Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San. Roger Hewitt
again:
Several little children came down upon the plain … presently afterwards the women and young girls, to the number of thirty or forty (ibid., 273).
Dorothea Bleek (1923: ix) also claimed that ‘several family groups’ sometimes joined together for a game drive.
When writing about dwellings, however, the majority of the early travellers describe only a few huts at each encampment. M.H.C. Lichtenstein (op. cit., 61ff) reports that:
A horde commonly consists of the different members of one family only and no one has power or distinction over the rest.
and that
Very little intercourse subsists between the separate hordes: they seldom unite, unless in some extraordinary undertaking, for which the combined strength of a great many is required.
The picture which emerges, therefore, is that of a number of extended family groups of various sizes, probably related by blood or marriage and joining together at certain times mainly for economic reasons. The concept of ‘the band’, however, lacks both spatial and social definition in the absence of adequate data. It might have been the case that a band consisted of a number of extended families related to a core of siblings, sharing a defined territory which contained a number of water sources. These people would be related to members of neighbouring bands with whom they visited, exchanged gifts, and married. The picture, however, must remain vague.
According to Dorothea Bleek (1923: vii),
The Colonial Bushman’s property was the water. Each spring or pool in that dry country had its particular owner and was handed down from father to son with the regularity of an entitled estate. Many families owned more than one water, had summer and winter residences, to which they resorted as the growth of the field supplies or the movements of the game necessitated. However, the owners never lived near the spring, for that would prevent the game from using it. The huts were a good way off, perhaps an hour’s walk and hidden by bushes. Their position was frequently changed.
Miss Bleek’s observation that water resources were ‘handed down from father to son’ may have been based on a statement by ||Kabbo, one of her father’s informants, that his own territory – his !xoe – containing several waterholes, had belonged to his father’s father, and, upon his death, had gone to his father, then to ||Kabbo’s elder brother, and, on his elder brother’s death, to ||Kabbo (Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 305ff). However, this is the only instance of such information being given. It is possible that inheritance may have been patrilineal in some cases and matrilineal in others. Such was certainly true of the !Kung-speakers of the Dobe area studied by Richard Lee (1972, Vol 1, 129).
The territory itself was defined by water sources and other natural landmarks. |Hang ǂkass’o reported that ||Kabbo’s !xoe had a name, ||Gubo, and that it contained a number of named sites including water sources (Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 307). The precise nature of the relationship between the inheritor of a resource area and the rest of the group is unclear. Beside possibly being responsible for regulating the use of water-holes, and having unquestionable rights to food resources, there is no evidence that any special privileges attached themselves to the inheritor and, judging by reports of usage and descriptions of everyday life in the oral literature, the question of ownership did not arise or influence the collective use of water, game and veldkos2 by the group. From the earliest to the last reports, all writers claimed that, except in times of warfare, the San had no leaders of any kind (Schapera & Farrington 1933: 75; Lichtenstein 1930: 61f; Moodie 1960: 34; Barrow 1801, Vol 1, 274).
Membership of the group was either by consanguinity or through marriage. The father and mother lived in one hut together with their young children until the children could feed themselves and ‘talked with understanding’ (Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 307), when they made their own huts next to their parents. In the other huts would live the married children with their offspring. Membership was not based on descent traced exclusively through either the male or the female line and both married sons and married daughters belonged to the same band. There is no evidence that bride service existed.
Kinship and marriage
Such kinship terms as were collected3 are incomplete and based mainly on vocabulary sources rather than on any actual observations of kinship as a system of obligations and affiliations within the group. However, beside purely descriptive terms of relationship, some terms were collected which were applied to whole groups of different relatives and these might have indicated special social relationships. Siblings and both cross and parallel cousins had the same terms of address applied to them, ||kã: (male), ||kãxai (female). (Cousin marriages, however, were not forbidden, and did occur.) Similarly, the parents of a son or daughter-in-law, and the parents of a brother and sister-in-law were addressed by the same term, ||k’en (male), ||k’aiti (female). The terms for ‘grandfather’ and ‘grandmother’, !kõing and !kõite, were used in addressing any elderly relative or person distinctly senior to the speaker. The term xoakengu, ‘mothers’, was applied to older women of the group and was ‘often used where we should say “the elder women” or “mother and her friends”’ (ibid., 57). These women were especially responsible for the education of young girls in matters concerning puberty rites.
Beside these terms, there were others which indicate a special relationship between certain individuals. A woman called her father’s parents her ‘real’ (kwokwang) grandparents, and her mother’s parents her ‘lent’ (|xwõbe) ones. A man reversed this. His mother’s parents were his ‘real’ grandparents. Another special relationship seems to be indicated between a woman’s siblings and her sons, for a man addressed his mother’s sister as ʘpwaxai, ‘daughter’, and his mother’s brother as ʘpwõng, ‘son’, while they called him oä, ‘father’. Dorothea Bleek admits that she is unable to give an explanation for these terms but, in the latter case, suggests that ‘a particularly affectionate relationship is indicated’ (ibid., 59). A joking relationship appears to have existed between alternating generations of cosanguines but there are no extant details concerning this relationship.
The |Xam were strictly monogamous, although some early writers have suggested that occasionally a man might have two wives, one elderly and one much younger. This impression might have resulted from observers mistaking the wife’s younger sister, who customarily helped in the married home, for a second wife (D.F. Bleek 1923: ix; Stow 1905: 95; Barrow 1801, Vol 1, 241ff). (After the death of his wife, a man was free to marry whoever he chose but there is no evidence to show if this was also true for women.) Marriage could be between any man and woman except between brothers and sisters, and tended to be between members of different groups, although marriage within groups also occurred. The marriage was marked by no ceremony and there were no special requirements, save the consent of both parties. Residence was a matter of convenience and could be with the parents of either party. Miss Bleek (1923: ix) writes:
Sometimes the young couple build their hut near the bridegroom’s father, sometimes near the bride’s. They seem to keep the family groups fairly even.
The couple lived together in one hut with their young children and usually close to the huts of the rest of the family. Certain avoidances were practiced between the wife’s parents and their son-in-law. A man would not usually talk to his mother-in-law but would address his comments to his father-in-law. However, sometimes the same man would address his mother-in-law and not his father-in-law. In this case his wife or his children would address his father-in-law on his behalf. There is no further information to indicate when these avoidances or the breaching of them occurred (Bleek 1924: 58).
Children
Nothing is recorded about child-bearing amongst the |Xam but it is known that naming was done by the child’s parents. According to George Stow (op. cit., 103), the child would be named either from the place where it was born, a cave, river, etc. or from some other thing which might distinguish it, such as a physical peculiarity of the child or one of its parents. In the Bleek and Lloyd material the name given to a child at birth was called its ‘little name’. In later life, however, this name would be supplemented by another given,