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5398 results in Wits University Press

Page 112 of 270

  • Chapter 4 - Colonisation of a Sympathetic Type? The Culture of Democracy

  • Steven Friedman, University of Johannesburg
  • Book:
    Power in Action
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 December 2018, pp 73-98

  • Summary

    Does democracy mean the same to everyone? Or does our culture determine what sort of democracy we want or whether we want democracy at all? Are Africans who declare democracy – or the type of democracy currently practised on the continent – a Western imposition expressing a truth or missing the point?

    The earlier discussion mentioned the constant refrain of authoritarian governments and Northern cultural supremacists that Africans, Asians, Eastern Europeans, Muslims or some Latin Americans are ‘not ready for democracy’. But similar arguments are made by scholars and commentators whose concern is precisely the opposite – to insist on the right of other cultures to avoid Western imposition. They seek not to show that Southern cultures are not yet ready for democracy, but that Northern imposition on the South of particular understandings of democracy, or democracy itself, is a form of cultural imperialism which ignores the understandings of governance held by the cultures of the South.

    Whether this view has any merit depends in part on how democracy is understood. The view supported here is that democracy is the right of human beings to choose. If we view democracy as popular sovereignty, it does not seek to impose values but to ensure that values are freely determined by all, not imposed by elites. If this imposes on people, there must be societies in which people freely decide that they do not want to take decisions which affect them – they choose not to choose.

    The idea that the right to choose is a Western cultural imposition seems odd when we consider that Western powers have been chiefly concerned to deny people in the South that right. The record of major powers in limiting Southern choices during the Cold War is well known. In Africa, it dates from the first months of independence, with the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba's elected Congolese government. Chapter 2 has noted the use of Northern power to erode or deny popular sovereignty in the South where it was seen to threaten the North's strategic interests during the Cold War or, latterly, to aid Islamic fundamentalism. In these and other cases, the West has sought not to force other countries to choose, but to deny them choice when it clashes with Western interests.

  • Introduction

  • Steven Friedman, University of Johannesburg
  • Book:
    Power in Action
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 December 2018, pp vii-xii

  • Summary

    Is democracy good for Africans in general and South Africans in particular? Does it really belong to us or is it a Western idea imposed to enslave us? If democracy is both ours and good for us, how do we know a democracy when we see one? And, if we do see one, how do we know whether and how it will survive? How do we do what we can to make it flourish and grow?

    A few years ago, it seemed absurd to question democracy's value or its survival. Formal democracy, in the shape of regular multi-party elections and at least some of the liberties and rights which are meant to accompany them, was no longer a rarity, practised mostly by rich countries. It had become the norm in Africa and Latin America and had taken root in parts of Asia (which also houses the world's largest democracy, India). Much of humanity lived in democracies, many of which, only a decade or two ago, were not democratic. Democracy had also become almost hegemonic in the sense that it was considered the normal, common-sense way of arranging politics: with some isolated exceptions, governments which wanted respectability insisted that they were democratic, whatever reality might suggest. In South Africa, formal democracy ended decades of white minority rule and was widely embraced by most citizens. This mirrored the international trend – modern people were confirmed democrats and the system's only opponents were small groups of hold-outs on the right and left.

    This brief period of democratic triumph is now under threat. In contrast to earlier periods of democratic breakdown – the collapse of democracies in Europe in the 1930s and in Latin America in the 1970s – democracies have not been replaced by other forms of government. But champions of the liberal democracy which spread across the globe from 1974, when a coup in Portugal triggered a series of transitions from authoritarian rule, have moved from unbridled optimism to deep anxiety. American scholar Francis Fukuyama's 1992 claim that history had ended because liberal democracy was the only credible political and value system now seems ridiculous – ‘a quaint artefact of a vanished unipolar moment’.

  • Chapter 6 - Every Day is a Special Day: Collective Action as Democratic Routine

  • Steven Friedman, University of Johannesburg
  • Book:
    Power in Action
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 December 2018, pp 115-146

  • Summary

    Why is access to collective action limited to a relatively small slice of African citizenries? Why, in other parts of the world where unaccountable governments decide on behalf of citizens – as many have done in Africa for decades – do citizens not combine their energies and efforts to make government work for them? Is it because people do not know how to act collectively? Because sustained collective action is the preserve only of those with particular resources or cultural attributes? Or because grassroots citizens want to act collectively but their circumstances make action difficult or dangerous?

