Broken strings: interdisciplinarity and /Xam oral literature

Critical Arts, July, 2009 by Anne Solomon

Story and history

Watson's alterations foreground the theme of colonial incursion by imputing a perceived otherness between the /Xam and European settlers that is not stated in the poem. However, there is little evidence that the /Xam thought in these terms. The degree to which different societies embrace an ethnic identity is situationally and historically contingent. Though the /Xam narrators regarded some Boers as cruel and unjust, and accounts in the archive recount predominantly negative experiences, there is no evidence that this was a blanket view; indeed, their relationship with the Bleek family itself suggests that their attitude to colonial society was more nuanced. Contact also provided new opportunities and goods, such as metal tools and tobacco.

A view of the /Xam that focuses inexorably on their victimhood under colonialism also underestimates their resourcefulness in the face of change. However prominent the role of colonial oppression in the eventual destruction of /Xam culture, deculturation and cultural change are more complex phenomena. For example, Traill has suggested that the death of the /Xam language began well before the narrators met Bleek and Lloyd--a process that cannot simply be attributed to an undifferentiated colonialist bogeyman. Traill's analysis (1996:183) provides much-needed historical texture, relating the decline to /Xam-Afrikaans bilingualism which may, in some instances, be interpreted as 'valuable evidence that, in some areas of the frontier, social relations between Boers and /Xam must have evolved beyond being exclusively hostile'. Undoubtedly it was the colonial presence that tragically sealed the fate of the /Xam, and it remains an essential frame for understanding, but it is sometimes used as something of a blunt instrument.

Nor were the /Xam unaccustomed to 'other people'. The /Xam shared their landscape with the warlike Korana (!Ora), the antagonists in several narratives. They, rather than the Boers, were the /Xam's traditional enemy. The /Xam had also been in contact with their Bantu-speaking neighbours since at least 1805 (Deacon 1996: 247). Texts include one about a /Xam man injured by a 'Kafir' who had stolen his mother's spoons (LV.4.4200-4230). European colonists were not necessarily the most feared or disliked of the/Xam's neighbours, though they proved the most powerful.

Though several/Xam texts describe colonial cruelties, the 'Song of the Broken String' is not necessarily among them, even though it was a Boer who caused !nuin-|kuiten's death. Had the /Xam owned guns while still living a more traditional life, they might well have dealt similarly with marauding predators and, objectively, there is no judgement passed in the song on the right or wrong of the farmer's deed, nor allusion to a clash of cultures. No doubt the /Xam understood colonial culture enough to recognise that the farmer did not know that this was !nuin-|kuiten.

It is also worth remembering that this song was not Dia!kwain's lament, but from his father's youth. If it described a real event, it took place many years earlier (perhaps even before Dia!kwain was born, probably around the mid-1840s). The extent to which a colonial presence impinged upon /Xam traditional lifeways in the earlier nineteenth century, is debatable. Gordon and Wikar journeyed to the northern Cape in the terminal eighteenth century, but British annexation of the area occurred only in 1847 (Deacon 1996: 250). White farmers were forbidden to settle the area before 1847, though some did and white hunters operated there (Deacon 1996). It does, however, seem that it was after annexation that clashes escalated, with notorious massacres of San in the 1850s (Deacon 1996). Traill (1996: 166) records that in 1858 a trader encountered 'large numbers' of /Xam near the Hartebeest River, and no colonists--a situation that was reversed within a year.