange for language samples, genealogical information and body measurements. Her field savvy was such that she knew that bolts of patterned cloth, ‘duks’ (doeks) or headscarves, tobacco, salt and sugar were items in great demand out in the ‘field’.

Her co-traveller on the Kakia trip was Margarethe Vollmer, or Ete as Bleek called her in her diary. Apparently on the trip purely for companionship, Margarethe busied herself with reading, sewing and ‘fancy work’. She also practised her skills as a photographer – at one point, Bleek’s diary records them searching for doves for Ete to photograph. During the journey, Ete developed a bad cold, which Dorothea described in her diary as ‘tiresome’.

Dorothea’s research notes show that she read the desert landscape through modernist eyes. In the diary she kept during her trip to Kakia, she used phrases such as ‘park-like’, ‘pretty copse of bushes’, ‘grassy country with graceful trees and bushes’ to describe the different camps and stop-over sites (or ‘halts’) on the journey. She commented often on the beautiful trees that dotted the landscape. Many of their overnight or meal stops were described as ‘lovely’ or ‘pretty’. From day one, Dorothea thought it important to record the weather each day, from icy cold in the early morning to very hot and occasionally very windy later on. Her first diary entry set the tone for the rest.

Monday June 23rd 1913: Margarethe Vollmer & self left Kanye for the desert at 5.30pm. Lovely weather – dry & cool. Outspanned to the West of Kanye after 8pm in pretty grassy country with graceful trees and bushes. We have a small wagon with full tent drawn by sixteen oxen. Our transport man has gone off to find his horse – but 4 natives three men & a boy are in attendance.

Cameos of Jemima Bleek (top) and her daughters Dorothea, Margie, May, Helma and Edith, from a group portrait taken in 1899 (BC151 B12.22).

Opposite: Dorothea Bleek’s journey to Kakia occasioned a mention in the Mafeking Mail.

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Opposite and above: The entries in this diary show that the weather, the landscape and vegetation were details that caught Dorothea Bleek’s attention while travelling (BC151 A3.6).

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This first diary entry introduced a pattern of writing and thought that she repeated throughout her diary: Tuesday 24th June: Fine sunny weather, cool breeze. After breakfast trekked for about 4 hours to the west – or n. west. Outspanned in the dry river bed, with water pits dry in it. Large number of huts scattered up & down the valley – cultivated ground in valley. Quantities of oxen, cattle and sheep came down to drink. Small herd boys dip out water from the pits into troughs dry in the ground for them. Spent afternoon quietly – walking and reading. Strong wind got up at times. Fine cold night.

And two days later: Thursday 26th June: Cold, cloudy day, biting wind early, less later. Little gleams of sun in the afternoon. Stayed all day at same place, Leroyan, waiting for our real guide Ompilletsi, to come up. In afternoon one man left. Ompilletsi appeared on horseback in the evening having come by more northerly road. He brought another man to go into desert with us. Spent quiet day reading, writing & Ete sewing. Entered some words for dictionary. Repacked part of wagon.

Bought milk, […] prints 3 yds. A good many people turned up here, from apparently nowhere.

Several herds of oxen etc came to be watered.

Dorothea’s way of rendering the landscape in words, in her Kakia diary, was something she repeated many years later, this time in a letter written from the Zambesi River in April of 1925 to her niece Marjorie Bright. Here again Bleek would describe the landscape in painterly, even cinematic, detail: This is our seventh day on the river, and each day has been different, though in some ways the same. At first we were mostly not in the real riverbed at all, but on the overflowed land on the north bank, the men poling, not paddling. There were lovely flowers of all sorts within reach very often, but not much distant view, at least only in bits. The last days we have been in the river proper, today with rather overhanging banks, in parts rocky, and with fine woods sloping down to either bank. Yesterday we passed a very beautiful island with palms in between the other trees.

Part of the land on south bank looked like a beautiful park.

Bleek’s written evocation of daily travel on the road to Kakia established a context for her research that encompassed experiences ranging from the everyday and expected, to the extraordinary and unexpected. Chores such as tidying and packing the wagon marked out the ordinary, daily chores of travel by ox wagon. The presence and deployment of instruments of science (camera and measuring instruments) marked out the extraordinary. Later, when they were settled at Kakia, Margarethe intriguingly and for reasons never explained, determined to take photographs of doves:

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Friday 18th: Cold early – looked for doves to photograph. Masarwas came. Mr Openshaw photographed two men. Madzhuinki & Olsher. Bought blanket off him. In afternoon Openshaws left. They took £1 [?] for museum. Walked across pan.

Sunday 20th: Warmer morning. Ete took photos of doves. MacIntyre breakfasted & dined with us & helped translate. Good man. Masarwas here most of the day. Bought a kaross.

