The problem

To dress is a unique human experience, but practices and meanings of dress are as different as the people populating the world. In a Western cultural tradition, the practice of dressing ‘properly’ has for centuries distinguished ‘civilised’ people from ‘savages’. Through travel literature and historical ethnographic descriptions of the Bushmen of southern Africa, such perceptions and prejudices have also made their mark on the modern research tradition. Early travellers, adventurers and colonial administrators wrote about the indigenous inhabitants they met on their journeys. Alongside the increased colonisation of the area and the subjugation of the natives, the popularised discourse evolved into ‘Bushman research’, using the terms of scientific means and methods. The developing discourse continued and ultimately formalised and cemented a myth of the ‘naked Bushman’ – a myth that had its origin in a Western understanding of what it means to dress and a strong focus on the Bushman body as a subject of research. Because Bushmen were widely considered to be nearly naked, the study of dress formed a limited part of the many later academic efforts at understanding Bushman culture.

This book aims to fill that void, and directs attention to what arguably formed an essential part of life within Bushman communities of colonial southern Africa. Two lines of discussion are pursued: first is a critique of how the material culture of dress has been handled in earlier research; and second, a conceptual framework is developed for understanding the role of dress within the material and bodily practices of historical Bushman communities. The book is thus written as an investigation into what Bushman dress has come to represent to people trying to understand Bushman culture from the outside, and in what ways the dress has been meaningful to Bushman people themselves.

The venture has led me deep into the museum archives and collections of some of South Africa's most prominent institutions of knowledge production and procurement. My search for a ‘non-existing dress’ revealed a vast field of dress practices, represented through the diverse media of artefact collections and visual representations in photographic records, as well as embedded in the memories and oral traditions of colonial Bushmen who were told to tell their stories about the world they were rapidly being deprived of.