ǃkhwe-ta ǃxōë: digital Bleek and Lloyd Website launch in July

The Bleek and Lloyd Archive is UCT’s most significant archival collection, and a United Nations Site of the Memory of the World. Its multi-faceted components comprise over 15000 pages of notebooks, correspondence, photographs, manuscripts and notes, newspaper articles, maps, drawings, watercolours, objects and over 70 000 dictionary slips: words and phrases of hunter-gatherer languages now endangered or no longer spoken. These include |xam, !kun, N|uu, Nharo, |Auni, Hadza and others, collected in the 19th Century and early 20th Century. In the case of |xam, the oldest inhabitants of the central interior of southern Africa, the archive is the only record we have of their intellectual traditions and cosmological knowledge, expressed in their own language. In July, the new website was launched. This site ǃkhwe-ta ǃxōë: digital Bleek and Lloyd (general editor Professor Pippa Skotnes, available https://digitalbleeklloyd.uct.ac.za/) now includes over 100 000 scans, cross referenced to various parts of the collection: essays, curations, summaries of sites and notes, information on publications, and a companion ibali site with ‘fragments’ from the collection, each of which acts as a point of access to the archive (available https://ibali.uct.ac.za/s/the-winds-place/page/welcome). The event included a colloquium at !Khwa ttu and Hiddingh Campus and the website launch programme was initiated by a reading by story-teller and poet, Nunke Kadhimo.