THE ROLE AND IDEOLOGY OF THE COLLECTORS

It has increasingly been recognised that the |Xam materials are a product of both the intellectual milieu of Victorian Cape Town and of |Xam culture itself. A growing body of literature has over the years attempted to explore this context, beginning, it might be said, with Otto Spohr's (1962) Wilhelm H.I. Bleek: A Bibliographical Sketch. Robert Thornton's (1983b) paper, ‘“This dying out race”: W.H.I. Bleek's approach to the languages of Southern Africa’, however, marked the beginning of the critical reappraisal of Bleek's work. This process has culminated, at the time of writing, with Shane Moran's (2009) Representing Bushmen: South Africa and the Origin of Language, a detailed analysis of some of Bleek's major texts. Moran emphasises Bleek's role as a producer of colonial ideology. Andrew Bank's (2006) history, Bushmen in a Victorian World: The Remarkable Story of the Bleek-Lloyd Collection of Bushman Folklore includes an investigation of Bleek's thought and its links with the nineteenth-century intellectual world. It also presents the most thorough account of the genesis of the Bleek and Lloyd project to date. Bank places the project in its historical environment in Cape Town and in the frontier zone of the northern Cape Colony. He also provides biographies of the major players. This work, together with some of Bank's papers (1999; 2002), has, in my view, certain far-reaching implications for the interpretation of the narratives. This chapter sets out to explore some of these.

Bank (1999) details the celebratory manner in which Bleek and Lloyd and their project have generally been represented by scholars. Lewis- Williams depicts Bleek as a visionary: ‘Bleek saw down the decades and realised that San rock art very possibly constituted the most powerful argument against those who believed the San authors of these paintings to be simple, primitive and distasteful’ (Bank 1999: 2, quoting Lewis-Williams 1996b: 307–8). Deacon and Dowson (1996) present Bleek and Lloyd as farsighted and courageous pioneers whose prescience and endurance led to the linguistic preservation of an extinct language and the transcription of one of the largest bodies in the world of oral literature from a single culture.