Walked across pan.

Early on in the journey a rhythm was established of periods of travel interspersed with breaks of varying duration. There were sometimes relentless periods of trekking.

At other times these were short and interrupted. Sometimes they travelled during the cooler parts of the day, either early in the morning, or in the later part of the afternoon and sometimes well into the night, especially when the moon made it possible to see the route. At other times they travelled through the day, or spent the entire day in one place. The availability of water, for both humans and oxen, dictated their movements. Breaks were had for meals or for sleeping and watering the oxen.

Sometimes there was time for relaxation. When possible, Dorothea read and worked on her dictionary. Her Kakia diary reveals that her work on the leading achievement of her career, her posthumously published A Bushman dictionary (1956), had begun way back in 1913. Margarethe, on the other hand, managed sewing and ‘fancy work’.

Dorothea enjoyed the wide open spaces and, especially once they were camped at Kakia, took frequent walks around their camps to nearby water holes or across the pans (dry or semi-dry lakes) that were always present. She also found time to sew a dress for one of the women she interviewed.

Monday 30th: Warmer today, cloudy early. Ompilletsi laid up in one of the huts. Masarwa woman did not turn up. Did trade in curios & a couple of pins. People round wagon most of the day. Tidied wagon & sorted some dictionary. Difficult work with many interruptions. Ete did fancy work. Could not leave on account of O’s toothache & poorliness. In evening hired guide to find Masarwa at Kakia. Promised him £1 if he produces them, grown men & women who speak the language. Oxen watered in evening.

Sunday 13th: Hot morning – light wind afterwards. Met Mr Openshore [sic] at well.

Masarwas came as usual. Worked at dress for one. Getting on with the language.

On another occasion, Dorothea practised target shooting against a tree: Friday 4th July: Clear morning – becoming hot later. All oxen watered at last.

Spent whole day at Legombe, tidied again, wrote, etc. Practiced with pistol on tree in evening. Said to be one Masarwa here, but he did not turn up. 2 wells with little water.

Natives sent by chief are digging a third with help of gunpowder.

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Above and opposite: Diary entries for 3-6 July (BC151 A3.6).

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Both women hurriedly wrote letters when they met a fellow traveller who was going in the direction of ‘home’.

Wednesday 25th June: Very cold, cloudy morning, icy wind. Made late start, about 10.30 – trekked till one. Outspanned in long grass – no water. Very long trek in afternoon past several dry pans. Country flatter, & stonier, vegetation the same, beautiful birds. After dark outspanned in stony ground near waterpits. One of McIntyre’s wagons outspanned nearby. Mc himself had gone on to Kanye already. Must have missed him somewhere. Gave letters to man of wagon to give Mrs Williams with enclosures for home. Afternoon warmer – bright sunshine & less wind. We trekked first south west, then west, & finally north west.

Wednesday 2nd July: Lovely morning – cool & sunny. Trekked from quite early till sunrise. Breakfast halt in pretty spot surrounded by trees & bushes. Trekked on till one o’clock on the way policeman passed with mule accompanied by native with saddled ox. He had been to fetch the Dutchman wanted by Govt to dig wells. Dutchman said to be far behind with wagon.

We quickly wrote letters & enclosed them in cover to Mr Drury. Gave man some food for journey. Long trek from 2.30 till dusk. Grassy country – sometimes open – & sometimes belts of trees. Trekked on again for a couple of hours after dark, again during night.

Marking the space of the extraordinary were the instruments of science that Dorothea brought with her, and her time spent taking language samples and translating, taking photographs of people and measuring them. She made frequent use of a camera, and produced at least fifty photographs both at Kakia and while travelling there from Lobatse. Right at the beginning of the trip, on 27 June, her first diarised record of using the camera found her deploying it to document spectacle rather than science: […] Saw old Masarwa at the midday halt – been brought up by Betchuwana since babyhood.

Photographed him in his get up. Picturesque old boy. […]

On another occasion she recorded taking photographs of men in any position they liked, presumably rather than forcing them into the full frontal and full-length profile photographic studies dictated by the terms of strict anthropometry: Monday 7th July: Clear day, warm. Pretty place. Near big dry pan. Looks like a salt pan. Nice lot of deep pits of water in two places. Walked over to see them. On our return we found one Masarwa here & seven more turned up. Had a long morning translating with them. Took a general photo of each man in whatever position they liked. Paid their master 2 pounds hire for them for a fortnight. He is Ompilletsi’s cousin. Took down some more during afternoon, gave each a duk or knife & food & sent them home. Lots of “shop” business doing too.