    For much of the political studies mainstream, collective action is an oddity, not a contribution to democracy. A once influential work on the topic, Why Men Rebel, sought to understand particular types of collective action by inquiring into the mental and emotional state, the sense of ‘relative deprivation’, of people who engage in it.

    This reflects an ideological choice. It signals that protest is odd, even pathological, and must, therefore, be related to something unusual happening inside the protestors’ heads. Collective action, for writers who hold this view, is ‘anomic, alienated and outside the polity’. There is nothing self-evident about this: it might be equally valid to assume that normal people always engage in collective action and, therefore, to investigate the mental make-up of passive citizens to explain their alarming lack of civic activity. A detailed study of collective action by Barrington Moore focussed not only on why people rebel, but also on why they obey. By examining the psychology of those who act rather than those who do not, Why Men Rebel declares that passivity is the norm, and action to challenge power the exception which must be explained.

    Popular collective action discomforts elites and may appear to them as a threat: to those who are challenged by collective action, it may, therefore, seem the product of a troubled mind. Psychological theories of collective mobilisation might reflect this bias. They may spring from the assumption that existing arrangements are so manifestly in the interests of all that anyone who opposes them must be dysfunctional. But simply to dismiss psychological explanations is to gloss over an important issue.

    If citizens were as inclined to combine with others to express themselves as they are to engage in economic activity, collective action would not seem remarkable enough to require explanation.

  • Chapter 3 - Democracy in Deed: The Centrality of Collective Action

  • Steven Friedman, University of Johannesburg
  • Book:
    Power in Action
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 December 2018, pp 47-72

  • Summary

    What do democracies need if they are to remain democratic – and to become deeper and broader?

    The previous chapter examined how we might recognise a democracy when we see one, and how we would know whether it was making progress towards fuller democratisation. But this says nothing about the ingredients which make it more likely that a democracy will be born – and, when it is, how it will deepen or broaden. And so it tells new democracies, and those who seek to understand them, nothing about what is required if they are to move closer to the goal of popular sovereignty.

    A celebrated article by the American scholar Seymour Martin Lipset suggests that we can identify the elements which democracies require to be born and to survive by distinguishing between the system's maintenance and support. Lipset noted that democracies need internal mechanisms to sustain themselves, such as ‘the specific rules of the political game’, but they are also, he thought, supported by factors which make democracy more likely. Maintenance factors are those internal features which keep it going, while support factors are the elements in the environment it requires to operate at all. This chapter will argue that democracy's key maintenance factor is also its key support factor: the capacity of citizens to act collectively to hold governments to account and ensure that they respond to voters.

    Analyses which stress the support factors claim that democracy cannot emerge or grow unless preconditions are met. They are common in the academic literature and can broadly be divided into the material and the historical. The former insists that democracy cannot be sustained in societies which have not reached particular stages of economic development or levels of wealth. The latter points to historical legacies which ensure that societies are more or less likely to become democracies: these may be cultural or the product of past patterns, such as how contending interests resolved their conflicts. Neither set is comforting to new democracies, particularly those in Africa, since both suggest that democracies can survive and deepen only if conditions exist which were produced by processes that developed over centuries and are usually said to be absent in Africa.

  • Chapter 8 - Collective Action as Democratic Citizenship: The Treatment Action Campaign

  • Steven Friedman, University of Johannesburg
  • Book:
    Power in Action
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 December 2018, pp 173-194

  • Summary

    How do powerless people use representative democracy and the rights which support it to protect their interests and demand a say?

    In early 2001, when many believed multinational corporations were invincible, and South Africa's new democratic government was so firmly entrenched that it did not need to listen to the voice of citizens, a group of activists was able to pressure international pharmaceutical firms to abandon a court action which sought to prevent the government from importing cheaper medicines. In August 2003, a coalition of organisations and individuals won their sustained campaign to press a resistant government to approve a comprehensive AIDS treatment plan which included the distribution of anti-retroviral medication (ARVs) to people living with the virus.

