Contributor Profile

Dorothea Bleek was born in Mowbray, Cape Town, on 26 March 1873. She was the sixth and second-youngest child of Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek and Jemima Lloyd. Dorothea attended school in Switzerland and Germany during the 1880s when her mother took the family to live in Europe in 1883. Dorothea Bleek (known as Doris) trained as a teacher at Berlin University and studied at the School of Oriental Languages in London, where she developed her interest in African languages. She became a recognised figure in anthropological and linguistic fields in Europe in her own right, but was also trained by her aunt, Lucy Lloyd, and taught to read and write |xam and !kun. She returned to South Africa in 1904 and worked as a teacher at Rockland's Girl's High School in Cradock until 1907. Dorothea went on field trips with a colleague, Helen Tongue, with whom she made copies of rock paintings. She went to London when the paintings were exhibited there in 1908. In 1909, some of the paintings were published with notes by Dorothea Bleek and her sister Edith. On her return from London in 1908, Dorothea Bleek devoted the rest of her life to studying the Bushmen. She had been trained in translation and methods of research by Lucy Lloyd (presumably during the periods Lucy stayed with her sister Jemima Bleek in Europe and after Lucy's return to Cape Town). Dorothea visited the northern Cape in 1910 and 1911, going to Prieska and Kenhardt in an attempt to locate the descendants of those interviewed by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd years earlier. She was accompanied on this trip by staff of the South African Museum who took photographs and made plaster casts of |xam descendants for display in the museum. Dorothea assisted Lucy Lloyd in preparing Specimens of Bushman Folklore for publication. She edited and published a considerable amount of her father's and aunt's research on the |xam after Lucy Lloyd's death, in the journal Bantu Studies. She went on numerous expeditions to study Bushman art and language, to places such as the Kalahari, Tanzania and Angola. Apart from recording genealogies, vocabulary, narratives and rock art, she also took photographs illustrating the way of life of her subjects, including their dress, artefacts and shelter, and also their anatomy. Dorothea kept a series of 32 notebooks between 1910 and 1930, documenting her travels and notes on Bushman dialects, vocabularies, genealogies and related information, as well as recording Bushman speech and music on wax phonograph cylinders. In 1920, 1921 and 1922, Dorothea Bleek and staff from the South African Museum travelled to what is now Botswana, to study the Naron (Nharo) and their language. (She later went on her own, accompanied by an interpreter.) This study was published in 1928. In 1929 she arranged for the publication of the GW Stow drawings and paintings purchased by Lucy Lloyd, entitled Rock Paintings in South Africa. She also employed artists to copy rock paintings throughout the 1930s. Some were published in More Rock Paintings in South Africa. Dorothea also published a more popular version of some Mantis stories entitled The Mantis and his Friends, in 1924. Between 1931 and 1936 she prepared |xam texts selected by Lucy Lloyd for publication. These appeared as nine papers in Bantu Studies, with titles including 'Special speech of animals and moon used by |Xam Bushmen', as well as a written piece concerning photographs taken during her 1910-11 trip to the northern Cape. The Bushman Dictionary was published posthumously in 1956, incorporating the lexicon worked on by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. Dorothea Bleek was made Honorary Reader in Bushman Languages at the University of Cape Town from 1923-1948, and in 1936 she was offered an Honorary Doctorate by the University of the Witwatersrand , but declined, saying her father should be the only Dr Bleek. She died in Plumstead, Cape Town, on 27 June 1948.