CHAPTER THREE: THE UNIVERSAL AND THE LOCAL: THE TRICKSTER AND THE /XAM NARRATIVES
C. The hartebeest and /Kaggen in /Xam discourse
Hewitt, with some difficulty, reduces the story to its structural functions. Guenther reduces it to its Khoisan type. Both read the narrative as predominantly a trickster tale. In both their readings, many of the elements of the story become incidental. I would propose, instead, that the story be read in terms of its detail and as the site of an intersecting web of signifiers. While the signifier "/Kaggen" is undeniably part of an intricate set of signifying relationships, other elements in the story, apart from /Kaggen, can be tracked as well in order to reveal chain upon chain of signifier, capable of countless configurations and sequences. While a universalising approach surveys the materials with a panoramic gaze, a critical practice that is fascinated by the singularity of /Xam discursive practice can discover the
"unintelligibility" it seeks in the detail. "The richness of the San narrative tradition," observes Solomon (forthcoming: 57) "lies ... in its differences" rather than in its relationship to a '"pan-San cosmology'" which if it exists, does so at the most general (and in some ways, banal) level."
When assembling the references from the materials that relate to one of the elements in a story, it should be borne in mind that these references are
circumscribed for interpreters as they would not have been for /Xam auditors by the limited range of the materials available and by unfamiliarity with /Xam language and praxis. Such a procedure can never do more than hint at the levels of meaning
206 See Baudrillard's critique of the universal in chapter 3, section v and his advocacy of a method of critique which renders the world less intelligible than it presents itself to us.
that every signifier would have generated for a /Xam participant, meanings that would have continually shifted according to an individual's location in /Xam history. In addition, single /Xam words often had multiple meanings, a
characteristic of/Xam languages generally (Solomon forthcoming: 74). What this approach can do, though, is point to the modalities of/Xam textual practice, which themselves create and generate meaning rather than reflect palely the meanings that emanate from an extra-linguistic origin.
I shall concentrate on the obvious figure of the hartebeest from the story rather than on a peripheral element, as I will do with the reference to springbok in my analysis of 'the story of the girl and the stars' in the last chapter. I have chosen the signifier
"hartebeest" because of its overt links with the signifier "/Kaggen", the focus of my attention in the three chapters that comprise the second part of this thesis. I explore the ways in which the hartebeest is linked to /Kaggen as well as to other signifiers whose contributions to the overall signification of the story are elusive but
important. In addition, I will argue that the term "hartebeest" is itself an unstable signifier. It is not simply a single term attached to a set number of signifieds but a signifier that spans the symbolic, the imaginary and the real. It can signify directly or through metaphorical association or metonymic extension. It can also refer to the particular or to a generic form.
In the story that I discussed in the last section and which I will continue to
investigate in this one, we encounter not a real hartebeest but /Kaggen disguised as a hartebeest. Lucy Lloyd's title already emphasises this point: 'The Mantis
Assumes the Form of a Hartebeest.' This observation is duplicated in the page heading which accompanies the story for fourteen pages: 'The Mantis in form of a Hartebeest.' Lloyd's intervention in naming the story entails an interpretation that cannot go untested for, in a sense, as we shall see, the Mantis and the hartebeest already, and always, share a form. But let us assume for now that we have before
207 The naming of a story played a crucial role in the way stories were constructed from the /Xam materials by Bleek and Lloyd (1911) and by Dorothea Bleek (1923). See chapter 6, section ii.
us, as did the girls, a hartebeest which we, but not the girls, know to be /Kaggen.
This creature is both more and less than a hartebeest. It possesses an uncanny wholeness and an uncanny capacity to elude the children's hands, to shrink from their grasp and evade the status of object. This is a hartebeest only through the eyes and voices of the girls: "The children perceived him, when he had laid himself stretched out... then said to each other: 'It is a hartebeest that yonder lies ...' "
(Bleek and Lloyd 1911: 3). We know, through our privileged relationship with the narrative voice of the story, that this whole, intact hartebeest lying so enticingly in the way of the girls is really the Mantis who "cheated the children, by becoming a hartebeest, by resembling a dead hartebeest." /Kaggen does not merely pretend to be a hartebeest. He really becomes one. To do this all he has to do is resemble one, a quality that is intrinsic to him since the Mantis and the hartebeest possess the same head shape and gait (Hewitt 1986: 128). What he does pretend, though, is to be dead: "He feigning death lay in front of the children". The presence here, by the way, of death, even in simulated form, calls into question once again the neat division between first and present times and the attribution of properties such as the absence of death to the First Times. /Kaggen wants the children to cut him up with a stone knife. These children, it is asserted, do not possess metal knives. The /Xam, too, it would appear, retain a Stone Age!
