|XAM RELIGION

According to the Breakwater Prison records, the Bushmen convicts had no religion. People of the bush and considered to be almost wild animals, they were purported to display few human characteristics such as religion. Wilhelm Bleek would not have concurred. He observed of Bushman rock art, for example, that it represented an ‘attempt, however imperfect, at a truly artistic conception of the ideas which most deeply moved the Bushman mind, and filled it with religious feelings’ (Bleek 1874b: 13). As I noted in chapter 8, Bleek believed also, as a matter of science rather than religion, no doubt, that, like all Khoisan peoples (Hottentots in his vocabulary), the |Xam worshipped the moon. Guenther (1996: 89) has suggested that Bleek's view of Bushman religion was predetermined by the influence on his thought of reading the work of Max Müller, who saw evidence of sun worship behind every traditional tale. Guenther himself, in his books and articles on the |Xam narratives (1989; 1996; 1999; 2002; 2006), concentrates on delineating the true features of |Xam religion and tracking its presence in Bushman mythology, identifying especially the trickster deity, |Kaggen, and the figure of the trance practitioner as central components of this religion. Lewis-Williams (1996a; 1998a; 2000) is another writer whose interpretation of the |Xam narratives concentrate on what we might call their ‘religious’ features. His influential and controversial trance theory of rock art interpretation informs his approach to the reading of the narratives. This chapter will provide a discussion of this approach as it is presented in his essay, ‘“A visit to the lion's house”: The structures, metaphors and sociopolitical significance of a nineteenthcentury Bush man myth’ (Lewis-Williams 1996a).

The prison authorities, Bleek and contemporary writers such as Guenther and Lewis-Williams hold different positions with regard to |Xam religion. These views correspond, for the most part, to those that have been held in regard to Khoisan religion generally in the colonial and postcolonial periods of South African history. David Chidester (1996a; 1996b: 51–59) describes how the attribution or denial of religion to the indigenous population fluctuated in relation to the situation on the frontier. The prevailing attitude in the period of early European contacts with the people of the Cape was that the local people exhibited no trace of religion (Chidester 1996b: 52).