African Folktales at Internet Archive: Specimens of Bushman Folklore

Yesterday I wrote about David Lewis-Williams's book Stories that Float from Afar: Ancestral Folklore of the San of Southern Africa, and in the lengthy introduction he tells the story of the San storytellers who, in the 1870s, told their stories to the linguist Wilhelm Bleek who, with the help of his sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd, meticulously transcribed their words and translated the stories into English. The book I want to share today is Bleek and Lloyd's Specimens of Bushman Folklore, published by Lucy Lloyd in 1911. It's available, just a click away, at the Internet Archive:

The picture inside the cover shows //Kabbo, whose name means "Dreams," one of the most important storytellers who contributed to the collection:

The book contains 27 stories, along with songs, natural history legends, and accounts of customs and practices. The text is presented with the original language transcribed (including the special symbols to represent the different "clicks" that are a distinctive feature of the language), with a facing English translation. 

There are also some illustrations and photographs in the book, like this photograph of a woman working with a digging stick (as shown also on the cover of the book):

Bleek died in 1875, but Lucy Lloyd carried on his work until her own death in 1914, and then Bleek's daughter, Dorothea, who had been only a baby when the //Kabbo and the other San men and women had stayed in her father's house (Dorothea was born in 1873), carried on the work as well; she died in 1948. The books that they published contained a portion of the materials recorded in the 1870s by Bleek and Lloyd, but you can consult the online archive for even more: The Digital Bleek and Lloyd.

There is also a book by Dorothea Bleek which only recently entered the public domain, having been published in 1924; it's available at Hathi Trust but not yet at Internet Archive: Mantis and His Friends. This short book is intended for a more general audience focusing on the Mantis stories in particular, and it also contains more illustrations from San art than in the Bleek and Lloyd Bushman Folklore book.

So, whether you decide to explore the stories with the original language in Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd's book, or maybe use Dorothea Bleek's book instead, wonderful stories about Mantis await you.

Specimens of Bushman Folklore

by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd