Dorothea Bleek

A Life Of Scholarship

Jill Weintroub

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781868148806
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito storico

Dorothea Bleek (1873–1948) devoted her life to completing the 'bushman researches' that her father and aunt had begun in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. This research was partly a labour of familial loyalty to Wilhelm, the acclaimed linguist and language scholar of nineteenth-century Germany and later of the Cape Colony, and to Lucy Lloyd, a self-taught linguist and scholar of bushman languages and folklore; but it was also an expression of Dorothea's commitment to a particular kind of scholarship and an intellectual milieu that saw her spending her entire adult life in the study of the people she called'bushmen'.
How has history treated Dorothea Bleek? Has she been recognised as a scholar in her own right, or as someone who merely followed in the footsteps of her famous father and aunt? Was she an adventurer, a woman who travelled across southern Africa driven by intellectual curiosity to learn all she could about the bushmen? Or was she conservative, a researcher who belittled the people she studied and dismissed them as lazy and improvident?
These are some of the questions with which Jill Weintroub starts her thoughtful biography of Dorothea Bleek. The book examines Dorothea Bleek's life story and family legacy, her rock art research and her fieldwork in southern Africa, and, in light of these, evaluates her scholarship and contribution to the history of ideas in South Africa. The compelling and surprising narrative reveals an intellectual inheritance intertwined with the story of a woman's life, and argues that Dorothea's life work – her study of the bushmen – was also a sometimes surprising emotional quest.

1	Colonial childhood, European learning

Philosophy is just not my cup of tea. Of all the words of Goethe’s that mean the most to me, are the ones he put into Mephisto’s mouth:

Grey, dearest friend, is all theory,

And green is life’s golden tree.¹

Dorothea Bleek was born on 26 March 1873, the fourth in a line of five daughters. Soon after she was born, her family moved from their home, The Hill, to their new residence a short distance away in the same village of Mowbray, just outside colonial Cape Town. The rambling new property, called Charlton House, was located across from the existing student apartment complex, now known as Forest Hill, in the Main Road. Demolished in the 1960s to make way for a teachers’ training college, Charlton House was just a few blocks from the Baxter Theatre in Rondebosch, on the edge of the middle and upper campuses of UCT, where Dorothea would one day hold an honorary readership.²

Dorothea was born into an unusual domestic situation. Her father, Wilhelm, was widely known within European intellectual circles despite his distant location at the Cape Colony. By the early 1870s his networks and correspondents included the leading thinkers and social scientists of the era, including his cousin the evolutionist and naturalist Ernst Haeckel, the philologist Max Müller, Charles Darwin and the English biologist Thomas Huxley. At the time of Dorothea’s birth, Wilhelm’s study of the ‘click languages’ of southern Africa had progressed, as had the process of collecting folklore from bushman prisoners who had been sentenced, mostly for stock theft and poaching, but in one case for murder, to hard labour at the Breakwater Prison. Some of the prison buildings, albeit repurposed, can still be seen along Portswood Road, close to Cape Town’s glitzy V&A Waterfront entertainment and shopping complex. Wilhelm had obtained permission from the colonial government to have selected prisoners live at his home so that he could work intensively with them to study their language, folklore and cosmology. As is well known, Lucy Lloyd, the sister of Wilhelm’s wife Jemima, became involved in the project. From early on, Lucy assisted Wilhelm with interviews and transcriptions and in time became schooled in the /Xam language and its nuanced phonetics. Lucy continued the project after Wilhelm Bleek’s early death in 1875. She extended Wilhelm’s narrow interests in grammar and folklore (and, ultimately, human origins), and recorded in her notebooks information about the bushmen’s daily life, including hunting practices, the use of the environment, the harvesting of plants, the curing of skins, the production of household objects and materials, poison making, and details of cosmologies and belief systems.³

Lucy would become Dorothea’s mentor and teacher, and the two collaborated on the publishing of Specimens of Bushman Folklore in 1911, the first public offering of tales from the Bleek and Lloyd notebooks.⁴ Dorothea’s mother, Jemima, contributed two notebooks to the collection, but her larger role was supportive. She continued to run the household and to support Lucy in the research project for nearly a decade following the death of Wilhelm. Also helping out, and a permanent fixture in this female-dominated household following Wilhelm’s death, was the older Lloyd sister Frances (Fanny), who was Lucy Lloyd’s constant companion.⁵ Fanny took care of the youngest Bleek daughter, Helma (Hermione), who was born in December 1875, a few months after Wilhelm had died, leaving Jemima grief-stricken.

