Upcoming conference: The Courage of ||kabbo and a Century of Specimens

In August this year, Archive and Public Culture's sister initiative, the Centre for Curating the Archive, will be hosting a conference to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of Specimens of Bushman Folklore in 1911.

This extraordinary book records Bushman legends, myths and other traditional stories, collected through interviews with several |xam and !kun speakers, translated by the linguist Wilhelm Bleek and edited by Lucy Lloyd.

In many ways the book owes its existence to the courage of ||kabbo, a prisoner released from the Breakwater Convict Station, who sacrificed the freedom of his final years to teach Bleek and Lloyd his language.

The central aim of the conference is to provide an opportunity to reflect on ways in which researchers from many different perspectives, writers, biographers, poets, artists, musicians and others have contributed to knowledge and appreciation of both the book and the archive.

It will focus on ways in which these multiple engagements with it, have placed it, and the scholarship around it, in the public domain. In so doing it also hopes to engage with other forms of archival research and publication, with the difficulties of understanding oral literature through writing and with the active curation of archives. In addition to keynote addresses, talks and panel discussions, there will be performances and exhibitions that commemorate the lives of those who created the archive, and celebrate the achievement of the publication of Specimens of Bushman Folklore.

The meetings will be held at the Hiddingh Hall campus of the Universityof Cape Town, close to Gray Street, where Bleek lived for a short while, and Queen Victoria Street, where both he and Lloyd worked at the South African Library. The nearby Iziko South African Museum was a favourite place for them to visit with their |xam teachers and the !kun boys to identify animals and plants that they spoke about in the 1870s and 1880s.

For further details, please visit the CCA website: www.cca.uct.ac.za.
Please send expressions of interest or any questions to: thomas.cartwright@uct.ac.za