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.

In the four preceding chapters on the Bleek and Fourie collections, I presented extensive material on Bushman dress from colonial southern Africa, and argued that this aspect of Bushman culture has mostly been neglected in earlier research. The two artefact collections, which were compiled around the same time and among some of the same people, represent ‘Bushman dress’ in two different ways: as a stereotype of common traits and characteristics among Bushmen in general (Bleek), and within a more complex framework of distinct material differences between different groups of people (Fourie). While contextualising the artefacts in relation to the photographs and research notes taken by each collector, I tried to question and nuance the outlined material expressions. The approach proved useful from a research historical perspective, as a means to pinpoint aspects of earlier research that should be highlighted in order to ask new questions.

In what follows, I focus on dress as part of the material and bodily practice of the colonial /Xam Bushmen of the Northern Cape in South Africa. I explore the remnants of their dress as remembered and told by six /Xam Bushmen who lived with the Bleek and Lloyd family at different stages between 1870 and 1879, in Mowbray, Cape Town. Approaching dress from the perspective of oral myths and narratives will enlighten the subject substantially.

/A!kunta, //Kabbo, ≠Kasin, Dia!kwain, !Kweiten ta//ken and /Han≠kass'o all contributed, to varying degrees, to the 138 notebooks (28 recorded by Wilhelm Bleek and 110 by Lucy Lloyd) of /Xam narratives that are now kept in the Manuscript and Archive Department of the University of Cape Town (UCT) Library. The narratives were transcribed by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd in /Xam, as Bleek developed the orthography to make it into a written language. They were later translated into English on the same page in a column next to the transcription. This work was also for the most part done in collaboration with a /Xam-speaking informant. On the opposite page, comments and notes made by the informant, or by Bleek or Lloyd, were added when necessary to clarify or otherwise add to the main story. These notebooks, together with the other notebooks of the archive, are now also available online at The Digital Bleek and Lloyd (BC151.A1.4.001–BC151.A1.4.028STARS, BC151.A2.1.001–BC151.A2.1.107, BC151.A2.1.125, BC151. A2.2.004, BC151.A2.2.005).

The questions

In this work, I have aimed to introduce a systematic study of dress to the already extensive scholarly literature on Bushman studies. I have argued that Bushman dress has been neglected in earlier studies because of a myth that has prevailed throughout the history of Bushman research – that of the ‘nearly naked Bushman’. By defining dress as a practice that includes body modifications and body supplements, I took a broad approach to the subject and included museum artefacts, photographs and written accounts in the study. This multi-source approach proved to be methodologically imperative not only to unravel the materiality of dress, but also because each source represents the material culture differently. Looked at as a whole, the sources show that far from being naked, or nearly naked, the practices of dress among the colonial Bushmen of southern Africa were multifaceted and of great social and personal significance.

My point of departure was the Louis Fourie and Dorothea Bleek museum collections, of which I asked: How do they, respectively and in comparison to each other, represent Bushman dress? These collections were both produced during the first part of the twentieth century and comprise the same kind of source material from overlapping areas of collecting. The categorisation, systematisation and comparison of the artefact material produced a representation of Bushman dress within frames and concepts of a cultural historical idea of people represented and identified through material cultural traits. Bleek complied with the uniformity paradigm of Bushman material culture, whereas Fourie saw each group as different from the other. The static image of culture implied in both selections of artefacts effectively leaves one with an understanding of ‘others’ as different from ‘ourselves’. It does not, however, say anything about how these ‘others’ understand themselves. That said, the inclusion of research notes and photographs in the analyses nuanced the picture. Bleek was interested in documenting dress as a means to effectuate social structure and individuality; Fourie was aware of dress as essential in extensive intergroup relationships. However, these are explanations of dress as representative of, and not part of, a living cultural practice.

Chichi Ngozi's childhood dream was to become a nun, a lifestyle choice her parents would never allow. Instead, she studied education in Owerri, in the heart of Igboland where she was raised. At the age of 24, a twist in an intimate relationship pushed her toward a new life in South Africa. She now lives in the suburb of Sunnyside in Pretoria with her husband and three-year-old daughter.

You know, here in South Africa, if you wear white clothes you can wear it from morning ‘til night and even the following day, and if you decide not to wash it you won't wash it. But in Nigeria, you can't wear white because the dust is too much. The heat is too much. It's very, very hot. And we usually have electricity problems. You know, we say ‘NEPA take light’ – that's the power company – when our electricity goes off. You can bath in the morning and when you come back you have dust on your legs. You come home and you start washing, cleaning shoes. Here in South Africa you can go out in the morning and come back in the night and even if you don't feel like bathing, you will not bath because you will not be feeling the heat.

