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 2003, 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, initially finding instructors released from the Breakwater Convict Station, where they had been 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 collected across southern Africa and in Tanzania. The bulk of the archive comprises 15,325 notebook spreads (double pages) and 85,821 manuscript dictionary cards (as well as many other word lists) of southern African indigenous languages, 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 the Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek (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. Notebooks in the library of the University of South Africa are also included. Each section has a brief introduction to its contents, and Curations of diverse aspects of the archive can be found at the bottom of the home page. These curations, by various scholars, offer points of access to the archive, and more will be added over time. The website also includes a significant archive of Dr Janette Deacon’s pioneering work in locating sites in ǀxam lands, and introductions both to the ǀxam dictionary (by Dr Menan du Plessis) and to the digitising of the archive (by Pippa Skotnes). 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 project to conserve, digitise, contextualise and publish the Bleek and Lloyd archive is not complete. New items are continually being discovered, including donations of objects to European Museums, collections of letters and other correspondence. Field trips in the Northern Cape, Namibia, Botswana, Angola and Lesotho are ongoing, and speakers of endangered languages are keen to have their languages and stories recorded, and the difficult circumstances of their lives heard more widely. It has been a privilege, if at times heartbreaking, to hear these stories. Work on this project 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.

The ǀxam spoke of their stories being carried on the wind. ǃkhwe-ta ǃxōë, means ‘the wind’s place’, suggesting this digital archive is a place where stories have come, temporarily, to rest, but hopefully also to drift out into the world.