Specimens of Bushman Folklore

Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd were linguists who worked directly with San, called Bushman in the source's own period title, informants in nineteenth century South Africa, and this 1911 volume is their foundational collection and translation of southern African San oral folklore, recorded in the informants' own words with Bleek and Lloyd's linguistic transcription. Its strength is that it preserves oral material directly from San narrators at a time when few others were recording it, giving it lasting value as primary documentation despite its age. Its limit is the colonial-era context of its collection and its now dated terminology, including the source's own period name for its subjects, so a claim about contemporary San communities' own self-understanding needs a more recent source reflecting how San people describe their own culture today.