Teaching Through Making: |xam and !xun Material Culture of the Bleek and Lloyd Collection

Abstract

At Wits Art Museum (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa) is a small collection donated to the former Wits Museum of Ethnology by Percival Kirby in 1952. A note in the accession register ties the items into the context of the renowned ‘Bushman researches’ of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd in Cape Town in the 1870s and 1880s, an unusual cross-cultural collaboration with a small group of |xam- and !xun-speaking people against the backdrop of the extreme oppression of San peoples across the southern African region. These objects represent a rare instance of historical material culture of San (‘Bushman’) origin in museum collections being associated with named persons or specific communities of origin. We examine them according to object type—spoon, head ornament, firestick, plaything, arrow and bullroarer—to assess their provenance and approach them ‘biographically’, exploring their community origins and coming into being as specific things, and their being gifted to Kirby by Wilhelm's daughter, Dorothea Bleek. Our ‘relocation’, documentation and contextualization of the Bleek-Kirby collection enables some of the material linkages to be restored, complementing the better-known narratives, making the case for the objects as active participants in the conversations, and enriching understanding of the Bleek and Lloyd Collection as a whole. We examine the significant cultural know-how embedded in these objects and emphasize the creative agency of the |xam and !xun people—|hanǂkass'o, !nanni, Tamme among others—as primary authors and producers of knowledge within the broader intellectual project. The bullroarers in particular reveal some of the affordances of this detailed work, assisted by the ongoing digitization and digital curation of the archive.