The references to hartebeest in the Bleek and Lloyd collection are not as extensive as those pertaining to springbok or eland, for instance. Nevertheless, an exploration of these references rapidly discloses a wider referential context for the story and reveals the exuberance of the signifier itself. The hartebeest is one of the Mantis's special animals. It is one of the buck endowed by the Mantis with colour. He fed the Gemsbok, the Hartebeest, the Quagga and the Springbok different kinds of honey which resulted in their attaining different colours. The "Hartebeest is red, because the comb of young bees which he ate was red. So he became like the comb
- See chapter 5, section B and chapter 8, section i for further discussion of the presence or absence of death in the First Times.
of young bees" (Bleek, D 1923: 10). The Mantis not only creates the Eland and the Hartebeest but endows them with colour by feeding them different kinds of honey. Colour is not simply descriptive. It signifies identity; it gives these animals their particularity. The hartebeest, as well as the other buck which /Kaggen invests with colour, are signifiers, then, of difference. While all the signifiers in the narratives participate in a play of difference, signifiers such as "hartebeest" make this play explicit.
It is important to note in passing that in the scheme that writers such as Hewitt (1986: 116-118) and Solomon (forthcoming: 38-39) apply to the materials, identity confusion prevails during the First Times until the anteater lays down the laws of the species and confers separate identities on them. If/Kaggen's endowing of the antelope with identity through feeding them different kinds of honey is also taken into consideration then it must be admitted that the /Xam materials do not contain a single account of the division of the Early Race into creatures with separate
identities; they contain instead many intersecting versions which are only
contradictory for so long as they are read with a view to extracting from them an
209 One could, at this point, deviate from tracking the hartebeest and turn to the role of the signifier
"honey" in the narratives, a substance that appears in many different contexts. Parkington (1996) links it to sexuality, femininity and fecundity in a consideration of the story Dorothea Bleek (1923) entitles 'The Mantis makes an eland.' In this story the Mantis makes an eland from Kwammang-a's shoe and raises it on a mixture of honey and water. Parkington argues that the phrase, "The eland grew up eating Mantis's honey" (Bleek, D. 1923: 1), could be "read metaphorically as implying sexual infidelity" (Parkington 1996: 283). Like hunting meat, which is symbolically conflated with male sexual activity (Biesele 1993), honey is exclusively collected by males (Hewitt 1986: 35). In 'the story of the Mantis and the Eland', /Kaggen's failure to return home with honey alerts his family group to the fact that something is up. The Ichneumon is sent to spy on his grandfather and sees him feeding what the Ichneumon, who along with everyone else has never known an eland (this is the first one), calls a "strong thing" (Bleek, D 1923: 1). Honey is intimately linked to the Mantis and to his special animals in an intricate web of signification. "[Symbolically honey was regarded as creative substance associated with game animals and the moon" (Hewitt 1986: 224). Honey, I would argue, is absent from 'the story of the girls and the hartebeest' as a signifier but present as a signified by virtue of its relationship with the signifiers that do occur directly in the narrative.
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authorised version of the /Xam myth of origin. The order of things in the narratives does not obey this logic or fulfil this expectation. It is possible for both the anteater and /Kaggen to parcel out identity at different times and in different ways just as it is possible for death to exist and not exist in the First Times.21 ] The story entitled 'the Mantis takes away the ticks' sheep' also describes /Kaggen's assertion of the differentiation of species (Bleek, D. 1923: 30-34). All the narratives could be described as exploring the nature of identity in one way or another. I discuss this aspect of them at greater length in 'the story of the sun's armpit' in chapter 7.
No mention of eland appears in this narrative and yet hartebeest and eland are always inextricably linked. The whole symbolic order in which the eland participates is present, I would maintain, in the story through a web of
intertexuality. Eland would always have been a silent but signifying presence in a telling of 'the story of the girls and the hartebeest.' Guenther (1996: 90) connects, as we have seen, 'the story of the girls and the hartebeest' with sexuality.
Parkington emphasises the sexual significance of eland: "The eland has a quite specific connotation related to the parallels seen by hunter-gatherer people between hunting and sex, and the roles these activities play in defining social roles (1996:
282). An intertextual relationship between the two antelope is established by the sexual connotations they share as signifiers. But sexual signification is not the only link between them. The Mantis and his friends devotes two and a half pages to the connection between the two antelope in an extract that is entitled, 'The hartebeest and the eland' (Bleek, D. 1923: 10-12). This piece does not only concern the eland and the hartebeest, it also supplies information about the relationship between /Kaggen and the hartebeest that has an obvious and immediate relevance to a consideration of 'the story of the hartebeest and the girls.'
See chapter 6 for a discussion of the /Xam materials and the notion of the myth of origin.
' See chapter 8 for a discussion of this paradox in 'the story of the moon and the hare.'