    The common thread between the two events was the pivotal role of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), which was responsible for the 2001 demonstrations and also led a fight for access to ARVs as part of its campaign to win adequate treatment for people infected by HIV and AIDS. This second victory helped confirm TAC's iconic status internationally and at home. It and its former chair, Zackie Achmat, have received international awards and were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Besides playing a major role in prompting the corporations’ 2001 decision not to contest the case, TAC, supported by key international NGO allies and influential civil society figures, was pivotal to the campaign which forced the government's reluctant policy change. While this did not initially produce a dramatic increase in the number of South Africans receiving treatment, the number who receive free ARVs has steadily risen: by 2016, 56 per cent of the 7.1 million people living with HIV and AIDS received them, as did up to 95 per cent of pregnant women, whose medication prevented mother-to-child transmission. Millions of people are alive purely because of this shift.

    TAC has played a crucial role in forcing the South African government to heed the concerns of an important constituency – people living with a deadly virus. These gains have been won not for the affluent or people who enjoy access to government – most TAC members during the campaign were unemployed black women. It has, therefore, given voice to people who would not otherwise be heard.

  • Chapter 2 - Deeper and Broader: What Makes Democracies More or Less Democratic?

  • Steven Friedman, University of Johannesburg
  • Book:
    Power in Action
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 December 2018, pp 21-46

  • Summary

    If democracy is a (never completed) journey, how do we know whether we are moving towards its always elusive goal?

    Democracies are misled when they assume that they can one day become ‘completed’. But that does not mean that they should not aspire to become more democratic. On the contrary – if we shed the belief that democracies should be judged by whether they are becoming more like those of the North, it becomes even more essential to offer clear criteria for democratic advance or retreat. On what must our judgment of democratic progress rest? An answer requires us to answer another question – what is democracy's defining feature, which sets it off against other political systems?

    THE ELUSIVE DESTINATION: DEMOCRACY AS POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY

    As a popular text points out, ‘Democracy comes from the Greek words demos meaning people and kratos meaning authority or power’. This basic definition clearly separates democracy from other forms of rule – in particular, monarchy (rule by an individual), oligarchy (rule by a few) or meritocracy (in which power is wielded by an elite considered inherently better able to govern). David Estlund, following Plato's Republic, has called this last strain ‘epistocracy’ or ‘rule of the knowers’. Democracy is distinguished from all these alternatives because it is, by definition, a system in which ‘the people’ – all adult members of a political community – are meant to exercise power. If this sounds straightforward and obvious, it is anything but that.

    First, how do we decide who belongs to the political community whose members are to govern themselves? Most South Africans would agree wholeheartedly that every citizen should enjoy equal rights, but what about people who have lived in the country for a long period yet are not citizens? And how do we decide who is an adult? Is the present criterion, that people may vote when they turn 18, too high a barrier – or not high enough? These two examples illustrate that deciding who is included and who is not can become complicated.

  • Chapter 1 - The Journey Lasts Forever: Beyond ‘Democratic Consolidation’

  • Steven Friedman, University of Johannesburg
  • Book:
    Power in Action
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 December 2018, pp 1-20

  • Summary

    How do we know that a society has become a democracy – or will remain one?

    This question is frequently asked in new democracies in general, and South Africa's in particular. Comparing the country to others, particularly in North America and Western Europe, is a national pastime. Whether the country is a ‘real’ democracy is a theme in the public debate. It has also been asked, repeatedly, by Western scholars of democracy anxious to discover whether the democratic systems which have spread to Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe are likely to last and are ‘the real thing’, not a cheap ‘Third World’ imitation. They ask the question through a framework, the ‘consolidation’ paradigm, which has influenced the thinking of most South African scholars of democracy as well as many elsewhere in Africa. It also, almost unnoticed, has shaped the way non-academic participants in the public debate think of democracy and its challenges. Since the paradigm shapes South African and African attitudes to democracy, what is it and how useful is it as a tool?

    For a while, as many more societies adopted democratic rule, the test of whether a country was ‘really’ democratic seemed, to some mainstream scholars and practitioners, simple. Countries were democratic if they held regular elections in which political parties freely established by citizens were allowed to compete. Later, the writings of more than a few scholars – and the concrete experiences of citizens – began to recognise that societies are not democratic simply because they hold multi-party elections. The ‘fallacy of electoralism’ noted in the introduction – the idea that a country has ‘become democratic’ simply because it holds competitive elections – has been largely discredited in the academic literature which sought to understand and explain the spread of formal democracy across the globe. The limits of an ‘electoral democracy’ which offers the vote but not the freedoms and the right to choose which must accompany it are now widely acknowledged, particularly since elections propelled leaders with little regard for democratic rules to power in the United States and Eastern Europe as well as parts of the global South.

