Bushman Letters by Michael Wessels primarily analyzes outsiders’ interpretations of KhoiKhoi or /Xam narratives. In his introduction Wessels asserts that the people outsiders homogenously classify as Khoisan, usually referred to as Bushmen, are actually a diverse group of people who live in present-day South Africa in the southernmost and western part of the territory, from Port Elizabeth all the way to the Northern Cape Province (1). The speakers of /Xam—one of the most widely distributed of the many Khoisan languages that existed prior to colonization—are the focus of this project. Wessels shows us that the original collection of narratives was made at a time when /Xam-speaking peoples faced cultural and linguistic annihilation. In the 1870s, the “letters” were collected as a measure of “ethnography’s tendency to become an imperial culture’s rite of mourning of what it destroys” (2, citing Moran 2009: 127), by German linguist Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd (the former’s sister-in-law). The /Xam collection entered UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 1997.
Wessels does an excellent job of giving the reader background information on the historic context in which the accounts were collected. For example, he explains how the primary informants were /Xam men who had been convicted for cattle-rustling and murder and were consigned to Cape Town’s Breakwater Prison. The one female voice represented is a Khoi woman who was visiting her imprisoned brother (5, 7). Additionally, Wessels discusses the differences in the primary collectors’ methods. He shows us that while Bleek focused on a Victorian idea of linguistic and human evolutionary hierarchies, along with studies of myth that would act as a window to the primitive mind (5), Lloyd was looser with her interviews and relationships and allowed conversations with her informants to evolve organically. In this way Wessels shows us how Lloyd focused more on culture than on doing ethnography in order to map “the local onto a global chart” (9).
Turning to the book’s content, Bushman Letters is divided into four sections. The first section deals with the history of the /Xam narratives and theoretical considerations. The author discusses a possible rethinking of past analysis along with the question, where do the /Xam texts belong? He does a good job at discussing the difference between /Xam folktales and myth, which for me, as a lay reader in this subject, helped in differentiating the two. Wessels helpfully addresses the subject of the authorship of myth. One of the key defining aspects of myth cited by Wessels, utilizing Caspo (2005), is that myth belongs to and is created by society rather than being credited to an individual (75). In this first section, Wessels presents the narratives as others have since they were collected, and points out the important fact that the narrators did not simply repeat the stories. Rather, each teller created from explanatory elements that were ordered in “the space of performance” by both teller and recorder (76). This point is important when looking at any past or present collection of stories.
Section 2 (pages 120-194) is a discussion of how various scholars have interpreted the narratives. In this section Wessels focuses on three books, including Roger Hewitt’s critical work and Mathias Guenther’s work on tricksters. The author adroitly informs the reader about the context in which these narratives were collected and by whom the tales were told. He puts the collectors in the context of their time and space (177-8). In section 3 (pages 194-263), Wessels gives examples of the /Xam narratives as they were translated and the interpretations that have been made by previous scholars. He focuses on three stories dealing with /Xam narratives of power, identity, and difference, and addresses a rare text that features the contribution of the only female who was interviewed by Lloyd. Additionally, he challenges conceptions of Khoisan gender equality that have been espoused by scholars and media (260-261). Finally, in section 4 he discusses the controversies that have arisen through the interpretations of these texts. Wessels examines two of Lewis-Williams’ works on /Xam religious features as a basis for this discussion.
In the end, I find that I am conflicted in my opinion of this work, in light of how indigenous histories and knowledge taken by the West continue to be retold to the descendants of these indigenous populations in schools, museums, and modern media. Bushman Letters is an extremely technical book, not intended for those unfamiliar with literature deconstruction theories or literary studies in general. It also lacks an orthography or guide on how to pronounce the numerous names of individuals, characters, and myths. (I spent some time at the outset attempting to pronounce the unfamiliar words, but failed miserably.)
While the book does give the reader a context for the classification of myths, stories, and tales, the reading is dry for someone looking to understand more about Khoisan society, especially in the present day. This book does not fit into the domain of “informative” cultural studies but rather into that of literary analysis. Every audience member is supposed to have her or his own interpretation of the meaning of a story, and attempting to deconstruct oral stories and ascribe truths to them defeats the purpose of allowing individuals to discover a meaning and a lesson that relates to their lives. In Wessels’ conclusion he urges that more work be done involving these materials (310). Unfortunately, he does not call for scholars to seek the help of living descendants. He does, however, advocate “endeavors to remain more faithful to the narratives’ own modes of ‘textuality,’” thereby resisting the temptation “to use them to provide evidence about earlier phases of human history” (311). To answer his call, I strongly believe, would require seeking out persons who identify with this group of people and its cultural knowledge.
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[Review length: 960 words • Review posted on February 6, 2012]