THE BLEEK AND LLOYD COLLECTION

For a very considerable period of time, probably, the |Xam language, in many forms and variations, was spoken across a broad region of presentday South Africa, west of Port Elizabeth and south of the Orange River. In the semi-arid area of the present-day Northern Cape province, home to the |Xam adults whose narratives form the subject of this book, |Xam speakers lived in small bands of between ten and thirty people near waterholes, ownership of which was passed down from generation to generation. Their economy was largely based on hunter-gathering, although they also traded and, increasingly, by choice or coercion, were drawn one way or another into the colonial economy.

|Xam was just one of many Khoisan languages that existed in pre-colonial southern Africa. It was, however, the San or Bushman language that possessed the largest number of speakers, a position that is currently held by the Ju|'hoan (or!Kung) language of Angola, Namibia and Botswana. By the beginning of the twentieth century, almost all the speakers of |Xam had been either killed by settler commandos or incorporated into the Afrikaansspeaking population of the Cape Colony, a process that frequently involved the separation of children from their parents. The language's demise was swift. Only a few decades earlier, in the 1870s, German linguist Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd, who grew up in the new British colony of Natal, had quite easily been able to find |Xam speakers from whom to learn the language and obtain a large and varied body of material. The fact that Bleek and Lloyd drew their informants from prisoners in Cape Town's notorious Breakwater Prison, however, was in itself symptomatic of the forces that would rapidly lead to the destruction of the |Xam language as a spoken medium. From the second half of the nineteenth century, |Xamspeaking people had found themselves alienated from their land as farmers claimed the area as their own, and the former had, as a consequence, become subject to constant harassment and arrest as poachers or stock thieves.