And the way they are dressing here is totally different from Nigeria. There, when you walk the streets wearing a miniskirt you feel embarrassed. They'll be shouting, ‘Hey! Didn't your mother see you when you left the house? You want to show all the men that you are ashawo?’ That is the word for a loose woman. You will feel so embarrassed!

Here you just mind your own business and you can wear anything you want. The most a boy can do is to whistle at you or hoot the horn in the car. But in Nigeria they can even be throwing water at you when you are walking. I'm telling you. There are so many things South Africa does better than Nigeria.

It's just that if you don't have money, yoh! You will die in South Africa! And you need to be very hard-working. If you are not hard-working you will end up in the street being a seller, selling your body up and down.

Between 1916 and 1928, the Medical Officer of South West Africa (SWA), Dr Louis Fourie, collected what was to become one of the largest ethnographic collections of Bushman material culture in the world. The collection comprises around 3 500 artefacts, more than 300 photographs, and numerous files of notes, correspondence, literature and other archival material. The majority of the collection is now housed at Museum Africa (MA) in Johannesburg and is unique not only in its volume but also for its well-documented provenance – collected in just over a decade, from mostly named groups and territories within what is today Namibia.

Although Fourie was an amateur ethnographer, he was in close contact with many of the Khoisan experts and researchers of his time (Wanless 2007, 22, 83). As part of the colonial administration by profession, he was in a good position to facilitate the research of numerous other scholars who wished to come to SWA for their studies (Wanless 2007, 89). This included Dorothea Bleek and James Drury from the South African Museum (SAM) in Cape Town, and AJH Goodwin of the SAM and the University of Cape Town. Fourie and Louis Péringuey (of the SAM) also corresponded regularly, and Péringuey's interest in the physical anthropology of the Bushmen might have motivated Fourie's efforts to measure and photographically record the Bushman body (Wanless 2007, 21). Fourie's published work (1926, 1928), two articles focusing on the customs of the Hei-//om, has also been heavily referred to by other scholars, Alan Barnard naming him ‘their leading ethnographer’ (Barnard 1992, 214). However, Fourie's main efforts, the collection of thousands of artefacts and the information he compiled about them, have for the most part remained hidden in museum storerooms.

The most informative and comprehensive work on Fourie and his collection is Ann Wanless's 2007 PhD dissertation (‘The Silence of Colonial Melancholy: The Fourie Collection of Khoisan Ethnologica’). Wanless worked for many years at MA, where the Fourie collection has been stored since it was transferred from the Museum of Man and Science (MMS) in 1978 (Wanless 2007, 16). She was part of the staff that received and incorporated the collection into the MA and, in her thesis, has worked with the different media of the collection in its entirety as an archive (Wanless 2007, 47).

At the end of 1920, Dorothea Bleek was asked by the government of the SWA protectorate to join the anthropological expedition in SWA, led by the SAM in Cape Town (Bleek 1928, 1). The purpose of the expedition was to carry out research among the Bushmen of the protectorate, described by Jill Weintroub as a typical state-sponsored colonial endeavour to study (and control) the native populations (Weintroub 2010, 115). Bleek travelled with ‘two other gentlemen’, the museum taxidermist and modeller James Drury being one of them (Bleek 1928, 1; Weintroub 2010, 115). Bleek was going to do the philological research, while Drury and the other gentleman would do the physical research, ‘such as taking casts, measurements, etc.’ (Bleek 1928, 1). Dr Louis Fourie, the Medical Officer of Health of the protectorate, facilitated the expedition, and, on his advice, Bleek and the others had the empty police station at Sandfontein at their disposal (Bleek 1928, 1; Weintroub 2010, 120). Situated on the border of the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Sandfontein (now Buitepos) (Weintroub 2010, note 3, 110) was on the boundary between the territory of two tribes, the Naron and the Auen (Bleek 1928, 1). Bleek stayed at Sandfontein until March 1921, learning the languages of the two groups with the help of her interpreter, ‘A Klip Kaffir constable, Saul’, and becoming increasingly ‘confidential’ with the Bushmen of the area, especially during the last six weeks of her stay, when the other two from the SAM had left. When she had the opportunity to go back the next summer, she travelled alone and stayed without an interpreter from the beginning of November 1921 to the middle of March 1922 (Bleek 1928, 1).