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Elsewhere, she schemed about enlisting the aid of a fellow sojourner at Kakia to take photographs of naked men: Tuesday 15th: Very cold early – ice in pannikins on wagon box. Moved from our tree to Mac’s vacated one. Ompilletsi & Keiner [an unidentified member of the transport team] off to Kakory – much nicer without them. Both young Openshaws came to tea this afternoon – heard a good deal from them. Masarwas here as usual. Elder Openshaw will try photograph men naked.

Walked in evening – cooler day altogether.

The photographic record of this trip, preserved along with Dorothea’s photographs from other trips, does not feature people in strict anthropometric poses. The collection, in the archive at the University of Cape Town (BC 151 J2.1) and preserved in a green photo album labelled ‘Postcards’, contains more than 300 photographs from Sandfontein and Angola as well as from Kakia. The prints are of poor quality, with subjects out of focus, little attention paid to framing, and scant understanding of the intricacies of proper lighting. On at least one occasion Dorothea’s shadow as she aims the camera can clearly be seen in the foreground of the image. Enthusiastic as she was in using the camera, the surviving collection of photographs indicates that she did not have a particular talent for the art.

As on subsequent trips, lists of measurements in her research notebooks confirm that she used her measuring instruments diligently. After just six days on the road to Kakia, on a day busy with visiting informants, trading and purchasing, Dorothea unpacked her measuring instruments: Sunday 29th: Cold morning. Sun & cloud. Warmer later in the day. Fair trek in morning to Kooi. Arrived about midday stopped all afternoon & night. Small village. Belt of trees round large pan in which are deep wells in what looks like soapstone. Very interesting to see men pull out water in old buckets on long thongs. Women fetch water in pots. One had eggshells too in a skin. Took photos. Masarwa women produced. Old woman evidently pure, daughters doubtful.

Hau old one’s name. Slave of Betshuana man taken in early childhood. Took 2 photos of them. Masters would not let them stay longer. Bought some Betshuana curios. Needles in cases.

Unpacked measuring instruments. Took longish walk round in afternoon. Ompilletsi bad with toothache.

The record shows that Dorothea measured many of the men and women who came to her wagon. The Kakia notebooks, alongside the diary, include lists of measurements and point to a highly intimate space of measuring. For example, Bleek recorded “breadth of thigh”, as well as depth of chest at inspiration as well as depth of chest

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Above: The final pages of Dorothea Bleek’s Kakia diary, in which she records that Ompilletsi took photographs on 31 July.

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Above: Notes on Dorothea Bleek’s visit to the ‘Lake Chrissie Bushmen’ follow directly on after the journal entries in her Kakia diary. She visited Lake Chrissie, in the then eastern Transvaal, in about 1915.

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at expiration. Another series of measurements focused on the head, recording “nasal height”, “nasal breadth” and “breadth of eyehole”. She also commented on the state of people’s teeth. At times, she recorded the person’s name. At other times, just a roman numeral at the top of each list of measurements was used to differentiate between lists of measurements.

Dorothea’s 1913 diary repeats with greater assurance many of the methods and approaches that she had tried out in 1910 and 1911 during her travels to Eyerdoppan, and on her way to KyKy and Tweerivieren. On both trips Bleek bought ‘curios’, exchanged gifts of clothing or food for language samples, and paid individuals to bring San people to her wagon for interviewing and, in some cases, photography. On the KyKy trip in 1911, the much more fragmented and disjointed written record makes many references to digging up graves and collecting skeletons. That was a practice Bleek may have indulged in because of the presence of her travelling companions, Scotty Smith and Maria Wilman.

Wednesday 15th [November 1911]: Cool, cloudy morning – went on early & again after breakfast. Reached (?). Outspanned near the Van Niekerk’s house. Friendly people.

Bushmen women came & took down words etc. After dinner digging party went to graves on Van Niekerk’s place. One very old – skeleton (??) had fallen to pieces, Bushman sitting up with knees up, one with a child’s grave bones, a few bones.One skeleton – woman – obtained. The very old man was buried in a sitting posture. Stayed the night to go on with graves. Duststorm in night. Cloudy night.

Thursday 16th: Dug up 4 graves & found 2 skeletons, one man, one boy – both on Blauw’s land. Man lying flat, boy lying curled on his side in hole off graves. Miss Wilman found lots of stones, eggshell beads & implements in B. werfs. I found a few too in afternoon. We went on in late afternoon & again after supper. Outspanned on stream.

It is unlikely that Bleek continued these practices on the journey to Kakia. Neither is there any indication that she made voice recordings, something she wrote about on several occasions on the earlier trip.