  • Chapter 9 - Towards Popular Sovereignty: Building a Deeper and Stronger Democracy

  • Steven Friedman, University of Johannesburg
  • Book:
    Power in Action
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 December 2018, pp 195-218

  • Summary

    What does the argument presented here tell a South Africa that is faced with the challenge of building a deeper and broader democracy which can offer citizens a share in the decisions that shape their lives?

    Of course, not all South Africans agree that building a democracy is a priority. They are not alone. Doubt about democracy's benefits is common across the globe, particularly in new democracies. Indeed, O'Donnell and Schmitter coined the term desencanto (disenchantment) to describe the doubts about democracy which emerge when the system is achieved, often after long and bitter struggle. This book has tried to show that South Africans, like everyone else, need democracy not only because it is the only system which can allow people to control their lives, but also because it does offer the tools needed to fight for a fairer society. It has argued, in effect, that those who suffered and died to achieve democracy did not waste their lives, and that the system established in 1994 opens possibilities which may still be realised.

    It has also rejected the view, still stubbornly embraced by those who mourn the passing of apartheid, that democracy must fail here because South Africa – and South Africans – have not developed to an economic or cultural stage where the system could work. Democracy can survive and grow here and in the rest of the continent. Everyone everywhere is ‘ready for democracy’. Whether democracy is ready for them is a more difficult question. In South Africa, as elsewhere, the system works well for some but not others – for those who enjoy access to collective action but not for those who don't. The effect is to repeat many of the divisions created by apartheid.

    This is so, however, not because the constitution imposed on the country an alien form of government which traps many of its people in servitude. Democratisation does not mean foisting a template on societies. On the contrary, it means empowering and enabling people to reject the templates which do not work for them and to choose the social forms which, in their view, do. And it means overcoming the powerlessness, real and perceived, which prevents most citizens from engaging in the collective action that holds power to account and ensures that decision-making is as much as possible an expression of popular sovereignty rather than elite preference.

  • Chapter 7 - Power is Theirs? Why Collective Action is Usually the Preserve of the Few

  • Steven Friedman, University of Johannesburg
  • Book:
    Power in Action
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 December 2018, pp 147-172

  • Summary

    If collective action is the engine of democracy, why do only a minority use it in a way which gives them influence over decisions?

    Several theories try to answer this question. For one, to engage in collective action is irrational – the reasonable person, it claims, leaves it to others to act on their behalf. For another, lack of interest is the problem – most people do not see any value in acting. For still others, ignorance of the opportunities for action and its power to advance interests explains inaction – a variant of this argument holds that people believe that there is no need for action because power-holders know better what their political community needs than they do. In all these explanations, the failure to act is a freely taken decision. They all insist that people do not use collective agency to claim a share in decisions because they do not wish to do so.

    This chapter rejects this view. It argues that, in the main, citizens refrain from collective action not because they do not wish to speak but because they cannot – or because they believe they will be unable to make themselves heard. It notes that people with more resources are better able to act, a reality stressed by social movement theories. But it insists that access to resources, while it matters, is not the chief reason why people who enjoy formal democratic rights do not act to challenge power. Whether people act is shaped by access to power: people avoid acting when they believe they are powerless. They fear that the powerful will punish them or ignore them.

    Their perceptions of powerlessness are not necessarily accurate: people may underestimate their power and so may avoid action which could gain them a share in decisions. But their failure to act is not a preference. In the main, people know that those who wield power over them ought to account and respond to them, but they avoid acting to achieve this accountability because they believe themselves too weak to achieve the share in decisions to which they know they are entitled. Before discussing the evidence for this claim, this chapter will discuss the rival explanations for the inaction of the many.

    THEORIES OF INACTION

    A celebrated explanation for limited participation in collective action is Olson's rational choice theory, mentioned in the previous chapter.

  • Chapter 5 - Another Lens: Collective Action and Democracy in Africa

  • Steven Friedman, University of Johannesburg
  • Book:
    Power in Action
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    21 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 December 2018, pp 99-114

  • Summary

    How does the approach to democracy proposed here help us to understand democratic progress in Africa?

