These words, penned in 1936 in a private letter to a friend in Switzerland, describe in a nutshell Dorothea Bleek's intellectual project that was her life's ambition. Dorothea devoted her life to completing the ‘bushman researches’ that her father and aunt had begun in the sitting room of their home in Mowbray, near Cape Town, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. For Dorothea, her bushman research was partly a labour of familial loyalty to her father, Wilhelm, the acclaimed linguist and philologist of nineteenth- century Germany and later of the Cape Colony, and to her beloved aunt, Lucy Lloyd, a self-taught linguist and scholar of bushman languages and folklore. Dorothea's research was also an expression of her commitment to a particular kind of scholarship and an intellectual milieu that saw her spending almost her entire adult life in the study of the people she called bushmen.

From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, how has history treated Dorothea Bleek? Has she been recognised as a scholar in her own right, or as someone who merely followed in the footsteps of her famous father and aunt by taking their ‘bushman researches’ out of their Mowbray home and into the landscapes of southern Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century? Was she an adventurer, a woman who stepped out of her colonial comfort zone and travelled across southern Africa driven by intellectual curiosity to learn all she could about the bushmen? Was she conservative and racist, a researcher who belittled the people she studied and dismissed them as lazy and improvident? Or was she a scholar who believed staunchly in the importance of close observation, hands-on fieldwork and the collection of samples and evidence from the field? Did she make her own contribution to South African scholarship, or did she simply rewrite, repackage and publish the celebrated collection of folklore and ethnographic knowledge that was her family heritage? An examination of Dorothea's papers and personal letters suggests that she was a mixture of all of these things.