Dorothea’s trip to Kakia in 1913 was unique for a number of reasons. Firstly, she kept a daily diary on this trip, something she had done two years previously when travelling to the southern Kalahari with Maria Wilman, as we have seen above, but which she did not repeat on any of her subsequent trips. Secondly, there remains an intriguing visual remnant of the Kakia trip in the Iziko South African Museum’s ethnological photography collections. The image features Dorothea herself, her travelling companion Margarethe, and their wagon crew of three men. An entry in her diary records that her interpreter and guide Ompilletsi took the picture (reproduced

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above on pages 10 and 11) on 31 July, just two days before the end of the trip and their return to genteel domesticity and civilisation.

That it was a windy morning is confirmed by the image, where the women appear slightly windswept in comparison to the men, who address the camera assuredly.

Their full-length figures seem to crowd out the two women sitting in the wagon above.

Dorothea, in her striped blouse with high collar, is squinting into the sun. Margarethe has on a cardigan with silk bow at her throat. The moment captured in the image comes right at the end of the recorded part of Dorothea’s journey. The party was well on the road back to Khanye, and travelling hard to reach the end of the trip. The final very brief entries in Bleek’s diary describe the photographic moment wedged between extended periods of trekking interrupted with stops for meals as the trip rushed to its end.

Thursday 31st July: Very windy. Still at Lottakan in the morning. Photos taken by Omp of us in wagon. Started after dinner. Trekked all afternoon & most of the night.

Friday 1st August: Outspanned for breakfast in lovely spot. Trekked on to Kanye in the afternoon.

Left & opposite: Handmade bags (Iziko South African Museum’s ethnological collections).

It is intriguing that Bleek’s interactions with Ompilletsi, ostensibly her guide but also deployed to translate and interpret Masarwa and other languages, was such that she gave him her camera to take the photograph. Like the image he produced, it speaks to the possibility of complex interactions that could not be encoded in and cannot be corroborated by any documents or texts that remain as a record of the trip.

However, the record that remains of the trip allows one to build a picture of Dorothea’s emerging field practice and the methods she developed in the course of her work. The journal entries record a lively trade in both ‘curios’ and staple food items which she and her party required on the trail. Bleek was always on the lookout for objects of material culture and was willing to trade or purchase items she deemed to be peculiar to San culture. She bought bags, a hyena skin and, once, towards the end of the trip, a kaross. Earlier, she tried unsuccessfully to purchase a string of bones and bits of carved hoof from a passing Bakalahari man, who threw these to foretell the future.

Saturday 28th [June]: Fine warm morning. Started fairly early. Long trek through flat grassy country, few trees & bushes about. Met Klukowe’s wagon a little before reaching Makarane pan. He showed us many skins – Lebalobulokwan – Klose, Letsie, & others. Halted at midday near the pan. Had guineafowl for dinner & made [?]. Filled up with water. Sold meat and sugar. Our axebearer went on ahead. Sorry. Trekked on late in the afternoon. Met Bakalahari with string of bones & bits of carved hoof. Foretold future by throwing them on the ground. Would not sell. Halted long after dark in open grass country. Trees & bushes have been getting fewer of late. One of Klukown’s men, a slave of his Basutoman, was a Kokalachadi

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Above and opposite: Pages from one of Dorothea Bleek’s Kakia notebooks showing vocabulary and a line illustration of a method of trapping small game, and (opposite) more vocabulary and a short note on ritual scarification (BC151 A3.7).

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man spoke Masarwa. By his features he was Bantu, so was the Bakalahari with the wishing bones. There were about six sheeps’ spinal cord bones, two flat bits of hoof & two rounded oval pyramids all on a riempi.

Bleek also purchased several pins, needles and Bechuana needle cases, and on one occasion, a tigertooth charm.

Tuesday 1st July: Cold grey morning. Warmer later, but windy. O’s tooth better.

Supposed to start at ten but left about one. New hired man & friend came along, likewise a horse which Fatters rode, going out with gun & finding nothing. Long trek through rather pretty country – flat pieces changing with belts of trees & bushes. Stopped at lovely spot for afternoon tea. Soon trekked on again, a little before sunset. Long trek well on into night.

Passed a couple of fires, at last halted at one & let oxen lie down by yokes. In afternoon nice Bakalaharis came with needle cases. Bought also tigertooth charm. Hot day – cold night. Dog found Eistervaark.

We have seen how, just three days into the trip on 26 June, Bleek entered words into her dictionary, and on 30 June she worked on sorting her dictionary. Both these references suggest that her work on the dictionary had begun as early as 1913. On the Kakia trip there is a sense that her language research had become more sustained and methodical than earlier. The two language and grammar notebooks which Bleek kept in addition to the one in which she wrote her daily journal suggest that language recording began in earnest only after her arrival at Kakia. But one or two of the daily entries record occasions where she gathered language samples while on the road.

Just before they reached Kakia, for example, Bleek worked with Ompilletsi to take down some words in the Masarwa language from a woman who presented herself at the wagon.