    This chapter suggests a way of examining African democracies which moves beyond prejudice and generalisation to understanding.

    This is not yet another of the reviews of ‘the state of democracy’ in Africa which are so popular among scholars and ‘think tanks’. While these assessments differ, they are generally united by their endorsement of the ‘consolidation’ paradigm – the test is almost invariably how close African states are to resembling an idealised notion of ‘Western’ democracy. A detailed account of democratic progress throughout the continent using a different framework would add much to our knowledge but is well beyond the scope of this analysis, particularly since a meaningful assessment would not be possible unless it offered detailed and textured analyses of each country. Analyses which generalise about an undifferentiated ‘African state’ distort reality by ignoring important differences: often, they stigmatise rather than analyse. New African democracies are not all the same and analyses which ignore their differences miss as much as they explain. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is not to attempt a detailed appraisal of democratic progress on the continent but to offer a framework for looking at democracy's progress in Africa.

    BEYOND LEADERSHIP

    Mainstream discussion of democracy in Africa would warm the hearts of democratic elitists – it is preoccupied with leaders, not citizens. The claim that the root cause of Africa's democratic problems (indeed all its problems) is the quality of its leadership dominates mainstream thinking on the topic, regardless of whether the commentator is African or Western. The Mo Ibrahim Foundation, which expresses the mainstream view on governance on the continent, awards an annual leadership prize. However, in keeping with the rest of the mainstream, it is repeatedly disappointed and so often does not award the prize. Even social and medical challenges – HIV and AIDS, for example – are said to depend on leadership. Scholarly work on democracy in Africa is equally fixated on leadership – mainstream credibility requires that it be seen as the core of democracy's problems and possibilities. Thus, a discussion of Africa's ‘waning democratic commitment’ soon turns into an examination of the commitment of its leaders alone.

  • Chapter 3 - Field Notes and Diaries, 1911 and 1913

  • from PART II - DRESSED IN SOCIAL STRUCTURE: THE BUSHMAN DRESS OF DOROTHEA BLEEK
  • Vibeke Maria Viestad, University of Oslo
  • Book:
    Dress as Social Relations
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    17 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 August 2018, pp 44-60

  • Summary

    Words and sentences

    Dorothea Bleek had a very systematic and comparative approach in her attempt to record as much as she could from as many Bushman languages as possible (see Weintroub 2010, 130). This is evident in her main work, A Bushman Dictionary, finally published in 1956, almost ten years after her death. The dictionary combines the work of her father and aunt before her with her own contributions from more than 30 years of fieldwork. Her comparative approach is, however, quite clear even from her first notes taken in 1910 and 1911.

    Most of these notes are extensive lists of words and sentences, and often the same words and phrases recur time and again. Her efforts to implement a systematic process of recording amongst different people in different places are illustrated in book BC151.A3.005, pages 372– 382. For example, on page 382 she presents a table of words in English, colonial /Xam, Langeberg and southern Kalahari //n, /auni, Katia and !kun in columns next to each other. Some of these words, noted down and repeated throughout the different notebooks, are related to dress, ornamentation and clothing (figure II.12).

    Many of the lists of words seem to have been taken down as Bleek and her informants pointed to different things in their immediate surroundings. The words are always written in the relevant Bushman language with the English translation next to them or immediately underneath. I do not reproduce the Bushman words for each example given as my ignorance of these languages would most probably result in an endless number of errors. Lists like the following one, from the very first notebook taken down among Langeberg Bushmen at the Mount Temple Farm in September 1910, are typical, particularly of places where Bleek was still not familiar with the language.

  • Petticoat

  • needle

  • front apron

  • waist band

  • bracelet

  • necklace

  • leglets

  • veldschoen

  • cap (BC151.A3.001, 8)

    • In another example, taken down a week later, with slightly different spellings in the Bushman //n language, the word for ‘petticoat’ is now translated as ‘back kaross’.

  • apron

  • back kaross

  • rings bracelets

  • leglets (BC151.A3.001, 32)

    • Dorothea was evidently making sure that she had got it right, or was eager to correct her first recording of the words.

