Sound from the Thinking Strings

Sound from the Thinking Strings:
A Visual, Literary, Archaeological and Historical Interpretation of the Final Years of /Xam Life
Pippa Skotnes
Cape Town: Axeage Private Press, 1991
Edition: 13/50
Smithsonian Libraries

Sound from the Thinking Strings honors the disappearing indigenous people of Southern Africa known as the San or /Xam, also known as Bushmen.  Genetic evidence suggests they are one of the oldest, if not the oldest, peoples in the world, going back to perhaps 60,000 years.  This artist’s book consists of forty-two San poems translated by Stephen Watson, twenty original etchings by Pippa Skotnes, essays by John Parkington, and Nigel Penn, and notes by Skotnes, with an introduction by Stephen Jay Gould.

This book is the first publication issued by Axeage Private Press, which was co-founded in Cape Town by Skotnes and Malcolm Payne.  The book’s cover is screen printed by Skotnes with gold and black handwritten notes against a red background.

Sound from the thinking strings published by Axeage Private Press, 1991. Thinking Strings Cover. African Art Museum artists' books exhibit research image.

The spine is covered in black leather.  The pages are Zerkall Buetten paper, a German mold-made paper also used for the etchings by Skotnes.  The essays and poems are printed in black ink with all other text in red.  Embossed animal or figurative elements are employed at key points throughout the book.

Sound from the thinking strings published by Axeage Private Press, 1991. Detail of Title Page. African Art Museum artists' books exhibit research image.

Sound from the thinking strings published by Axeage Private Press, 1991. Detail of Embossed Elephant. African Art Museum artists' books exhibit research image.

The book is based on the interviews conducted by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd of three San informants, //Kabbo, /Han ≠ Kasso (//Kabbo’s son-in-law), and Dia!Kwain in the late nineteenth-century in Cape Town, South Africa.  Skotnes pays tribute to honor the history, cosmology, and visual traditions of the San through the archaeological, historical, and oral traditions as preserved by Bleek and Lloyd.  Without this historical record, knowledge about San culture would be irrevocably lost and this publication would not have been possible.

Bleek and Lloyd and the San

Wilhelm Bleek, a philologist, was interested in the origins of San language and began recording terminology with the help of his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd.  Their informants were San prisoners from the Breakwater Convict Station, some of whom were entrusted to their care for the purpose of their research.  His main informant was //Kabbo—whose name means “dream” in the San language—who not only taught them San vocabulary, but also retold San stories and myths and described San culture.   //Kabbo considered himself to be Bleek’s teacher.  After Bleek’s death in 1875, Lloyd continued documenting San stories with her informants.  Their cumulative research ultimately became the 13,000-page archive now housed at the University of Cape Town, which provided the source material and the inspiration for Sound from the Thinking Strings.[1]

Sound from the thinking strings published by Axeage Private Press, 1991. Plate VII. African Art Museum artists' books exhibit research image.

The San Poems

The literary dimension of Sound from the Thinking Strings is provided by Stephen Watson.  Relying on archaeological and historical records, Watson selected forty-two narratives from the Bleek-Lloyd collection of San interviews and transformed these difficult texts into poetic language.  he thus restored and preserved some aspects of San cosmology and mythology for posterity.

In the essay accompanying the poems, he addresses the difficulty of translating textual material from 1870, in the absence of any dictionary because “there is no-one left on earth today who can speak the /Xam language.  Worse still, no-one is in a position to gain a reliable knowledge of it, even if he or she wished it.” [2]

The Thinking Strings

The title Sound from the Thinking Strings is a reference to the “thinking strings,” the San way of expressing thoughts or consciousness.  One powerful poem called “Song of the broken string” encapsulates the tragic demise of the San people and the destruction of their culture.  One poignant stanza from the poem:

Because
of a broken string,
because of a people
breaking the string,
the earth, my place
is the place
of something
a thing broken
that does not
stop sounding
breaking with me [3]  

John Parkington’s essay in Sound of the Thinking Strings, entitled “//Kabbo’s father’s father’s place it was: perceptions of San hunter gatherers,” describes /Xam history and way of life and their dramatic transformation in the interior Cape as a result of the foreign intrusions, particularly the colonialists during the late nineteenth century.

Skotnes’ Etchings

The seventeen monochrome and three color etchings, combining aquatint, hard and soft ground textures, and linear patterns, are individually signed by the artist.

These etchings represent metaphysical, symbolic, historic, even archaeological aspects of San culture.  Skotnes’ images often include therianthropic figures (part human, part animal) looming over an arid landscape in a dream-like vision.

Sound from the thinking strings published by Axeage Private Press, 1991. Plate I. African Art Museum artists' books exhibit research image.

An equally evocative visual icon is the hunter’s bag, a symbolic reference to things being held and things lost.[4]  Plates II, XI, XV, XVIII, and XIX include bag imagery.  In a short essay the artist explains that these images are drawn from her research of rock paintings and engravings in southern Africa, museum displays of the San in the South African Museum, San mythology, and Lloyd’s accounts.

