D3.6: The native nations of South Africa [DF Bleek's letter to the Cape Times editor]

D3.6: The native nations of South Africa [DF Bleek's letter to the Cape Times editor]

Newspaper Clippings

Ink on newsprint

16 January 1926

A facsimile of a typewritten page with transferred and subsequent annotations/corrections in black ink and pencil. TS.

Soil (South African soil requires cultivation), Bushmen (are vulnerable against agriculturalists or herdsmen), agriculturalists (live in larger communities), herdsmen (live in larger communities), hunter-gathering (requires a higher land-to-person ratio), Professor Schwarz (Bushmen came from the Mediterranean), pygmies (who danced before Egyptian monarchs), Karoo (Bushmen arrived there shortly before the Boers), Early Race (in Dr Bleek's translations), Black tribes (came from the Northeast)

Page 3 of Dorothea Bleek's reprographed 1926 letter to the editor of the Cape Times (Basil Kellett Long), refuting claims in Prof. EHL Schwarz's article in the Saturday edition of the Cape Times titled 'The native nations of South Africa' (1926). Schwarz's article does not refer to George Stow (posthumous) and George McCall Theal's similarly named 'The native races of South Africa' (1905). Instead, Schwarz, a geologist and geographer, comments on recent Bushman-related fieldwork (Dorothea's?) in Angola reported in the Cape Times. UCT's BC 1091 Cape Times Collection confirms that Basil Kellett Long was editor of the Cape Times from 1921 to 1935 (after Maitland Hall Park [1902 to 1921] and before George Hough Wilson [1935 to 1945]). Long is also photographed as 'Editor' in 1926, the year of the paper's golden jubilee (Shaw, 1999: 13, 52). Dorothea writes that she would 'not inflict these Bushmen's [...] names for themselves on the public' ('which are hard to print').