Voices from the Past : Xam Bushmen and the Bleek and Lloyd Collection

The papers in this volume, which deals exclusively and extensively with the Bleek and Lloyd Ethnographic Collection, result from a conference held in Cape Town to honour the early efforts of W.H.I.

Bleek and L.C. Lloyd in the field of Bushman studies in Southern Africa - the documentation of the language of the Xam Bushmen.

To do this, Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd, took down by dictation, in a phonetic script they themselves developed, over 12,000 pages of folklore, accounts of daily life and descriptions of rituals.

Since the 1870s, this ethnographic material has been used extensively by linguists, folklorists and archaeologists, and the Cape Town Conference was held in order to bring together researchers from these diverse, but related, fields.

The published volume is in two parts. The first describes these two unusual personalities of the 1870s and their work; the second covers the research that has followed.

It thus not only presents a detailed biographical account of the Bleek family's work with the Xam informants, it also represents a contemporary position piece on the status of their ethnographic collection.