Sound from the thinking strings published by Axeage Private Press, 1991. Plate XIX. African Art Museum artists' books exhibit research image.

The /Xam and the Colony, 1740–1870

Nigel Penn’s essay on the interactions among the Khoi, the San, the colonials and the missionaries between mid-eighteenth to late nineteenth century begins

“By the 1870s the /Xam hunter gatherers of the Cape interior were a dying people, their societies shattered by warfare, starvation and disease; their women and children enslaved; their men all but exterminated by the genocidal hatred of their enemies.  They fought this process of extinction for over one hundred and thirty years, but the story of their struggle—their history—is virtually unknown.”[5]

The struggle was between the Khoi pastoralists and the San hunter-gatherers, between indigenous people and the newcomers, between colonials and indigenes, and between humans and the harsh environment.  The winners were the colonials with greater resources and weaponry; the losers were the vulnerable, unprotected San.

Penn describes the conflicts, the raids against the San, the struggles with the environment, and the missionary attempts to civilize the “uncivilized” San.  His essay underscores the raison d’être of this publication, a means of preserving and illuminating the San world by recording their re-constructed history, representing a visual world, and hearing their stories in poetic form. 

In his foreword the noted paleontologist Stephen Gould (1941-2002) reflects on the loss of San culture:

“The extirpation of /Xam culture and language was a special tragedy . . . We should have seen the /Xam for what they and all human cultures are—brothers and sisters on their particular island in the sea of human cultures—with all islands as wonderful places to visit, all equally instructive, equally complex, and equally beautiful.  When any island founders, we lose a vital piece of the human soul. [6]

About the Artist

Pippa Skotnes (born in 1957) was educated at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, where she earned a B.A. in fine arts and in 2007, a D.Litt.  She is currently professor of fine art and director of the school’s Lucy Lloyd Archive, Resource and Exhibition Centre.

Skotnes’s research and artistic focus on the history, visual traditions and belief systems of the San people of southern Africa have led to exhibitions, catalogs, essays, and her own works of art.  Most notable is the provocative 1996 exhibition that she curated—Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen.[7]  In this exhibition and its catalogue she explores historical and contemporary representations of the San people.

Skotnes’s Heaven’s Things, A Story of the /Xam also draws on the Bleek-Lloyd archive.  This small publication includes reproductions of text and her watercolor imagery as well as historical photographs and narratives of San informants.[8]   Skotnes compiled a photographic documentation of the landscape with special emphasis on the dolorite rocks that have rock engravings along with brief text on the significance of the Springbokoop area.[9]

Skotnes introduces the extant works of George Stow who made paintings of San rock art in the 1860s and 1870s in a book and accompanying exhibition.[10]

About the Essayists

Stephen Watson (1954-2011) was a South African poet and essayist and professor of English at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.  He was also the founder of the university’s Creative Writing Programs.

John Parkington studied Paleolithic archaeology at the University of Cambridge, England, graduating in 1966.  He completed his Ph.D. in 1977.  He was on the faculty of the University of Cape Town, where he is now professor emeritus.

Nigel Penn (born 1956) is a professor of history at the University of Cape Town, focused on the impact of colonialism on San cultures of southern Africa.

Bibliography

Arnold, Marian.   “Parallel Texts.” In: Image and Form: Prints, Drawings, and Sculpture from Southern Africa and Nigeria.  Edited by John Picton, pages 62–64, 80.  London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1997.

Skotnes, Pippa.   “Blood of the Rain.” Arts and Cultures: antiquity, Africa, Oceania, Asia, Americas (Geneva) (2011): pages 140-155.

Skotnes, Pippa.   Claim to the Country: The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek.  Johannesburg: Jacana; Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007.

Skotnes, Pippa.   Heaven’s Things: A Story of the /Xam: An Extract from the Story of the Day-Heart Star.  Cape Town: LLAREC, 1999.

Skotnes, Pippa, editor.   Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen.  Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1996.

Skotnes, Pippa.   Unconquerable Spirit: George Stow’s History Paintings of the San.  Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press; Johannesburg: Jacana, 2008.

University of Cape Town, Department of Archaeology, “John Parkington.”

Wikipedia.  “Stephen Watson (poet).” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Watson_%28poet%29


[1] Pippa Skotnes, Claim to the Country, page 42.

[2] Stephen Watson, Sound of the Thinking Strings, page 98.

[3]  Skotnes, Sound of the Thinking Strings, page 152.

[4]  Marion Arnold, “Parallel Texts,” page 63.

[5] Nigel Penn, Sound of the Thinking Strings, page 24.

[6]  Skotnes, Sound of the Thinking Strings, page 3.

[7] Skotnes, Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen.

[8]  Skotnes, Heaven’s Things.

[9] Skotnes, “Blood of the Rain.”

[10] Skotnes, Unconquerable Spirit: George Stow’s History Paintings of the San.