As an infant and toddler, Dorothea’s awareness of her father must have been vague and later influenced by the memories of her mother and older siblings. Her babyhood would have been shadowed by her father’s illness and her mother’s worry. Wilhelm’s health, never excellent, had deteriorated in the years preceding his death at the age of 49. He died in the early hours of 17 August 1875 when Dorothea was just three years old. The records confirm that Jemima was shattered by her husband’s death, and that she was incapacitated by grief for months afterwards.⁶ One can only imagine the atmosphere in the home during Dorothea’s early years. Dia!kwain, the /Xam man who was living at Charlton House at the time, was sensitive to the sadness. Stories recorded by Lucy early in August narrate Dia!kwain’s presentiments of death.⁷ After Wilhelm died, Dia!kwain told a story about an owl visiting Charlton House, interpreting this as a visit by his ‘master’ to check on his little ones.⁸

Nevertheless, the ‘bushman’ work continued. The birth of Dorothea’s youngest sister, Helma, in December 1875 may have brought some relief to the bereaved household. Dorothea would have been nearly five years old and much more aware of what was going on around her when /Han≠kass’o returned to Mowbray at the request of Lucy Lloyd. The family would have said goodbye to Dia!kwain and welcomed another set of interviewees, this time a Korana family, into their home.⁹ Piet Lynx and his family stayed for close to a year, allowing Lucy to gather samples of their language. They were part of a rather more itinerant series of interviewees who were drawn on during this time. By now, Lucy’s research methods had expanded to include the use of drawings, and sketches made by Dia!kwain and /Han≠kass’o entered the collection.¹⁰ As far as Dorothea’s biography is concerned, it is difficult to resist the temptation to mark these months and years as central moments in influencing the later tone and direction of her scholarship.

In the absence of documentary evidence, however, and given her location as a young girl in Victorian Mowbray, one can only imagine what kinds of interactions the six-year-old Dorothea would have had with the !Kung children who arrived in 1879. !Nanni, Tamme, /Uma and Da were from Damaraland (in what is now northern Namibia/southern Angola). The refugee boys were left in the care of Lucy by the explorer W.Coates Palgrave so that she could collect samples of bushman languages from the northern reaches of south-western Africa, a project that had been part of Wilhelm Bleek’s research agenda from the beginning.¹¹ Of all the interlocutors visiting the household, it was the presence of these youngsters that perhaps made the biggest impression on the young Dorothea. First, they were closest to her in age. Second, Lucy encouraged them to draw and sketch, and the young Dorothea may have been allowed to participate, or she may have watched as they produced the watercolours and drawings for which they are now most widely remembered. While in the Bleek household, the boys made illustrations of the flora, fauna and folklore of their home countries (Figure 1.3). These were annotated in detail by Lucy Lloyd.¹² The oldest, !Nanni, produced a map of his home country (Figure 1.4). He also told stories about his home to Lucy Lloyd. The youngest child, Da, remained in the Mowbray household until 1884.

So it is certain that the young Dorothea heard the !Kung language being spoken during the two or more years the youngsters lived at Charlton House. These years could have been crucial ones in directing the young Dorothea to her later scholarship. Dorothea gained further familiarity with !Kung vocabulary and grammar as she helped Lucy though the arduous process of editing and indexing a small percentage of the notebook texts prior to their publication in 1911. It may have been at that time that Dorothea learned of the boys’ traumatic removal from their families and land and their insertion into the colonial economy. Perhaps that was the first time she properly looked at the drawings (and Lucy’s annotations) produced by the youngsters, and closely examined the map that !Nanni had sketched of his country. In any case, Dorothea must at that stage have developed an ear for their language that was reinforced when helping Lucy with the manuscript for Specimens, and again years later when in the field. Dorothea’s fieldwork from 1910 onwards suggests a level of familiarity with the languages that she was able to build on during subsequent trips.

