Library Weekly

On  27 June 1948, South African-born German anthropologist and philologist Dorothea Frances Bleek died in Newlands, Cape Town at the age of 75. She is known for her research on the San in Southern Africa.

Dorothea Bleek was born on 26 March 1873, in Mowbray, Cape Town as the fifth daughter of Wilhelm Bleek, a noted philologist, who, together with his sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd, studied the languages and cultures of the /Xam and the !Kung. After the death of her father in 1876, the Bleek family was forced to return to Germany. Dorothea attended schools in Germany and Switzerland, trained as a teacher and specialised in linguistic studies.

She continued her father and aunt's research, but she also made numerous notable contributions of her own to San studies. Her most important work, published after death, was the A Bushman Dictionary. Dorothea undertook many expeditions in the course of her research on the different San groups, their languages and rock art. Apart from recording genealogies, vocabulary, narratives and rock art, she also took photographs illustrating the way of life of the San, including their clothes, dwellings and weapons, but also their anatomy. Dorothea kept a series of 32 notebooks between 1910 and 1930, documenting her travels and research which are online available at the Digital Bleek and Lloyd.

Dorthea Bleeks’s personal archive is part of UNESCO’s Memory of the World (MoW) Register.

(Source: English and German Wikipedia)

Selected publications

Bushmen, Botany and Baking Bread: Mary Pocock's Record of a Journey with Dorothea Bleek Across Angola In 1925 / Jean Kelly; Tony Dold. - Melton: NISC (Pty) Limited (National Inquiry Services Centre (Pty) Ltd), 2021

Frogs or people: Dorothea Bleek and a genealogy of ideas in rock art research / David Witelson.
In: Azania, 2018, Vol.53 (2), p.185-208

Dorothea Bleek : a life of scholarship / Jill Weintroub. - Johannesburg : Wits University Press, 2015

On biography and archive : Dorothea Bleek and the making of the Bleek collection / Jill Weintroub.
In: South African historical journal , vol. 65, no. 1, p. 70-89, 2013

Sisters at the rockface: the Van der Riet twins and Dorothea Bleek's rock art research and publishing, 1932-1940  / Jill Weintroub.
In: African studies : a quarterly journal devoted to the study of African administration, cultures and languages , vol. 68, no. 3, p. 402-428 : foto's, 2009

Anthropology and fieldwork photography : Dorothea Bleek's expedition to the northern Cape and the Kalahari, July to December 1911 / Andrew Bank.
In: Kronos : 'n geleentheidspublikasie van die Wes-Kaaplandse Instituut vir Historiese Navorsing , no. 32, p. 77-113 : foto's, krt, 2006

The //ng!ke or Bushmen of Griqualand West ; Notes on the language of the //ng!ke or Bushmen of Griqualand West / Dorothea F. Bleek; Tom Güldemann. - Köln : Khoisan Forum at the Institut für Afrikanistik, University of Cologne, Germany, 2000
2000

A bushman dictionary / Dorothea F. Bleek; Zellig S. Harris. New Haven, Conn. : American Oriental Society, 1956

Cave artists of South Africa : 48 unpublished reproductions of rock paintings / Dorothea F. Bleek; Eric Rosenthal; A.J.H. Goodwin. - Cape Town : Balkema, 1953

Rock-paintings in South Africa from parts of the Eastern province and Orange Free State / George W. Stow; Dorothea F. Bleek. - London : Methuen, 1930.

For an (incomplete) list of her articles in Bantu Studies see AfricaBib, for a collection of her photographs see UCT Libraries Digital Collections.

Timeline of linguists of Khoisan languages via DBpedia and Wikidata