ABSTRACT
The San narratives embody characteristics of myth that we encounter far beyond the confines of southern Africa. In the 1870s, there were many San languages, as indeed there still are among the groups who continue to live in the Kalahari Desert to the north of where the nineteenth-century /Xam lived. The southern /Xam language is no longer spoken, but the 1870s work of the German philologist Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law and co-worker Lucy Lloyd managed to preserve much of it. After Bleek's death in 1875, Lloyd continued with their work and in 1911 published selected passages in Specimens of Bushman Folklore. It will be readily apparent that the circumstances in which Bleek and Lloyd made their record were very different from those in which the narrators told the tales in their own cultural circumstances. Diä!kwain's life gives a broad, introductory idea of how /Xam people were living on the Cape frontier in the 1870s.
