Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Open Questions

What did the San communities of the southern and eastern Cape believe, in the period before their languages ended?

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Open Question

There is no answer on record and nobody holds a position, because the evidence to hold one was never gathered. Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd recorded /Xam between 1870 and 1884 and their work ended when their narrators went home and no further speakers could be found. The neighbouring communities of the southern and eastern Cape were recorded by no one. Their languages have no speakers and their descendants were absorbed into other communities. The San religion described in the scholarly literature is therefore the religion of the /Xam and of a small number of twentieth-century northern groups, generalised, and the generalisation covers an absence rather than a consensus.

What would resolve this Recovery of further colonial-era linguistic or missionary material comparable to the Bleek and Lloyd notebooks: unpublished mission-station vocabularies, magistrates' and travellers' notebooks, or word lists held in South African, Dutch, German and British archives that have not been catalogued as linguistic material and so have not been looked for. A systematic archival survey aimed at this specific question has not been carried out. Failing that, the question stays open permanently, which is itself worth recording.
OpenHistorical linguistics of the Khoisan languages; archival research in southern African, Dutch, German and British colonial and mission collections; southern African social history.W. H. I. Bleek and L. C. Lloyd, Specimens of Bushman Folklore
Cross-Tradition Connections

Question On

Source Specimens of Bushman FolkloreW. H. I. Bleek and L. C. Lloyd
Sources
Specimens of Bushman Folklore
W. H. I. Bleek and L. C. Lloyd, George Allen and Company, 1911View the Source
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.