Saturday 5th July: Cloudy morning, warm & windy later. A Masarwa woman turned up. She could speak her language. Took down a few pages with Ompilletsi translating & took photographs. Two empty wagons from Liku Litu came up before we left. Wrote to May & Edith & sent letter by them. The Masarwa woman is real Bushman type. Did not measure her as her circumstances made it not suitable. Had child with her. Left Legombe about one, crossed pan & ascended hill opposite. Passsed small group of huts, heard a Masarwa couple live there with Bakalaharis. Woman out. Man & children came to wagon. Took photos. He could not speak his language. Gave presents. Trekked on up long – long hill outspanned for tea at top.

Then trekked on till long after dark. Om. shot duiker. Great joy of men.The natives round wagon at Legombe very amusing today. One very handsome … (?) worn.

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Further language sampling and translating took place on the return journey as well.

Bleek again deployed Ompilletsi’s translating skills when the opportunity arose just a few days before their return to Khanye.

Sunday 27th July: At Uaohane. Walked down to see the pan – not much water. Lovely sunrise. Cloudy – warm later. Oxen watered during day which we spent here entirely. Got a good deal of Masarwa – Omp. translating.

After the first week of travel, a sense of the routine of travel began to take over. Clearly Dorothea, and presumably Margarethe as well, were embracing, if not enjoying, the freedom of the open road and country. Bleek, at least, found the local people ‘amusing’, as we saw in her diary entry recorded on 5 July.

From the vocabulary and grammar samples in the notebooks whose dates correspond with diary entries, we learn that Bleek was addressed as ‘missis’. We also have a sense of the intimate scale and interactive nature of moments in the research process. Bleek used the environment to extract words and phrases, for instance in the descriptive phrase “smaller black beetle with stripes on back”. One can imagine the closeness and intimacy of this interaction, presumably requiring both parties to look closely together at the tiny insect. A different form of intimacy is suggested by the phrase “Missis has changed her shirt (blouse)”. The interactive nature of the work becomes apparent in such phrases as “we lie down, we sleep”, “the axe chops it down”; “the stone, I pound with it”; “I am taking my jacket off”; “I am putting my jacket on the ground” (BC151 A3.8: 172, 177, 181). The performative aspects of Bleek’s method here recall the methods used by her father and aunt as they began their sitting room-based research project in Mowbray in the early 1870s.

Bleek’s diary entry for 6 July records that she and her party had finally reached Kakia “long after dark” the previous night, having begun their trek from Khanye on 23 June.

Sunday 6th July: Fine clear morning. Trekked from early till breakfast. Outspanned in pretty park-like ground. The whole way from Legombe has been very pretty so far – with very fine trees. Long trek in morning – encamped in lovely spot – [?] oxen. Still longer trek in afternoon. Reached Kakia long after dark. Stopped near village under fine Kamelthorn trees.

Old Masarwa greeted us on entry – gave me tobacco and sugar. Hot day.

Evidence of intrusions of colonial authority, technical interventions and commercial activity in the landscape appears through Dorothea’s diary. The entries suggest a landscape filled with the comings and goings of local inhabitants, traders, travellers and colonial authorities, and trade and interaction among all of the inhabitants in the

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Above: Maps and sketches surviving among Dorothea Bleek’s papers show her interest in mapping her research findings onto the southern African landscape. By 1924, she had divided her language samples into three groups, which she illustrated with a hand-coloured map (left) at a lecture given at UCT’s Vacation School in January of 1924 (BC151 E5.1.3). Middle: A sketch map of Angola showing rivers and lines of latitude, 36

preserved inside the notebook recorded on Dorothea Bleek’s 1925 trip through Angola (BC151 A3.22). Right: This sketch map from Dorothea Bleek’s papers indicates directions to rock art sites near Zastron, Wepener and Theunissen, all towns in the then Orange Free State which she visited during a trip to sites that had been recorded decades earlier by George Stow (BC151 G3.5).

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landscape. We have seen how, on the day of her target practice session at Legombe, Bleek’s diary records that “natives sent by a chief” were digging a well “with the help of gunpowder” (see diary entry for July 4 on page 23).

Yet as much as the diary entries are replete with references to scientific and colonial intrusions and technologies in the landscape, there are also moments when camp life mirrored the attributes of suburban sociability. The road that Bleek and her party followed was well travelled, and they passed other wagons on several occasions. Bleek’s party shared the landscape with others who readily involved themselves with her research activities. At Kakia, Bleek and Vollmer shared meals with fellow travellers in settings that attempted to reproduce the domestic and social activities of life in colonial suburbia. It is not clear why the Openshaw family were at Kakia, but they provided welcome ‘civilised’ society as well as practical assistance with Bleek’s translations and, as we have seen, the delicate question of taking photographs of naked male subjects.

