Return of the Moon: Versions from the /Xam - Stephen Watson

Although the / Xam (or Cape Bushmen) were all but wiped out by the end of the nineteenth century, part of their oral culture was preserved through the remarkable efforts of W H Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, who transcribed more than 12,000 pages of their folklore, songs and other stories in Cape Town over a century ago. Basing his versions on the Bleek & Lloyd collection, Stephen Watson has created a series of poems which illuminate the rich and various facets of what was once the oldest continuous culture in Southern Africa. They range widely, from the mythological to the historical, dealing with the creation of the moon, the origins of the Milky Way, and with such figures as the trickster, Mantis.

The origin of these poems is an extensive ethnographic record known as the Bleek and Lloyd collection, a testimony of folklore, songs and stories that formed part of the /Xam oral tradition (the /Xam being one linguistic group of the Bushman people who lived in Southern Africa in the nineteenth century)

 The testimony was narrated by three men, //Kabbo, /Hankasso and Dia!kwain, and transcribed by Dr W H Bleek and Lucy Lloyd in the 1870s. Watson re-cast excerpts from this testimony into poetry, a complex process he recounts in his original publication, Return of the Moon: versions from the /Xam.

ISBN: 0958306079

Pages: 80

Paperback

The Carrefour Press, 1991

Good condition

B122