Bushman Stories – E. W. Thomas

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Bushman Stories – E. W. Thomas

In the Outjo district of South West Africa I came upon a little old man, whose name was Gaira, who claimed to be a pure Bushman, though he was descended from two Bushmen stocks. As he himself said, ‘My father was a Kalahari Bushman, and my mother a Heikom.’

In his Nama dialect, his mother’s language, old Gaira toldme his stories.

The main purpose of my little collection of stories is really to provide light entertainment for a leisure half-hour. The editor of an American Zoological Review once wrote to me saying : ‘That which we of America are privileged to receive upon your tribal lives is of such a trite or scientific nature, little may be gained to the lay-man.’

I trust these stories will be of some scientific value, but I should like them to interest the layman too. For the same reason my spelling of Bushman names is simple, though I trust sufficient ; for I have thought that, in a little book like this, the Bushman orthography of philological scholars, with its unusual symbols for the constantly recurring ‘clicks’, would try some tempers and interrupt quiet reading.