The boer and the jackal: satire and resistance in Khoi orature

Abstract

In the context of considerable scholarly and popular attention focused on Bushman narratives over the last 30 years, much of it centred on analyses and retellings of the Bleek and Lloyd archive, there has been much less attention paid to Khoi story-telling and the comparative insights made possible by such a study. The monumental work on the ∣Xam carried out by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd in the 1870s and 1880s has overshadowed Bleek's own earlier studies of Khoi folklore. Soon after his arrival in Cape Town and his appointment as Lord Grey's librarian, Bleek had started to solicit Bushman and Khoi folktales from missionaries stationed in the remoter areas of the colonies, and in 1864 a collection of 42 of these translated oral narratives was published in London as Reynard the Fox in South Africa; or Hottentot fables and tales. The book is South Africa's earliest publication of indigenous literature, and it remains one of the most important collections of Khoi orature. This article has two interrelated interests: first, drawing attention to the largely neglected area of Khoi orature, and second, developing an argument about the similarities and differences between Khoi story-telling and Bushman narratives. It is in this context that the contradistinctive idea of satire will be explored which is, in Khoi orature, associated with the transgressive trickster figure of the wily jackal. In Khoi stories the jackal is an attractive, roguish figure who is able to outwit the powerful – in particular, predators such as lions. In ∣Xam story-telling on the other hand, the jackal did not function as a trickster but was associated with negative connotations such as cunning, cowardice and selfishness, qualities that did not allow him to become a figure of identification. Such a bifurcation, this article will suggest, was not without political consequence in the often violent 19th-century Cape frontier.

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