The Broken String: The Last Words of an Extinct People | Neil Bennun

San hunters also believed that they were connected to the animals they hunted, that they could feel a springbok scratching itself by the tapping under their own skins. This incredibly close identification with their quarry seems to rub off on Bennun himself, whose own writing takes up the half-repeating sentence rhythms of the kukummi — the myths and stories told by the San — and applies them across entire sub- sections: a phrase he uses once may appear again 20 pages further on, both as a return to the same subject but also as an elaboration of it. The effect is calming, almost dreamlike, yet not overwhelming. Bennun frequently displays a wry humour, in his description of /Kaggen’s antics, for example, or of Bleek’s abortive first attempt to explore Africa. ‘Once he had caught malaria he made his way back to the steamer,’ he writes, as if Bleek’s sole errand on the continent had been to pick up a tropical disease. The only danger in Bennun’s style is that the dreamy melancholy of much of the book tends to leave the reader with an imprecise understanding of today’s situation. Have the San, as the subtitle indicates, completely disappeared? If not, where do they live now? These and other such questions could have been cleared up with a simple, matter-of-fact epilogue.

Nonetheless, this is a rich and beautiful book. In one sense, it is a long-deserved funeral, at which those who knew the dead stand up and say a few words — or rather it is a recounting of a funeral held long ago by Bleek and Lloyd and the last storytellers of the San. Indeed, by the time Dorothea Bleek, Wilhelm’s daughter, returned to Africa to complete her father’s work, the scattered survivors had already lost touch with their past. She wrote in 1910 that after reading them some of the stories ‘a couple of old men recognised a few customs and said, “I once heard my people tell that” ’. The culture is gone. The /Xam language is extinct. ‘When we die,’ the San believed, ‘the wind blows dust, because it intends to blow away our tracks.’ Perhaps not a funeral after all, then, but a sheltering of footprints from the obscuring wind.