San Language Development

While still in WIMSA’s employ as Education and Culture Co-ordinator Willemien le Roux supported and facilitated most of the activities of the national Khwedam Language Committees in Botswana, South Africa and Namibia, and of the Regional Khwedam Language Committee

A Khwedam language workshop underway in West Caprivi, Namibia, in January 2003.

chaired by Tomsen Nore. In the reporting period a series of Khwedam literacy workshops was run at different venues in the region, and members of the three national committees networked via e-mail and met to discuss orthography development and other language-related matters.

Willemien also supported Khwedam speaker David Naude from West Caprivi in his efforts to develop a Khwedam ‘People’s Lexicon’ as well as translate into Khwedam the oral history booklet titled The Khwe of the Okavango Panhandle: The Past Life.

While the Khwedam Language Committee members appreciated Bothas Marinda reporting on their efforts at the “International Expert Meeting on UNESCO Programme: Safeguarding of the Endangered Languages” in Paris in March 2003, they were concerned about the lack of co-ordination with the Regional Khwedam Language Committee in respect of the tasks he fulfilled in the two months after the meeting which he spent working with linguists Christa Kilian-Hatz and Matthias Brenzinger of the University of Cologne.
During the reporting period a team of seven researchers from various American and European universities contacted WIMSA and linguists Nigel Crawhall and Levi Namaseb, who are working on the N|u orthography, to offer their expertise and determine how they might co-ordinate their research on the N|u language.

Tom Güldemann of the Max-Planck-Institute Leipzig and Gertrud Boden of the University of Cologne informed WIMSA and the Omaheke San Trust that they had secured funds for a project aimed at documenting the !Xõó language and culture and developing materials in !Xõó such as textbooks, cultural maps and a grammar guide. The project will be embedded in the Documentation of Endangered Languages Project sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation and run in co-operation with the Max-Planck-Institute in Nijmwegen, Netherlands. The team, which includes another linguist from the University of Hamburg, is planning to start the fieldwork by the end of 2003 or the beginning of 2004.

Development of Educational Materials

WIMSA is planning to introduce a focus on children’s literacy as a means to raise awareness and promote acceptance of San culture, and simultaneously complement the development of curriculum materials underway for specific San language groups. In co-operation with Namibia’s National Institute for Educational Development (NIED) and the Windhoek College of Education (WCE), Yvonne Pickering has planned a series of writers’ workshops for San students with a view to producing a children’s book by San authors and illustrators. The envisaged six workshops will include an introduction to the ingredients of a successful children’s book, provision of information on children’s literature, and the practical work of developing a plot, characters and so forth for the book. Ten San students are expected to attend the workshops at the WCE in June and July 2003.

The outgoing WIMSA Education and Culture Co-ordinator, Willemien le Roux (left), and the incoming WIMSA Regional Education Advisor, Yvonne Pickering, in a meeting at the WIMSA office in Windhoek in November 2002 soon after Yvonne’s arrival in Namibia from the United Kingdom.

San Education and International Fora

In April 2002 Willemien le Roux and then trainee TOCaDI Culture and Education Officer Moronga Tanago attended the “Indigenous People’s Expert Consultation” organised by the Bernard van Leer Foundation in The Hague, Netherlands. The purpose of the workshop was to discuss issues connected to indigenous programming in early childhood development (ECD) in order to inform the Foundation’s own strategic planning. Indigenous peoples’ representatives from Guatemala, Malaysia, Mexico, Australia, Thailand, India and Kenya reviewed topics relating to the transmission and transition of indigenous children into modern societies and the threats affecting their progress.

The Bernard van Leer Foundation invited Bokamoso Trust Co-ordinator Gaolatlhe Thupe and Willemien le Roux to participate in a workshop in Kingston, Jamaica, in April 2002, on the role of research, and more specifically Tracer Studies, as a monitoring tool in education programmes. The week-long workshop, titled “Following Footsteps”, served as an excellent forum for development practitioners and researchers on education from around the world to exchange views and experiences on ECD programmes in which they are engaged. Goalatlhe and Willemien also visited community development projects with an educational focus in and around Kingston. Culture and identity were found to play a significant role in some of the projects visited.

At a “Roundtable Meeting” organised by the Ford Foundation in Johannesburg, South Africa, in August 2002, Willemien le Roux presented a paper titled ”The Art of Survival: Can childrearing practices of the San people provide lessons for child sexual abuse interventions in southern Africa?”, in which she identifies the traditionally most typical San child-rearing practices to inform NGO representatives and government delegates including the South African Police Child Protection Unit about traditional San socialisation strategies adopted to prevent sexual abuse of children.