The ‘Klip Kaffir’ Saul had grown up near Sandfontein, spoke Naron well and could understand Auen. Saul had also worked as a guide and interpreter for Fourie on several occasions and was recommended by him to help Bleek and the rest of the expedition (Wanless 2007, 87). At this point, Fourie had already collected a large part of his Bushman collection and although Bleek came to SWA as an authoritative expert in Bushman languages and culture (appointed by the SAM), we must consider Fourie the expert of local Bushman culture, based on at least four years of empirical studies and experience.

It was 14 April 2015. They were sitting in groups near the hostel, on all the roads, everywhere. They were toyi-toying in front of the hostel, burning tyres, stoning cars. They were holding pangas, knives, sticks, knobkerries, hammers. A lot of people, jumping up and down, dancing, shouting, screaming. Shirts were off. It was a whole commotion.

I had guards in the place before that – two security in the day and two security at night. But I went to the station commander that day and he said, ‘I advise you take these guys out. They can't sleep here. If they sleep, they're gonna kill them.’ I felt to myself: You know what? Just imagine these guards die for a few thousand or million rands’ worth of articles? I can always replace something but I cannot replace a human life. How would I explain to their families if they had died in my building, protecting my assets for some stupid little toyi-toying? So I decided to withdraw the guys.

Later on, when I went to go close the building, the people from the hostel – they stoned my car. I drove to my building, locked up and put the alarm on. In the middle of the night I came back and was checking what's going on and saw they were burning tyres. The next night they broke into other shops. Took some cars out and burnt them. They even burnt the one shop – went inside and put down petrol bombs and burnt it down.

Leadership is natural, without politics, without white people. Black people understand that there is induna, who lords over them. As induna, I am seen as a sell-out because my stance is always anti-war.

But my word only carries weight once the police arrive. I have been in the leadership committee at the hostel since the nineties, and I have always considered myself a peacemaker and have always discouraged crime. I got here by serving in a committee, resolving conflicts, and that very same committee elected me at a later stage.

The way it works is like this: there are block chairmen for each of the six blocks here. Each block has a committee and the chairmen meet with me regularly. I have a deputy and committee members on each floor. Each floor should have six members but they dodge duty. So, it could be four or three on the floor. In another block, it could be one person. These very dodgers end up coming to us when they have problems to untangle. If you don't fuck up, you stay in leadership until the next person comes along. The others before me were induna until they took their pensions. It's that type of a deal. It's not democratic per se because it doesn't involve open elections with the entire hostel. It's tough being a leader because all you earn, in fact, are grave insults, the harshest of them coming from gunslingers. I appeal to God to stay protected.

THE RUDE AWAKENING

I was born in 1956 in a place called KwaNomoya, near Weenen, in KwaZulu-Natal.

In this chapter I address the implications of what previous chapters uncovered about interhuman relations and the construction of personal and social identity. If the practice of dress among colonial /Xam fed into strategies for social relations, both in terms of the normative actions considered essential to live in the world with other beings, as well as in the maintenance and continuation of these relationships as materialised in clothing, one might assume that similar notions of social relationships also manifested themselves through dress in the sphere of human–human interaction.

This chapter is concerned with being dressed in two senses: the state of being dressed, as well as the process of being dressed (by someone). It is about how being dressed constituted and created both personal and social identities and how this is reflected in the narratives.

The narratives

The first narrative below exemplifies, among other things, how ornaments and dress were of major importance to the personal identity of women. The second narrative suggests that the practice of dress was an important element in constructing social and personal identities in transitional stages of life.

‘The Story of !ko’-g !nuin-tara and the Dawn's Heart Star’

‘The Story of !ko’-g !nuin-tara and the Dawn's Heart Star’, or ‘The Story of the Dawn's Heart and His Wife the Lynx’, is found in three versions in the archive. Hewitt gives an elegant summary with details from all three versions (Hewitt 2008, 74–75). Andrew Bank considers the version related by //Kabbo to Lloyd as an appendix to the main story recorded by Bleek, as there is no mention of the central event of the plot – the transformation of the She-Lynx (Bank 2006b, 173). I consider it, rather, as an introduction to the story itself, which is how I summarise the story in what follows. Particular to this story is the focus on ornaments and detailed descriptions of dress, or the dressed main character.

The Dawn's Heart Star (identified as Jupiter [Bleek 1875, 11]) hides the Dawn's Heart Child underneath a pile of edible roots. He hides her so that her mother, !ko’-g !nuin-tara (the Lynx), might find her. He instructs her not to come out until her mother approaches.