Thus was Dorothea introduced in a column in the Cape Times of 26 April 1946. The Cape Town daily newspaper was advertising the ‘short talk’ she was to present at an exhibition of rock art reproductions that would be displayed along with work by Leo Frobenius. The article described Dorothea as ‘tall, spare and grey-haired’, living ‘quietly’ near Newlands station, a ‘gentle householder’ and also a ‘world-famous person’. If the audience was lucky, it went on to say, ‘Miss Bleek may talk in some of the Khoi-San dialects. She is the only living European with a real mastery of Bushman language.’

At the time, two years before she died, Dorothea was embroiled in the protracted and convoluted process of readying her bushman dictionary manuscript for publication. It was an entanglement that would last past her death. As she had experienced with previous book projects, seeing the dictionary into print was a fraught and time-consuming process. Perhaps she thought of Lucy Lloyd's long-ago struggles to publish Specimens of Bushman Folklore, and Stow's The Native Races of South Africa some 30 years earlier. Dorothea attended to the delays with customary stoicism and dedication. She was 73 years old by the time she forwarded the all-but-completed manuscript to its publisher, the American Oriental Society of New Haven, Connecticut. She would not live to write the 30-page introduction she had planned, nor to see A Bushman Dictionary in print. When it did finally appear, it was welcomed as the crowning achievement of a lifelong pursuit, albeit one that was focused on languages Dorothea herself believed were dying out.

Throughout her career she had been firm in her oft-stated view that the ‘tribe’ she had spent her life studying was either ‘rapidly being absorbed by stronger races or dying out’. The quotation is taken from a letter Dorothea wrote to the linguist Clement Martyn Doke at Wits in May 1932. Its particular context was a response to a query from the Inter-University Committee on African Studies with regard to future funding for ‘bushman’ research, and it provides testimony to Dorothea's attitude to research.