Thursday 17th: Warmer morning. Many Masarwa in the Openshaw. Photographed one.

New woman & child measured & photo of woman. New man – measured & photo. Ousho measured. In afternoon danced. Photo of dancers & children. Openshaws came to supper.

At the same time, Bleek’s goal was to observe and study ‘natural’ people in their ‘natural’ landscapes. She did not seem to question the ability of the romanticised landscapes she traversed to provide this, even though her diary entries document the degree to which external authorities and different orders of technical and economic relations had intervened. She recorded the extent to which the lives of the ‘natural’ peoples she interviewed were intertwined with new arrivals in the landscape and with new economies, technologies and new orders of authority. At the same time she was especially sensitive to the persistence of ‘earlier’ forms of expression, in particular rituals such as dancing: Monday 21st [June]: Warm morning packed wagon early. Masarwas came. They talked. Gave them presents & meat. They danced. We bought a sheep. Malzuinki’s wife got bucket of kaffircorn 2/6 on account per head. He entered service. Walked in evening.

Thursday 10th [July]: Cold night – clear cool morning getting warm later. Bought hyena skin. Late in morning a group of Masarwa came. Got Ompilletsi to translate and took down words & sentences especially pronouns. Measured one more man. Women there were the same as last times. After dinner they danced & women clapped hands. The men mostly danced with sticks in their hands. For the first dance only the men danced, mostly advancing and Left: Detail of a photograph taken by Dorothea Bleek during her 1910-1911 trip to the Northern Cape. It shows a woman demonstrating the use of a digging stick (BC151 J2.1).

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retreating before the women each one doing his own business; once or twice they followed each other in a ring. In the second dance one or other woman danced out of the group of women & one or more men made pretence love, [?] round her as she danced & stretching his hands round her shoulders. About 7 Masarwa men were there & 5 women. In the evening walked across pan.

The preceding excerpts from the diary suggest that Bleek’s degree of personal involvement with her research varied at different times. We have seen how she engaged in dispensing ‘presents’ in the form of ‘duks’, knives, food and tobacco. At other times, she brought Western expertise to heal the sick.

Wednesday 16th: Very cold early. Milk frozen on top. Masarwa came took down some.

Went to their huts to doctor man’s eye. Little grass affairs. Young Openshaw went with me.

We have seen how Dorothea in the closing days of her trip, permitted (or perhaps encouraged) her guide and translator, Ompilletsi, to use her camera to take pictures of the travelling party posed on their wagon. The image produced through that exchange (pages 12 and 13) survives to mark a different order of closeness and intimacy in Bleek’s field encounters. Other moments in the record similarly speak to the degree of empathy which can be read into many of Bleek’s interactions with her research subjects. Scarcity of water, a continuing motif throughout the Kakia trip, provoked one such moment.

On 3 July, Bleek’s diary noted there was ‘trouble with oxen half the night who got wild with thirst’: Thursday 3rd July: Very early trek, started before sunrise. Outspanned about 8 for breakfast. Clear morning. Slightly undulating ground. Long grass, few bushes. Long trek till one o’clock. Outspanned in lovely scenery – trees & bushes again. After short pause trekked on again till after dark when we reached Secombe. A large flat pan next a long low hill. Several wells there – very little water in them. Trouble with oxen half the night who got wild with thirst. About 13 of them got something. Good water when at last got.

But the real drama of the situation and its emotional effect on the travelling party only surfaced weeks later in Bleek’s language notebook, in an entry recorded on 30 July: we are very glad, our oxen have got water we thought they would die we are very glad, because they shall be able to take Missis home

Right: Detail of a photograph taken by Dorothea Bleek on her 1910-1911 trip to the Northern Cape (BC151 J2.1).

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Above and opposite: Pages from one of the two language and vocabulary notebooks Dorothea Bleek recorded at Kakia, showing the texture of her language sampling and research methods (BC151 A3.8).

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Surfacing as these comments do among random lists of vocabulary and phrases, one is struck by their power. Perhaps their force derives from the presence of a shared humanity that can be sensed in this short narrative. Read in a particular way, these texts reveal moments of chaos and unpredictability in which the depth of shared experience between the researcher and her subjects is revealed. Another instance surfaces, in Bleek’s language notebook, this time on 24 July: we yesterday saw a baboon we this morning saw a flock of ostrich … we saw a secretary bird S. tried to go to it, it flew away he wanted to shoot it, it flew away it is beautiful Again, these phrases seem replete with shared experience and mark moments of genuine communication, rather than an interaction singularly focused on the extraction of language for scientific study. They suggest the possibility that, even though Bleek’s project was to map, in the most objective and scientifically correct way she knew, the traces of a ‘dying’ language and its speakers onto the landscape of southern Africa, the actualities and messiness of human interactions regularly broke through her screen of scientific objectivity.

