In this unique collection of folk stories, the voices 
of long-dead "Bushmen," or San people, of southern Africa 
speak to us about their lives and beliefs. We are given 
glimpses into their thought-world. We listen to them 
recounting their poignant myths and beliefs. We learn from 
them the ancient lore that guided their lives and inspired 
their famous rock art.

   
All these stories have lain hidden since they were first 
collected more than a hundred years ago by a remarkable 
family in Cape Town who devoted their lives to recording 
the life-ways of the /Xam San before their disappearance.


In 1870 //Kabbo, a /Xam (San) Bushman convict in Breakwater 
Prison, met Dr. Wilhelm Heinrich Emmanuel Bleek, a linguist 
from a celebrated scholarly German family. Bleek was there 
because he had heard that nearly thirty Bushmen were 
incarcerated there, and knowing that the future of these 
people was in jeopardy, he wanted to study their language 
before it was lost. //Kabbo, who was a /Xam shaman, became 
Bleek's teacher.


Bleek began to get interpretations of rock art drawings from 
people whose own fathers and grandfathers had made rock 
engravings. After Bleek's death, his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd 
carried on his work. While Bleek had concentrated on linguistics, 
Lloyd had focused on collecting stories and oral history - 
kukummi, or myths and folklore.  It was the kukummi, 
//Kabbo taught Bleek and Lloyd, "floating from afar," that bound 
together disparate camps of Bushmen.


The Bleek and Lloyd Collection comprises some twelve thousand 
pages of texts, word lists, and notes. In 1997 it won the 
UNESCO Memory of the World Programme designation, perhaps the 
highest award any historical document or collection can receive. 
Although Bleek, Lloyd, and others have published several works 
from this massive study, much of the corpus has remained 
unpublished. When J. D. Lewis- Williams turned to the notebooks 
at the University of Cape Town, he found that no one had worked 
with them since Dorothea Bleek's death in 1948, and nothing had 
been published from them in forty years. //Kabbo and the others 
spoke from the pages to him, and he committed himself to 
bringing more of these unique oral history materials to the 
public, following the wishes of //Kabbo himself, who longed for 
the kukummi of his people to be recorded for posterity. Stories 
That Float from Afar resulted. The individual kum are full of 
the details of life - of hunting, making weapons and tools, 
invoking rain, grieving lost loved ones, placating spirits, 
and initiating the young.


Today there is a need for us to listen to these voices from 
the past. They fill in one of the tragic blanks in South 
Africa's history and add understanding of preliterate 
lifeways. Suddenly a people who have spoken only through 
others' voices now speak out and come alive on the pages 
of this book.


_________________________________________________________

J. D. LEWIS-WILLIAMS, recently retired as professor of 
cognitive archaeology and director of the Rock Art Research 
Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand, is the author 
of several books, including The Shamans of Prehistory 
(Harry Abrams, 1998) and many learned articles. He is widely 
regarded as the doyen of rock art research in South Africa.


Number Five:  Texas A&M University Anthropology Series