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familiarity with Piet Rooi, by referring to him by his !Ora (or /Xam?) name, Katten (Bleek & Lloyd, 1911:291, 297). It is unlikely that we will ever know the extent to which //Kabbo and his family were involved in this ‘Koranna War’ but it is certain that they, like other /Xam of that area, were embroiled in the turmoil of those times. The bilingualism of Bleek and Lloyd’s informants should therefore be seen as a necessary adaptation to the major social changes of the times. The roots of this bilingualism in Bushmanland are to be found some 70 years earlier. The first significant record of /Xam was provided by Henry Lichtenstein in 1815. During his travels between 1803 and 1806, he had collected 141 words and 21 phrases in “Coran” (that is, !Ora) and /Xam which he called “the Bosjemans dialect of Hottentot” (1930, Vol. 2:62,468). His uncomplimentary remarks about the latter are worth quoting: Among all the Hottentot dialects, none is so rough and wild, and differs so much from the rest, as that of the Bosjemans; so that it is scarcely understood by any of the other tribes . . . [It is] . . . disagreeably sonorous, from the frequent clacking of the teeth and the prevailing croaking in the throat; and it is extremely poor, no less in words than in sounds; they understand each other more by their gestures than their speaking . . . To avoid saying any thing [sic] about the language, I rather give a short vocabulary and modes of speech. I do not make it very simple, since no one who may happen, after me, to visit this people, will wish to learn so rude a language, except upon the spot itself . . . Lichtenstein obviously did not regard /Xam as ‘unlearnable’, but he expressed the same sort of disdain for the language and, indeed its speakers, whom he described as “a class of savages”, with lives “so near those of brutes . . . who are sunk so low, who are so unimportant in the scale of existence” (1930, Vol. 2:244) that had been shown toward Khoe at the Cape 120 years earlier. In the latter case, this contributed in a direct way to the pressure against the maintenance of Western Cape Khoe (Traill 1995:5); in the case of /Xam it expressed an attitude which probably explains why very few people “upon the spot itself” ever did learn the language. As is well-known, this sort of stigmatisation of the /Xam pervaded the attitudes of all groups with whom they came into conflict, involving contempt for their culture and justifying relentless persecution. Equally well-known are the linguistic responses of a stigmatised class: loss of language loyalty, language shift, language contraction and ultimately language death. Evidence about early patterns of language use amongst the /Xam would be difficult to obtain were it
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not for the persistence of the London Missionary Society in establishing a series of mission stations amongst the /Xam between 1799 and the 1820s (see Schoeman 1993a; 1993b and forthcoming). Since the enterprise was critically dependent on language and bilingualism in the form of interpreters, the missionary record provides invaluable glimpses, albeit meagre, into the socio-linguistic situation of those times. The first formal, intensive linguistic contact between Europeans and the /Xam was at Blyde Vooruitzichtfontein (Happy Prospects Fountain) on the Sak River, where the missionaries J.J. Kicherer and W. Edwards established the first mission to the San on 6 August 1799. Kicherer found “their manner of life . . . extremely wretched and disgusting . . . [In] . . . their huts . . . they lie close together like pigs in a sty . . . they are extremely lazy, so that nothing will rouse them to action, but excessive hunger” (Kicherer 1804:7). He described the language as “. . . so very difficult to learn, that no-one can spell or write the same. It consists mostly of a clicking with the tongue” (Kicherer 1792–1805:333). Undaunted, however, and in a response that was identical to George Schmidt’s at Baviaanskloof 62 years earlier when he taught the Khoe to speak Dutch because their language was too difficult to learn (Du Plessis 1965:54), Kicherer and Edwards immediately divided the ‘Boschemen’ who had come to live near them “between us, some to learn Dutch and some English” (Kicherer 1795–1805). Both missionaries relied on the constant presence of an interpreter, Carolus Bastert, a ‘Hottentot’, who claimed to know /Xam better than ‘Hottentot’ (Berichten & Brieven 1801:99). Shortly afterwards, Edwards established his own station a few miles away “with his Boschemen people”, thinking this advisable “as it would be more easy to instruct the people in the English language, when they were separated from those taught the Dutch . . . the only difficulty was, that he had no interpreter with him; but to facilitate his design we sent him occasionally ours” (Kicherer 1795–1805). Kicherer’s own opinion was that this interpreter had a poor command of Dutch and one wonders what sort of linguistic Babel existed at Happy Prospects Fountain. The missionaries were also assisted by a Willem Fortuin and his /Xam wife, Catharina Dorothea, both of whom spoke Dutch and /Xam. Kicherer described the daily routine (Kicherer 1795–1805:335–6): In the following manner we instruct the people: In the morning we all assemble together, when we sing an hymn, called the Morning Hymn, (which they know tolerably well), afterwards we all bend our knees; this being done, the old people depart, and the young people we instruct in the Dutch orthography, some of whom can already spell very well.* In the afternoon we
assemble again, and read to them one or two psalms. After giving out two lines at a time, we explain the principal contents of what they sing, and then teach them, by the interposition of an interpreter, Dutch words, and also to count numbers, which they then repeat again in the Boschemen’s language. At evening . . . we sing a psalm; then brother Kramer and I, each in our turn, announce, in the plainest manner, Jesus, his blood and righteousness, as the only ground for the salvation of a poor sinner; and take for a foundation some applicable texts, mostly historical, limiting ourselves chiefly to the walking about of the Lord Jesus upon earth, which we by experience see occasions the most attention . . . In our evening exercises we sometimes set the eldest, each in his turn, to pray aloud. * Elsewhere, Kicherer refers to this activity as “the School . . . [in which] . . . we teach the younger people to spell and read Dutch” (Kicherer 1804:9). By 25 November Kicherer reported of his flock numbering 30–40 souls that “some of them have made considerable progress in spelling the Lord’s prayer, and know many Dutch words” (Kicherer 1795–1805:329). It would be a mistake to exaggerate the impact of this language instruction on the patterns of /Xam linguistic behaviour because an insignificant number of /Xam were involved and the focus of the mission soon turned away from them to the large number of Khoekhoe and Baster residents of the station. There was also no sustained effort and the mission was abandoned in August 1806, only seven years after its inception. However, the Sak River Mission was the site of some early, incipient bilingualism between ‘Dutch’ and /Xam and it exposed the existence of bilinguals in the form of the interpreters Carolus Bastert and the Fortuins and Floris Visser, farmer and Veldwagtmeester of the Roggeveld, and his son Gerrit (Penn 1995b:422 fn.46). It also established a precedent for later missions to the /Xam, in which the missionaries made no effort to learn the language,8 proceeding instead with instruction in Dutch which was de facto becoming the dominant language of the northern border. The rapid spread of ‘Dutch’ in Bushmanland took place in the first half of the nineteenth century with the permanent occupation of the country by farmers, initially Basters in the west and later Boers throughout the area. The /Xam were relentlessly persecuted; many were killed and “those who were not . . . were incorporated into the farmers’ labour force [or] retreated from the Sak River area to the even more arid Hartebeest River area” (Penn 1991). The evidence relevant to a reconstruction of the earlier socio-linguistic conditions
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