But the published version of Bleek’s trip to Kakia amounts to a bland one-paragraph summary in the introduction to her Comparative vocabularies of Bushman languages, which was published nearly twenty years later in 1929. In that sanitised version, all of the arduous and intimate details of the trip are written out. The personal tone of the Kakia diary becomes all the more interesting in light of this.

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Clockwise from top left: An undated photograph of Dorothea Bleek seated among a group of men, perhaps taken at an anthropological or linguistic conference in Berlin (BC151 B12.18); the photograph of the 1932 meeting of the South African Association of Science, at which Dorothea Bleek gave an address on rock art, shows her seated in the centre of the front row flanked by the palaeontologist Professor Robert Broom on her left (BC151 B12); another undated photograph of Dorothea Bleek may have been taken at a lecture on rock art she gave in Bloemfontein in September of 1920 (BC151 B12.23).

Opposite page: Detail of a photograph Dorothea Bleek took at Prieska Location in the Northern Cape in August of 1911.

It shows a man dancing the “pot dance�, which was performed after a feast (BC151 J2.1).

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Above: Pages from the Kakia notebook in which Dorothea Bleek recorded phrases that could point to the possibility of shared experience between the researcher and the people she studied, as in, for example, the sight of a baboon and a flock of ostriches (left), and the “beautiful� secretary bird (right) (BC151 A3.8).

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Above: Arrivals, departures, daily activities and the passing of time provided scope for the sampling of vocabulary and phrases; for example, tomorrow, today and yesterday (left), and the washing of clothing and faces (right) (BC151 A3.8).

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In conclusion The intimate, day-by-day view of Bleek’s developing field practice which her Kakia diary afforded was not to be repeated in the archived documents that remain as a record of her scholarship, but the surviving research notebooks indicate how she put her commitment to fieldwork into practice in the following decades. After Kakia, her extensive programme continued as she travelled deeper into the landscapes of southern Africa.

Just a year or two later, probably in 1915, Dorothea Bleek travelled to Lake Chrissie in the then eastern Transvaal (now Mpumalanga). Notes following her diary entries in the Kakia notebook indicate that her friends the Ralstons hosted her on their farm in the area. In 1918, she visited her friends the Lanhams, who farmed near Mount Temple in the Langeberg area east of Upington. There she interviewed their servants and, according to the introduction to Comparative vocabularies of Bushman languages, took language samples from “the Bushmen of Griqualand West and Gordonia, including Bushmen found on the right bank of the Vaal, and on the Lower Molopo in Gordonia” (Bleek 1929).

In 1920 and 1921, when the South African state took authority in the South West Africa Protectorate (now Namibia), Dorothea Bleek was part of a South African Museum research team sent to study the San of the region with a view to understanding and managing them more effectively. Bleek had two lengthy stays at Sandfontein, where she interviewed prisoners at Windhoek jail and spent many months based at a disused police station on the border of the Protectorate and Botswana. She also travelled south of Sandfontein and sampled ‘Bushman’ dialects from that region. Beginning with the Sandfontein sojourns, the 1920s turned out to be a most productive decade for Dorothea. Those ten years saw her becoming Honorary Reader in Bushman Languages at the University of Cape Town in 1923, travelling in Angola for six and a half months in 1925, and retracing rock art sites in the south-eastern Drakensberg and the then Orange Free State for three months in 1928. She published her monograph, The Naron, a Bushman tribe of the Central Kalahari in 1928, and her comparative overview of the ‘Bushman’ languages of southern Africa, Comparative vocabularies of Bushman languages, in 1929, along with a number of papers in journals both in South Africa and in Europe.

In 1930, the year her edited collection of Stow’s copies was published (Rock paintings in South Africa from parts of the Eastern Province and Orange Free State), Bleek travelled to what was then northern Tanganyika, where she spent six weeks observing and interviewing the Hadza, people still regarded in contemporary media as ‘hunter-

Left: This image of a woman in hat and sunglasses in the foreground of a desert landscape with cattle crossing a dry pan or waterhole, carries the inscription “Miss Bleek(?)”

(Iziko SAM 1020).

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gatherers’ (Finkel 2009). She was nearing her sixties by then, and by her own admission was too old for fieldwork – but not too old to continue her intellectual project. In 1932 she commissioned two young artists from Grahamstown, Mollie and Joyce van der Riet, to visit and copy rock art at sites in the Eastern Cape near Uniondale, Oudtshoorn and the area now known as the Garden Route. Bleek drew on their research in her presidential address to the South African Society for the Advancement of Science in 1932, and in 1940 collaborated with the sisters in the publishing of More rock paintings in South Africa.