Joseph Nangolo of the ITFEMC and SASEF, and Masego Nkelekang, now UB San/Basarwa Education Outreach Officer in Botswana, represented WIMSA at the “Commonwealth Roundtable on Citizenship Education in Small States” held in London, UK, in mid 2002. The papers they presented described the educational issues preventing San from achieving equal citizenship status and participation in society, and provoked a great deal of discussion.

Regional Oral Testimony Collection Project

One highlight of the Regional Oral Testimony Collection Project in the reporting period was the first book to emerge from it, titled ||Xom Kyakyare Khwe: ‡Am Kuri Kx’ûî â / The Khwe of the Okavango Panhandle: The Past Life, which was introduced to the WIMSA network at the General Assembly in November 2002. In her capacity as WIMSA Education and Culture Co-ordinator, Willemien le Roux spent a considerable amount of her time facilitating the book production process after the Khwe and Ju|’hoansi of the Okavango Panhandle, working together under the auspices of the Trust for Okavango Cultural and Development Initiatives (TOCaDI), a WIMSA member organisation, decided that the interviewers had collected sufficient information to develop this first product for their communities. Before the production process began in earnest, the interviewers met in a series of workshops where they identified recurring themes in the interviews and then grouped and compared them until 25 common themes for the book were agreed on. The themes emerging from interviews with Khwe and with Ju|’hoansi differed slightly. The latter decided that their interviews need to be followed up with further interviews before they can compile their own history book.

After lengthy discussions with the board of the Teemacane Development Trust, a WIMSA member organisation representing 10 Khwe communities along the Okavango Panhandle, the themes were prioritised in the following order: land and origin; leadership; religion and belief systems; traditional lifestyle; hunting, gathering and food preparation; folklore, dance, music and games; social relationships; modern lifestyle; contact with other groups; and the role of government. By means of colour-coding, cutting and pasting, the interviewers first extracted and then combined sections of the interviews with matching themes. In one of their workshops they also produced visual images on the themes to ensure that illiterate people also understand important issues covered in the book. A consultant, Cornelius van der Post, assisted the interviewers in editing the text to ensure a coherent line of thought throughout. In her report to the London-based Panos Institute, a project donor, Willemien notes the following:

“The interviewers found the process of theme selection and analysing their interviews immensely rewarding. Where they had previously worked as individuals with a joint training workshop here and there, the whole project started to make sense as a development tool when they started comparing notes.”

The book is now being translated into Khwedam by David Naude, a Khwe man originally from West Caprivi and now residing in Ngamiland, Botswana. David, who had received training on the Khwedam orthography from Matthias Brenzinger of the University of Cologne, is one of the Khwe community representatives who strongly emphasised the need for a “user-friendly” version of the orthography developed since the Penduka Workshop in Windhoek in April 2001, and he is currently producing a Khwedam ‘People’s Lexicon’, as well as conducting Khwedam literacy training in the region.

The core target audience for the translation of the book on the Khwe of the Okavango Panhandle are the Khwe communities in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. The broader target group includes all who live and work with the Khwe, including their teachers, extension workers and even policy-makers and planners.

Pages 46-47 of the book titled The Khwe of the Okavango Panhandle: The Past Life, the first oral history book to be produced as part of the WIMSA Regional Oral Testimony Collection Project.

If funds can be secured, three more books on the Khwe will be produced: one on their traditional lifestyle; one on the effects of their transition into modern society; and a Khwe anthology of poems, stories and games.

The sole interviewer (a San woman) conducting interviews with Ju|’hoansi, Naro and !Xõó in the Omaheke Region in Namibia has also identified recurring themes, including, among others, the generation gap, traditional knowledge and beliefs, land resettlement, farm life, and contact with other ethnic groups in the past and today. Twenty-two interviews in total had been conducted by March 2003.

Since 2001 the two Hai||om interviewers involved in the project in Namibia – a third was involved in 2002 only for a brief trial period – have taped and transcribed a total of 92 interviews with Hai||om community members. Themes emerging include: the traditional way of life, often set in the context of what is now the Etosha National Park; farm life; land issues; formal and traditional education; life stories; gender; and health, including traditional healing and HIV/AIDS.

