The Broken String : The Last Words of an Extinct People

by Neil Bennun

The first people of South Africa, stone - age hunters and gatherers from the mountains and the arid flats of the interior, did not survive the arrival of settlers from Europe. Within decades an ancient world of sorcerers, hunters and artists was lost for ever, along with the stories they told. We would know next to nothing of their myths, their beliefs or the rituals that governed their lives if it were not for six people, five of whom were men taken to Cape Town and imprisoned between 1869 and 1870. Released into the rural home of a Prussian linguist called Wilhelm Bleek and his English-born sister-in-law, a former governess called Lucy Lloyd, they were invited to teach their language and to share a previously unknown world on the verge of extinction. Over the next eighteen years Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd worked together to record 12,000 pages of stories, songs, pictures and moving personal histories.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Africa

432 pages, Paperback

First published June 3, 2004

Reviews

[Claire Coetzee]

I loved every page.
Every sentence
was another world.

[Dagazwind · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so, so good. Reads like well written fiction, except it's not fiction. There is no need for embellishments, reality supplies more than enough excitement, struggle, tragedy, complexity, laughter - anything. We meet storytellers no less interesting than the stories they keep, and legends that simply refuse to stay ephemeral. Magnificent.