Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San. Roger Hewitt
which might suggest a formal mode of conclusion. Characters in the narratives are often given to making explicitly didactic statements and it is here, embedded in a drama of socially situated characters, that the narrators tended to place such lessons as their audiences were expected to draw. Here again, just as speech of a community provides one of the primary surfaces of |Xam narrative, so social education is continuous with the lives of people living together, seen in fictional constructs and separate from any directly asserted view of the narrator himself.
This is not to say that a narrator’s guiding voice is absent. There are certainly cases where irony is employed, plainly intended to influence the audience’s perception of characters. In several of |Hangǂkass’o’s |Kaggen narratives there is also a visible attempt on the part of the narrator to interpret the protagonist in a special light (see Chapter 7). Such acts of interpretation, however, are only engaged in tentatively and always with reference to well-established and communally owned values. As is so often true in oral literature, the individual narrator puts his own stamp on what is communally held, just as any individual speaker of a language draws on that language in his own characteristic way expressing simultaneously both his distinctiveness and his membership of the community.5
Turning to the subject matter of the narratives, a number of distinctions can be made for purposes of description on the basis of content even though, as was pointed out above, the |Xam themselves did not distinguish between kinds of narrative. Besides a substantial amount of material concerning the beliefs and customs of the informants, a few accounts of the personal experiences of the informants were also collected. These represent a simple form of narrative and provide a useful source of contrast to the purely fictional narratives in the collection. These accounts relate both ordinary and extraordinary events in the lives of the informants and are often of great ethnographic interest. Of more concern as oral literature are a few accounts, some quite extensive, of events which had occurred apparently during the lifetime of the narrators but which were not personally witnessed by them. Such narratives were not said to be about the !Xwe-||na-s’o !kʔe and involve no magical happenings. They are, however, quite similar in theme to other narratives which do purport to be about this early race and it must be said that the distinction between these narratives and what might be termed ‘historical legends’ possibly only resides in the embellishment of the latter.
The historical legends, which the narrators did claim recounted events in the lives of the !Xwe-||na-s’o !kʔe, do not involve animals in human form, or even humans with animal names but simply human beings in a context which could be that of |Xam life contemporary with the time of collection. These narratives often involve mysterious or magical events but this was by no means a necessary condition for a narrative being said to be concerned with the !Xwe-||na-s’o !kʔe. Such a narrative is the simple tale of the man who ordered his wife to cut off his ears because his wife had shaved his brother’s hair so closely that he believed his brother had been skinned; wishing himself to have a similarly unusual appearance, he told his wife, against her protestations, to perform the operation and naturally ended up screaming with pain. This short narrative contains nothing magical, but the man’s foolishness may have been the aspect which marked him out as one of the !Xwe-||na-s’o !kʔe as far as the narrator was concerned. Other narratives of this kind concern dangerous encounters with lions and even conflicts with the !Korana which may well have had some foundation in actual events in recent history (see Chapter 3).
The majority of |Xam kukummi concern the !Xwe-||na-s’o !kʔe as animals – or rather people who were said to have later become the animals whose names they bear and who often also have at least some of the attributes of those animals. Apparently any living creature, from an elephant to the lava of a caterpillar, could be regarded as having once been one of the !Xwe-||na-s’o !kʔe. Many varieties of birds feature in these narratives, as do insects, burrowing animals, reptiles, large and small antelopes and beasts of prey. All are described as the !Xwe-||na-s’o !kʔe who preceded the |Xam in their country and, apparently, no special distinction was made between these characters and those, not identified with animals, who were the subject of historical legends. Nor were either of these groups of narratives regarded as more true than the other. Like the !Kung tales of today both seem to have been regarded as equally true or untrue with no clear distinction being made either way.
The themes of these animal narratives are various but often involve inter-family relations, the consequences of bad marriages and the conflicting interests of in-laws. Many of the problems which form their subject are caused by the fact that although the characters are in human form they are essentially animals. As such, difficulties inevitably arise if marriages take place between people who in their animal form would be incompatible. Such is the case of the Jackal who married a Quagga and was persuaded by his family that his wife was food and therefore should be killed. The Anteater and the Lynx are also both involved in the problems of making inappropriate alliances although here both creatures come to realise the order of things and articulate the need for proper marriages between animals and proper (i.e. animal-like) life-styles. The Lynx marries another lynx and lives as a lynx lives, while the Anteater becomes an actual anteater and lives in a hole.
All collections of San oral literature contain the notion that the animals were once people and were later changed into the animals we know. In the Bleek and Lloyd collection, narrators credited this change to the Anteater and the Lynx who commanded the animals to take their real form and henceforth live as animals – which they did (see Chapter 5).
Beside the animals, the sun, moon and stars were also said to have once been numbered amongst the !Xwe-||na-s’o !kʔe and the narratives concerning their lives on earth at that time often account for the existence and movements of celestial bodies. Such a narrative is the well-known account of the man whose armpit glowed with light while everywhere else was in gloom. While he slept a group of children, on the instructions of their mother, threw him up into the sky where he became the sun. The moon was also said to have once been a man, as was the ‘Dawn’s Heart Star’ Jupiter, while several stories describe two lions, !Haue ta ǂhou and !Gu, who, according to one narrative, are now the two pointers on the Southern Cross. Some narratives speak of whole families becoming groups of stars. In some instances such transformations were said to be caused by the disobedient actions of girls subjected to puberty observances, while some fragmentary narratives given by ||Kabbo simply describe the appearance of certain constellations as families of people moving across the sky, the children being the smaller stars, the parents the larger ones.
Many of the stars were given animal names. W.H.I. Bleek (1874: 102) comments:
With regard to the constellations, – it is especially worthy of remark that their names in Bushman seem, generally speaking, to be unconnected with their shapes in the sky, – and that many of them seem only to be named from the fact of their being seen at certain times when the animals, or other objects, whose names they bear, come into season, or are more abundant.
This led Bleek (loc. cit.) under the influence of Max Müller’s theory of myth,6 to the following speculation:
Of course, when such names as steinbok, hartebeest, eland, anteater, lion, tortoise, etc., had once become attached to certain stars or constellations, fancy might step in, and try to discover the shapes of those animals (or other objects) in the configuration of the stars; whilst at the same time, mythological personification would begin its work, and make the heavens the theatre of numberless poetically conceived histories.
While there is some evidence for this being the case in certain minor instances, there are only a few narratives where animals named are actually associated with those stars possessing animal names. However, there is no doubt that explanations for the presence of the sun, moon and stars were taken up into narrative form.
Apart from these narratives of animals and celestial bodies there are, finally, those concerning the supernatural beings who were part of |Xam religious belief. These narratives relate the activities of !Khwa (the Rain) and |Kaggen, the trickster associated with the mantis. The narratives involving !Khwa are mainly to do with the consequences of