Dorothea Frances Bleek (later Dorothy F. Bleek; born 26 March 1873, Mowbray, Cape Town – died 27 June 1948,

Newlands, Cape Town Newlands (Nuweland) is an upmarket suburb of Cape Town, South Africa. It is located at the foot of Table Mountain in the Southern Suburbs of Cape Town, and is the wettest suburb in South Africa due to its high winter rainfall. The neighborhood ...

) was a South African-born German

anthropologist An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms an ...

and

philologist Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined ...

known for her research on the

Bushmen The San peoples (also Saan), or Bushmen, are members of various Khoe languages, Khoe, Tuu languages, Tuu, or Kxʼa languages, Kxʼa-speaking indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures that are the Indigenous peoples of Africa, first cultures of Sout ...

(the San people) of

southern Africa Southern Africa is the southernmost subregion of the African continent, south of the Congo and Tanzania. The physical location is the large part of Africa to the south of the extensive Congo River basin. Southern Africa is home to a number o ...

Life and work

Dorothea Bleek was the fifth daughter of

Wilhelm Bleek Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek (8 March 1827 – 17 August 1875) was a German linguist. His work included ''A Comparative Grammar of South African Languages'' and his great project jointly executed with Lucy Lloyd: The Bleek and Lloyd Archive o ...

, a pioneering philologist studying the languages and cultures of southern Africa in the late 1800s. Much of his work was done in partnership with his sister-in-law (Dorothy Bleek's aunt,

Lucy Lloyd Lucy Catherine Lloyd (7 November 1834 – 31 August 1914) was the creator, along with Wilhelm Bleek, of the 19th-century archive of ǀXam and !Kung texts. Early life Lucy Catherine Lloyd was born in Norbury in England on 7 November 1834. H ...

). The work of Dorothy Bleek was largely a continuation of her father and aunt's research, but she also made numerous notable contributions of her own to the field. Her culminating work, published after death, was the book ''A Bushman Dictionary'', still referenced today.

Laurens van der Post Sir Laurens Jan van der Post, (13 December 1906 – 15 December 1996) was a South African Afrikaner writer, farmer, soldier, educator, journalist, humanitarian, philosopher, explorer and conservationist. He was noted for his interest in J ...

, who liked to think of himself as "a white Bushman", credited her book ''Mantis and His Hunter'' (along with ''

Specimens of Bushman Folklore ''Specimens of Bushman Folklore'' is a book by the linguist Wilhelm H. I. Bleek and Lucy C. Lloyd, which was published in 1911. The book records eighty-seven legends, myths and other traditional stories of the ǀXam Bushmen in their now-extin ...

'' by her father and aunt) as "a sort of

Stone Age The Stone Age was a broad prehistoric period during which stone was widely used to make tools with an edge, a point, or a percussion surface. The period lasted for roughly 3.4 million years, and ended between 4,000 BC and 2,000 BC, with ...

Bible". This is in the introduction to ''The Heart of the Hunter'' (1961), a follow-up to ''The Lost World of the Kalahari'', the book based on the BBC series that brought the Bushmen to international attention. Bleek's research and findings are often overshadowed by the work of her father, and she has been criticised for lacking the empathy and intuition of him and her aunt. This has led to a misperception of her as a racist. Despite this, Bleek's research on the language, customs, and especially rock art of southern Africa (present-day South Africa, Tanzania, Botswana, and Namibia) stands as a vital contribution to scholarship on the region. Her photographs and audio recordings were especially important to later researchers.Andrew Bank
Anthropology and Fieldwork Photography: Dorothea Bleek's Expedition to the Northern Cape and the Kalahari, July to December 1911
africabib.org; accessed 4 February 2017.

Bibliography

* ''The Mantis and his friends'', 1923 * ''The Naron, a Bushman tribe of the central Kalahari'', 1928 * ''Comparative vocabularies of Bushman languages'', 1929 *Dorothea Bleek, ; , 1956

Notes

External links

University of Cape Town Libraries
The Digital Bleek and Lloyd
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bleek, Dorothea 1873 births 1948 deaths German anthropologists German philologists German women scientists South African anthropologists South African women scientists Linguists from South Africa South African emigrants to Germany German women anthropologists South African women anthropologists Women linguists 20th-century philologists People from Cape Town Linguists of Khoisan languages