CLAIM TO THE COUNTRY

The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek.

388 pages, profusely illustrated throughout, pictorial laminated boards, a compact disc ‘The Digital Bleek and Lloyd’ is mounted in a pocket on the rear endpaper, a very good copy.

‘In Claim to the Country Pippa Skotnes presents, for the first time, all the notebook pages and drawings that comprise the bulk of the Bleek & Lloyd archive. Also included is a searchable annotated index for all the narratives and contributors and several contextualising essays by well-known scholars. More than this, Pippa Skotnes has revealed both the beauty of the archive and the loss that it represents. She celebrates the enormous achievement of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd as well as the lives of the men and women and their children who struggled against unimaginable odds to survive, yet who filled the landscape with the poetry of their ideas and set their stories adrift on the wind. This book shows that more than a record of the memories of a few !xam and !kun individuals and the dispossession of their descendants, the archive is their claim to the country.’ Editor’s note.