  • PART I - TO DRESS: BACKGROUND AND PERSPECTIVES

  • Vibeke Maria Viestad, University of Oslo
  • Book:
    Dress as Social Relations
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    17 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 August 2018, pp 1-5

  • Summary

    The problem

    To dress is a unique human experience, but practices and meanings of dress are as different as the people populating the world. In a Western cultural tradition, the practice of dressing ‘properly’ has for centuries distinguished ‘civilised’ people from ‘savages’. Through travel literature and historical ethnographic descriptions of the Bushmen of southern Africa, such perceptions and prejudices have also made their mark on the modern research tradition. Early travellers, adventurers and colonial administrators wrote about the indigenous inhabitants they met on their journeys. Alongside the increased colonisation of the area and the subjugation of the natives, the popularised discourse evolved into ‘Bushman research’, using the terms of scientific means and methods. The developing discourse continued and ultimately formalised and cemented a myth of the ‘naked Bushman’ – a myth that had its origin in a Western understanding of what it means to dress and a strong focus on the Bushman body as a subject of research. Because Bushmen were widely considered to be nearly naked, the study of dress formed a limited part of the many later academic efforts at understanding Bushman culture.

    This book aims to fill that void, and directs attention to what arguably formed an essential part of life within Bushman communities of colonial southern Africa. Two lines of discussion are pursued: first is a critique of how the material culture of dress has been handled in earlier research; and second, a conceptual framework is developed for understanding the role of dress within the material and bodily practices of historical Bushman communities. The book is thus written as an investigation into what Bushman dress has come to represent to people trying to understand Bushman culture from the outside, and in what ways the dress has been meaningful to Bushman people themselves.

    The venture has led me deep into the museum archives and collections of some of South Africa's most prominent institutions of knowledge production and procurement. My search for a ‘non-existing dress’ revealed a vast field of dress practices, represented through the diverse media of artefact collections and visual representations in photographic records, as well as embedded in the memories and oral traditions of colonial Bushmen who were told to tell their stories about the world they were rapidly being deprived of.

  • PART IV - DRESSED AS TOLD: INTERPRETING DRESS PRACTICES FROM/XAM BUSHMAN NARRATIVES

  • Vibeke Maria Viestad, University of Oslo
  • Book:
    Dress as Social Relations
    Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    17 May 2019
    Print publication:
    01 August 2018, pp 131-141

  • Summary

    In the four preceding chapters on the Bleek and Fourie collections, I presented extensive material on Bushman dress from colonial southern Africa, and argued that this aspect of Bushman culture has mostly been neglected in earlier research. The two artefact collections, which were compiled around the same time and among some of the same people, represent ‘Bushman dress’ in two different ways: as a stereotype of common traits and characteristics among Bushmen in general (Bleek), and within a more complex framework of distinct material differences between different groups of people (Fourie). While contextualising the artefacts in relation to the photographs and research notes taken by each collector, I tried to question and nuance the outlined material expressions. The approach proved useful from a research historical perspective, as a means to pinpoint aspects of earlier research that should be highlighted in order to ask new questions.

    In what follows, I focus on dress as part of the material and bodily practice of the colonial /Xam Bushmen of the Northern Cape in South Africa. I explore the remnants of their dress as remembered and told by six /Xam Bushmen who lived with the Bleek and Lloyd family at different stages between 1870 and 1879, in Mowbray, Cape Town. Approaching dress from the perspective of oral myths and narratives will enlighten the subject substantially.

    /A!kunta, //Kabbo, ≠Kasin, Dia!kwain, !Kweiten ta//ken and /Han≠kass'o all contributed, to varying degrees, to the 138 notebooks (28 recorded by Wilhelm Bleek and 110 by Lucy Lloyd) of /Xam narratives that are now kept in the Manuscript and Archive Department of the University of Cape Town (UCT) Library. The narratives were transcribed by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd in /Xam, as Bleek developed the orthography to make it into a written language. They were later translated into English on the same page in a column next to the transcription. This work was also for the most part done in collaboration with a /Xam-speaking informant. On the opposite page, comments and notes made by the informant, or by Bleek or Lloyd, were added when necessary to clarify or otherwise add to the main story. These notebooks, together with the other notebooks of the archive, are now also available online at The Digital Bleek and Lloyd (BC151.A1.4.001–BC151.A1.4.028STARS, BC151.A2.1.001–BC151.A2.1.107, BC151.A2.1.125, BC151. A2.2.004, BC151.A2.2.005).

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