In January 2003, having discussed the way forward, the Hai||om interviewers and the WIMSA consultant agreed that all the interviews should be scanned for information on the theme of traditional healing which could be extracted for presentation in a book or another format. A wealth of information was detected among the Hai||om on plants used in the traditional manner to treat a range of illnesses and in childbirth, and on the practices and powers of traditional healers in the past and today.

WIMSA is planning to hire a long-term consultant with a degree in history and vast experience in training community groups to assist the Hai||om and Omaheke interviewers to either follow up on certain themes or continue interviewing particularly old people to determine what products should be developed under the Oral Testimony Collection Project.
Some of the information collected by the Hai||om interviewers will feed into the Etosha Oral History and Cultural Mapping Project conducted by consultants Ute Dieckmann, Harald Sterly and James Suzman in close co-operation with Open Channels, Strata 360 and WIMSA.

Early in 2003 Ute Dieckmann of the University of Cologne and Bill Kemp of Strata 360 presented a set of draft maps referring to place names, seasonal mobility, and seasonal distribution of bush food and lifelines to Hai||om community members in Oshivelo, Okaukuejo and Ombika in the Etosha Park area. Discussions were held on forming an organisation representing communities living adjacent to the park, and the process of doing so has been driven by the Hai||om men involved in the Etosha Oral History and Cultural Mapping Project.

The maps as well as posters produced under the Etosha Oral History and Cultural Mapping Project were shown to teachers at Ombika Primary School who responded enthusiastically with suggestions for displays, growing bush food and producing educational materials. Ute Diekmann and WIMSA Regional Education Advisor Yvonne Pickering exchanged concepts for the production and presentation of educational materials.

Work still planned under this Etosha project includes drafting a constitution for the envisaged Hai||om Trust, transcribing all new interviews, and finalising the maps and posters.

Regional Co-ordination Meeting on Cultural Auditing

In April 2002 WIMSA organised a workshop for stakeholders and other parties interested in San oral history, land-mapping and cultural auditing projects, the purpose of which was to enable an exchange of experience and knowledge of techniques for developing compatible methodologies and data-processing in these areas. The presentations on the different projects underway were generally viewed as very useful because they highlighted advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches, each of which is directed by the particular situation of the San communities concerned. The participants resolved to constitute themselves as a working team that combines complementary skills and stand ready to collaborate with WIMSA on future projects.
One possible future project entails producing “a map showing the region’s ethnography, with the distribution of San territories, cultures and languages marked as clearly as possible”.7 More specifically:

“A three-level map (or a set of maps) was proposed, i.e.: San distribution today in the region, based on the work of recent years and anthropological sources; San societies as they existed in the mid-19th century, based on archival records; and San distribution in ancient times (e.g. 3 000 BP), based on archaeological data.”8

It was agreed that Strata 360 should generate these maps in June/July 2002 and a regional follow-up workshop should be held in 2003.

San Oral History on an International Level

The XIIth International Oral History Conference was held in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu/Natal Province, South Africa, in June 2002. A large number of African delegates and delegates from South and North America, the United Kingdom and Turkey participated. Willemien le Roux and Sefako Chumbo, a young Khwedam-speaking man from a small village in Ngamiland, Botswana, were invited to attend and present a paper at the conference. Jointly they prepared a paper outlining the objectives, advantages and disadvantages of the Regional Oral Testimony Collection Project as an alternative to a purely academic research project.

“The way we started was to tell our communities at a meeting what the project was about and what the tape recorders meant. I went to interview in the mornings, before it was too hot, or in the late afternoon, when the work was finished. I asked permission to ask some questions. … Many people thought I was working for some white people and I had to explain very well that this information was for ourselves, and that I, as a young person, did not know enough about my culture, and that was why I was asking. I told them too if they did not speak, things might never change in our lives. Then I started to enjoy this work very much. I worked hard and it was difficult, but I learnt such a lot that now I feel I am a professor of my culture.”

– Extract from the paper presented at the XIIth International Oral History Conference, quoting Khwe interviewer Sefako Chumbo on his experience of the Regional Oral Testimony Collection Project.

In the end the paper was presented by Moronga Tanago who replaced Sefako Chumbo who had fallen ill. It was well received, and representatives of other organisations offered advice on archiving and preserving different oral history materials. At the conference the WIMSA Regional Oral Testimony Collection Project joined the Oral History Association of Africa founded during the event.

FOOTNOTES:
7 Hugh Brody, “A short follow-up to our Penduka meeting” (e-mailed memo), 2002.
8 Ibid.