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About ǃkhwe-ta ǃxōë the Digital Bleek and Lloyd


ǃkhwe-ta ǃxōë: the Digital Bleek and Lloyd is an externally funded project of the Centre for Curating the Archive at the Michaelis School of fine Art, University of Cape Town, under the directorship of Professor Pippa Skotnes. Initiated in 2004 the aim has been to assemble as much of the widely dispersed materials originally produced by philologist Wilhelm Bleek, Lucy Lloyd from 1870 and later Dorothea Bleek from 2010; then digitise, edit and introduce them as an integrated digital collection. In 1870 WHI Bleek initiated a project to record the ǀxam language making use of instructors released from the Breakwater Convict Station where they were serving sentences for stock theft and homicide. Bleek and Lloyd worked with primary instructors ǁkabbo, Diaǃkwain and ǀhanǂkass’o who remained with or returned to Bleek’s home in Mowbray, Cape Town after their sentences were served; and later Lloyd worked with 4 boys from northern Namibia to learn and record ǃkun, spoken along the Kavango River. Many other ǀxam speakers made smaller contributions and Dorothea Bleek assembled word lists and short narratives from other hunter-gatherer or former hunter gatherer speakers in several distinct languages and dialects. The bulk of the archive comprises tens of thousands of pages of notebooks and manuscript dictionary cards, but there are hundreds of other documents, manuscripts, genealogies, newspaper articles and correspondences. It also includes George Stow’s copies of rock paintings from the 1860s, and over 500 drawings, maps and watercolours by the four ǃkun boys, ǃnanni, Tamme, ǀuma and Da made in the 1870s and 1880s (see short bios on each of the contributors which can be accessed from the home page).

A publication, Claim to the Country (2007) first released a searchable CD of all the notebooks along with contextualising essays, and this web publication includes this material as well as the full UCT collection, and material from Iziko, the National Library of South Africa and the University of South Africa. Each section has a brief introduction to its contents, and curations of diverse aspects of the archive can been found at the bottom of the home page. These will be added over time. The website also includes a significant archive of Dr Janette Deacon’s work in locating sites in ǀxamlands, curations by various scholars offering points of access to the archive, and an introduction to the ǀxam dictionary (link) and the digitising of the archive (link). Contemporary speakers of former hunter-gatherer languages have also contributed short audio clips and stories allowing visitors to the site to hear their languages spoken.

The ǀxam spoke of their stories being carried on the wind. ǃkhwe-ta ǃxōë, means ‘the wind’s place’, suggesting this digital archive as a place where stories have come, temporarily, to rest.

The Bleek and Lloyd Archive is a United Nations Site of the Memory of the World. The project, including several field trips in the Northern Cape, Namibia, Bostwana, Angola and Lesotho, has been made possible by generous grants from De Beers, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Mapula Trust, Swan Fund (Oxford), Vivien Cohen, Janette Deacon, and Oppenheimer Generations Research and Conservation, as well as donations from members of the public who rallied in support of the University of Cape Town after the devastating fire that destroyed its African Studies Library in 2021.