I HATE being put into boxes, says filmmaker Sylvia Vollenhoven.
That, she says, is why she has written a deeply autobiographical novel. She didn’t want the rules of autobiography — or a novel — constraining the story of how her Bushman ancestor //Kabbo called to her across 200 years to guard Bushman heritage as a "Keeper of the Kumm".
Bushman is the term Vollenhoven prefers for the people academics often call the San. The Kumm are their stories, or, as //Kabbo tells her, "(The Kumm) is a very special kind of story that a Bushman will bring to you. The Kumm is the living thing before you impale it on a page, imprison it between covers and kill its heart."
It’s not hard to understand why someone like Vollenhoven would have higher than average distaste for being "put into boxes". After her people were massacred, mostly by white settlers in the 18th and 19th centuries, the survivors were enslaved. With the 1950’s Population Registration Act, they found themselves classified by white legislators as coloured. Their history and heritage was all-but wiped out, by death and by the cynical use of law. They are a people without stories.
"My great grandmother says our people stopped talking about their history because of the pain," a Bushman descendant says in the novel. "So much dying and violence. It became taboo to tell children about the past. They became embarrassed to pass on stories about so much loss."
Vollenhoven’s The Keeper of the Kumm is a multi-platform project aimed at reclaiming what has been almost eradicated. She has used her creative expertise — a previous play did well on London’s West End — to write a novel, and to collaborate with choreographer Alfred Hinkel in the dance drama that will be opened at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown on July 3.
Details
- TITLE: The keeper of the Kumm: Ancestral longing and belonging of a Boesmankind
- AUTHOR: Sylvia Vollenhoven
- PUBLISHER: NB-Publishers
Both trace journalist Elizabeth "Betjie" Petersen’s response to an ancestral calling to become a Keeper of the Kumm. Like many a reluctant sangoma before her, Petersen (a very thinly veiled Vollenhoven) at first doesn’t recognise the voice as that of her ancestor //Kabbo. She becomes addled and ill and it is not until she has exhausted all other options, especially medical, that she decides to cross the boundaries of her family’s fundamentalist Christian religion and her fact-focused journalist’s training to accept that she is being spoken to by an ancestor, called, not to be a sangoma, but to be a Keeper of the Kumm.
"I had no choice," says Vollenhoven in an interview with BDLive. "The world I had been brought up in hadn’t helped me. I had no other option but to go to people who were outside my world, my paradigm. This is a story about crossing boundaries, and that makes people uncomfortable."
Back in the 1860s //Kabbo too had to cross a boundary that would presumably have made him uncomfortable. Arrested for stock theft he was handed over to philologist William Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd, who noted down the stories he told them. The Bleek/Lloyd Archive, housed at the University of Cape Town (UCT), contains over 100 notebooks full of history and folklore from interviews with several Bushman prisoners in Cape Town. //Kabbo /Uhi-ddoro Jantje Tooren was one of these men (there was one woman).
That’s history. In the novel, //Kabbo, confronted with the massacre of his people, decides to go on a quest to find people who can preserve Bushman history and folklore — Bleek and Lloyd. There is irony, of course, in //Kabbo’s having to hand these treasures over to white people, just as there is irony in it being a white sangoma who tells Petersen an ancestor is calling her. Vollenhoven too consulted a white sangoma, and there is an online video of a traditional ceremony he and other white sangomas performed on her.
That the boundary between fact and fiction, in the novel at least, is so porous is partly a strength, partly a weakness. Identity is, of course, part fantasy, and this is one of the points Vollenhoven is making by writing what amounts to "faction". However, Vollenhoven’s personal story is a fascinating one, and a fully autobiographical account would have had greater resonance. This is especially so when Petersen tells of her work for Swedish newspaper Expressen around the time of former president Nelson Mandela’s release from 27 years of imprisonment, and her work at the South African Broadcasting Corporation, starting around the time of the 1994 elections and ending 12 years later. Vollenhoven worked for Expressen and did these things. Petersen’s vignettes would have more power in an autobiography about Vollenhoven’s experiences as a journalist at a heady time in SA’s history.
Social history is, however, always part fact, part fantasy. The stories we tell about who we are and where we fit in the world are more often myth than scientific truth. Social myths are powerful, and it is they that have been taken from the Bushmen. Petersen tells how "when our tribes were massacred, the survivors sometimes had their teeth knocked out to stop them from pronouncing the complex sounds of our indigenous languages." There is almost no more cruel but effective way to extinguish a heritage.
"In terms of actual, actual stories that are part of folklore we have to accept that (most of that) is lost," says Vollenhoven. "That means huge damage... in us there is a gap, a pain and in order to move forward we have to ask, what is it that we need to honour."
Just as Vollenhoven’s book loses on the fact side of things, her decision to make it "faction" leaves it without the full narrative power of a novel. //Kabbo, for one, could be a far more compelling character story if he made it off the pages of Bleek and Lloyd’s notebooks. He doesn’t.
Vollenhoven says — as does Petersen — that since she embarked on her Keeper of the Kumm project she has come into contact with a growing attempt to preserve and recapture the Khoisan heritage. They start with Bradley van Sitters’ Khoikhoi lessons — taking place, in fabulous irony, at Cape Town’s Castle of Good Hope from where the Dutch started the colonisation of SA — travel past Elias Nel’s hand in the revival of the traditional riel dances and in some ways end with community attempts to secure rights to intellectual property over traditional herbs such as rooibos. There is also the work of artist Pippa Skotness, director of the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Curating the Archive, where, among other projects, the Bleek/ Lloyd archive is being digitised.
A story exists for as long as it is told, or, in the Kumm’s case, is lived. The painful gap of which Vollenhoven speaks is described by //Kabbo as, "the sickness of separation (from the Kumm) ...It started when we stopped dancing and when our stories no longer came to us on the wind."
For Vollenhoven (and Petersen) accepting that "the material world is just an extension of something bigger" has brought healing and wholeness. Perhaps, then, through Vollenhoven’s work and the work of others, the Kumm will return.
