Talk: 'Two objects he had made himself': |han≠kass’o’s bullroarer and gora in Paris

'Two objects he had made himself': |han≠kass’o’s bullroarer and gora in Paris

By Dr Justine Wintjes & Dr Vibeke Viestad

The Bleek and Lloyd Collection is a world-famous source of hunter-gatherer memory. The core of this collection is a set of notebooks compiled by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd from conversations with |xam and !xun people living with them at their house outside Cape Town in the 1870s and 1880s. Other materials from the same context have become dispersed somewhat haphazardly across different institutions, including hand-made objects that also participated in the conversations. We have refound some of these objects including spoons, head ornaments, firesticks, playthings, arrows and musical instruments in the collections of Wits Art Museum and the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. They shed light on the creativity of the |xam and !xun in the making of the archive, and are exceptional also as rare instances of things that can be related to the lives of named Khoesan individuals in the 19th century. The story of a bullroarer and a gora – musical instruments used to invoke rain – is astonishingly personal. In about 1877,|han≠kass’o gifted these two items to Paul de Jouvencel, a member of the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, thereby also participating in international anthropological discourse in the very early years of the scientific field.

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