In 1864 Wilhelm Bleek published a collection of Khoi narratives titled Reynard the Fox in South Africa, or Hottentot Fables and Tales. This paper critically examines this foundational event in South African literary history, arguing that it entailed a Victorian circumscription of the Khoisan imagination, containing its libidinal and transgressive energies within the generic limits of the naïve European children's folktale. Bleek's theories of language and race are examined as providing the context for his editorial approach to Khoi narratives in which the original 'nakedness' was written out. The extent of Bleek's censorship of indigenous orature becomes visible when comparing his 'fables' to a largely unknown corpus of Khoi tales, collected by the German ethnographer Leonhard Schultze during the Nama genocide in the early 20 th century. The paper compares these collections of oral narratives, and suggests that this has implications for the way the famous Bleek and Lloyd /Xam archive was subsequently constituted in the 1870s. Wilhelm Bleek's interventions in civilizing the Khoisan imagination marks a move away from a potentially Rabelaisian trajectory in South African literature through which the Khoisan could be represented and represent themselves. In admitting a sanitized indigenous orature into the colonial literary order, it is argued that Bleek helped to create a restrictive cultural politics in South Africa from which the country is yet to emerge fully.

Bushman narratives have been the subject of a large volume of scholarly and popularstudies, particularly publications that have engaged with the Bleek and Lloyd archive.Khoi story-telling has attracted much less attention. This paper looks a number of lesserknown Khoi narratives, collected by Thomas Baines and Leonhard Schultze. Despitecommonalities in the respective oral traditions, Khoi folklore appears more open todiscursive modes of satire, mockery and ridicule, features which are not readily foundin Bushman story telling. A number of Khoi narratives that feature the trickster figureof the jackal are presented and analysed as discursive engagements with historicalrealities and political forces that impinged on indigenous societies. It is argued thatKhoi orature was able to mock and subvert settler dominance by making imaginativeuse of animal proxies such as the jackal. This capacity for satire in Khoi oral cultureallowed it to resist colonial violence on a discursive level, a strategy that was much lesspronounced in Bushman narration.

Paton's Sublime: Race, Landscape and the transcendence of the Liberal Imagination Hermann Wittenberg, University of the Western Cape "The ill effects of black" on the imagination While theories of the sublime have been used to reexamine phenomena as divergent as sado-masochism, tourism and hypermedia computer technology, surprisingly little https://repository.uwc.ac.za/

Bushman narratives have been the subject of a large volume of scholarly and popular studies, particularly publications that have engaged with the Bleek and Lloyd archive. Khoi story-telling has attracted much less attention. This paper looks a number of lesser known Khoi narratives, collected by Thomas Baines and Leonhard Schultze. Despite commonalities in the respective oral traditions, Khoi folklore appears more open to discursive modes of satire, mockery and ridicule, features which are not readily found in Bushman story telling. A number of Khoi narratives that feature the trickster figure of the jackal are presented and analysed as discursive engagements with historical realities and political forces that impinged on indigenous societies. It is argued that Khoi orature was able to mock and subvert settler dominance by making imaginative use of animal proxies such as the jackal. This capacity for satire in Khoi oral culture allowed it to resist colonial violence on a discursive level, a strategy that was much less pronounced in Bushman narration.

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