Dorothea’s association with the !Kung youngsters came to an end in her 11th year, when Jemima and her daughters left for Europe. Some details are available in the record to flesh out imaginings of what their life in Germany was like. Correspondence suggests the family had settled in Berlin by June 1884.¹³ A studio portrait of Jemima and her daughters taken in Bonn confirms they were in Germany by 1886 (Figure 1.5). Family history suggests that the move may always have been part of Wilhelm and Jemima’s planning. It was motivated by Jemima’s desire that her daughters should, with the support of Wilhelm’s relatives, receive the best education possible.¹⁴ Jemima’s support of Lucy’s ‘bushman researches’ at Mowbray had delayed this move by almost 10 years. By then, the financial strain of having to support a large household with almost no income made the trip back to Europe a necessity.¹⁵

In Europe

Jemima and her daughters were able to draw on the support of members of Wilhelm’s family in Germany. They set up home in Charlottenburg, a suburb of Berlin, but, according to correspondence and photographs in the collection, they also spent time in Bonn. They remained involved in the bushman work and continued to support Lucy, who, with Frances, travelled to Europe and London in 1887 to begin the process of publishing Specimens.¹⁶ The Germany the family returned to in the 1880s was vastly different from the country their father had left three decades before. The post-1850s surge in industrialisation had seen rapid urbanisation as thousands moved to the cities. German universities had become world centres of study in both the humanities and the sciences. It was in this environment of growing affluence, urbanism, cosmopolitanism and intellectual vibrancy that Dorothea and her sisters completed their schooling and tertiary education. The family divided their domestic lives between Berlin and Clarens (Switzerland), spending six months of the year in each city.¹⁷ According to notes recorded in the 1980s by Dorothea’s niece Marjorie, the Bleek daughters ‘went to school in both countries, becoming fluent in French as well as German, while speaking English at home’.¹⁸ Years later, in correspondence with the Wits musicologist Percival Kirby, Dorothea would agree with his suggestion that ‘bushman singing’ resembled Alpine yodelling, remembering the ‘very musical yodelling [she] used to hear in Switzerland & the Tyrol’.¹⁹

Family records show that each of the sisters achieved high levels of tertiary education. Margarethe (Margie) attended medical school in Zurich, but died in Italy on 16 December 1902 at the age of 31, of a fever contracted during her training.²⁰ The youngest, Wilhelmina (Helma), born in 1875 just months after her father’s death, studied music and trained as a concert pianist.²¹ Helma would return to South Africa, where she married and raised her family in Cape Town. She and Dorothea shared the family home, La Rochelle, in Newlands for most of their lives. Mabel (May) married Albert Jaeger in Berlin in 1899 and settled in Halle, which became part of East Germany after World War II. She died there in 1953.²² Details are scarce regarding Edith Bleek. We know that she assisted with the editing and production of Specimens, and can surmise that she returned to South Africa with Jemima, Dorothea and Helma in 1904.²³ Edith and Dorothea collaborated to produce an essay for Helen Tongue’s book in 1909.²⁴ But beyond that, the archive is silent.

Intellectual influences

There is little detail in Dorothea’s papers regarding her teenage years and schooling apart from a single photograph that suggests that at some point she attended boarding school in Bonn. What is known is that she trained as a teacher and specialised in linguistic studies. Family memory suggests that Dorothea attended lectures at the School of Oriental Studies in Berlin and took classes in African languages in London, although no indication of courses competed and/or certificates obtained survive.²⁵

Such uncertainties are intriguing when they are considered in the context of the intellectual climate of late-nineteenth-century Europe that formed the background to Dorothea’s studies. ...