THE / XAM-KA !EI
Lost words of a broken string; South Africa’s extinct people
The /Xam-ka !ei were the first people of Southern Africa. Known to the Dutch as Bosjemans, as Bushmen to the British and as San to South Africa’s Khoe people.
The /Xam-ka !ei breathed the magic that envelopes the land. They are the people behind the rock art paintings we can still see today in the Southern Drakensberg Mountains.
Yet none survived to tell us their story, to pass on the stories of magic in the mountains.
The /Xam-ka !ei; A people who did not survive the advance of European colonisation north.
In the 1770s, the San leader, Koerikei, shouted to a Boer commando while perched on top of a cliff out of range of their muskets:
What are you doing in my territory? You occupy all the places where eland and other game live. Why do you not remain where the sun sets, where you first were?
Children of the /Xam-ka !ei
“We know nothing of our grandfathers, we do not know who painted our pictures; the Dutchmen shot them all down at the great slaughter, and carried us, the children, away. I was a little girl, six or seven years old, at the time.
‘My father used to sing that the string had broken; the string he used to hear when ! Nuin- /kuiten had called forth the Rainbow. That was why things were different now.
For things continue to be unpleasant to me; I do not hear the ringing sound in the sky I used to hear. I feel that the string has really broken, leaving me. So when I sleep I do not feel the thing which used to vibrate in me, as I lay asleep.’”
Culture and Cosmology of the the /Xam-ka !ei
!Khwe // na s’o !kwe – The First at Sitting People were believed to be the original people of the land. The /Xam-ka !ei believed they were a fluid entity between animals and humans who passed the land on to them after they left.
“‘The First as Sitting People were those who first inhabited the earth. It was their children who worked with the Sun.
This is why the people who inhabited the country after them say that those children made the sun ascend, feeling that their mothers had agreed together that they should throw the Sun up for them; that the Sun might warm the earth for them; that they might feel the Sun’s warmth; that they might be able to sit in the sun…
The Sun had been a man. He talked. They all talked: the other one too, the Moon. While they spoke, they used to live on the earth.
They do not talk, now that they live in the sky.’”