The 1930s ushered in years of consolidation as Bleek turned all her attention to the continuing work of translating the notebooks of her father and aunt. With most of her fieldwork days behind her, Bleek devoted herself to sharing translations of the notebook texts with a wider audience, publishing an edited series of articles in the journal Bantu Studies until 1936. At the same time she continued working on her dictionary, which was eventually published posthumously in 1956.

Dorothea Bleek would have regarded A Bushman dictionary as the crowning achievement of her career and the fulfilment of her lifelong intellectual project to document, as comprehensively as possible, examples of all the San languages to be found in southern Africa. In his 1957 review of the work, the linguist C.M. Doke, then Professor of Bantu Languages at the University of the Witwatersrand, hailed it as a “monumental piece of work” and the cumulative result of a century of scholarship. But he also critiqued the dictionary for its lack of precision and for containing a vast amount of material that was of “historical” rather than linguistic value. By the 1950s, it seems, Bleek’s observation-driven, comprehensive and comparative approach to linguistics was going out of style. The outcome of her years of painstaking, cautious and detailed fieldwork had, by the middle of the twentieth century, been superseded by theoretical, sociological and psychological approaches in the human sciences.

In the preceding pages I have pondered in detail a particular moment that exemplified Dorothea Bleek’s research process and daily journey through the landscape at a particular time, and tried to make sense of how she converted these multiple experiences into text.

I have quoted extensively from the daily journal she kept while travelling to and from Kakia in 1913, to give a sense of the texture of her particular engagement with the people she encountered, and also with the landscapes through which she travelled. The Kakia journal was singled out for close reading because the narrative it offers of Bleek’s evolving and emerging field practice is not repeated at any subsequent moment or in any other form in the documentary record that remains of her scholarship. It gives insight into her developing field practice, one that she would expand on through her career, and one that allowed her to produce a form of knowledge about the San built upon particular 48

intellectual foundations.

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References and Selected Readings Primary source materials drawn upon in this essay are from collections held at the University of Cape Town’s Manuscripts and Archives Department, the African Studies Library at UCT, and from photographic and correspondence collections held at both the Iziko South African Museum and the National Library of South Africa’s Cape Town branch. Dorothea Bleek’s Kakia diary and vocabulary and language notebooks can be found in the Bleek-Lloyd collection at UCT in BC151 A3.6, A3.7 and A3.8, or online, at http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/books/.

Bank, A. 2006. “Anthropology and fieldwork

photography: Dorothea Bleek’s expedition to the Northern Cape and the Kalahari, July to December 1911”. Kronos 32: 77-113.

Bank, A. 2006. Bushmen in a Victorian world: the remarkable story of the Bleek-Lloyd collection of Bushman folklore. Cape Town: Double Storey.

Barnard, A. 2007. Anthropology and the Bushman.

Oxford: Berg.

Battiss, W. 1939. The amazing Bushman. Pretoria: Red Fern Press.

Bleek, D.F. 1956. A Bushman dictionary. New Haven: American Oriental Society.

Bleek, D.F. 1932. “A survey of our present knowledge of rockpaintings in South Africa”. South African Journal of Science 29: 72-83.

Bleek, D.F. 1931. “The Hadzapi or Watingdega of Tanganyika territory”. Africa, 4 (3): 273-285.

Bleek, D.F. 1929. Comparative vocabularies of Bushman languages. London: Cambridge University Press.

Bleek, D.F. 1929. “Bushman folklore”. Africa 2 (3): 302-313.

Bleek, D.F. 1928-1930. “Bushman grammar: a grammatical sketch of the language of the |xamka-!k’e”. Zeitschrift für Eingeborenen-Sprachen, 19: 81-98; 20: 161-74.

Bleek, D.F. 1928. “Bushmen of central Angola”, Bantu Studies 3 (2): 105-125.

Bleek, D.F. 1928. The Naron: a Bushman tribe of the central Kalahari. London: Cambridge University Press.

Bleek, D.F. (ed). 1923. The Mantis and his friends: Bushman folklore collected by the late Dr. W.H.I.

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Bleek and the late Dr. Lucy C. Lloyd. Cape Town: Maskew Miller.

Bunzl, M. and Glenn Penny, H. (eds). 2003. Worldly provincialism: German anthropology in the Age of Empire. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Carstens, P., Klinghardt, G., and West, M. (eds). 1987.

Trails in the Thirstland; the anthropological field diaries of Winifred Hoernlé. Cape Town: Centre for African Studies.

Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. (eds). 1986. Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Deacon, J. and Dowson, T. (eds). 1996. Voices from the past: |xam Bushmen and the Bleek and Lloyd collection. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

Doke, C. 1957. “A Bushman dictionary review”.

African Studies 16 (2): 124-125.

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