Dorothea Bleek (1873-1948) devoted her life to completing the 'bushman
researches' that her father and aunt had begun in the closing decades of
the nineteenth century. This research was partly a labour of familial
loyalty to Wilhelm, the acclaimed linguist and language scholar of
nineteenth-century Germany and later of the Cape Colony, and to Lucy
Lloyd, a self-taught linguist and scholar of bushman languages and
folklore; but it was also an expression of Dorothea's commitment to a
particular kind of scholarship and an intellectual milieu that saw her
spending her entire adult life in the study of the people she
called'bushmen'.
How has history treated Dorothea Bleek? Has she been recognised as a
scholar in her own right, or as someone who merely followed in the
footsteps of her famous father and aunt? Was she an adventurer, a woman
who travelled across southern Africa driven by intellectual curiosity to
learn all she could about the bushmen? Or was she conservative, a
researcher who belittled the people she studied and dismissed them as
lazy and improvident?
These are some of the questions with which Jill Weintroub starts her
thoughtful biography of Dorothea Bleek. The book examines Dorothea
Bleek's life story and family legacy, her rock art research and her
fieldwork in southern Africa, and, in light of these, evaluates her
scholarship and contribution to the history of ideas in South Africa.
The compelling and surprising narrative reveals an intellectual
inheritance intertwined with the story of a woman's life, and argues
that Dorothea's life work - her study of the bushmen - was also a
sometimes surprising emotional quest.
