Dorothea Bleek

Dorothea Bleek was the fifth daughter of Wilhelm Bleek, 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). 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.^[4]

Laurens van der Post, who liked to think of himself as "a white Bushman",^{[citation needed]} credited her book Mantis and His Hunter (along with Specimens of Bushman Folklore by her father and aunt) as "a sort of Stone Age Bible".^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]}

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. For example, a section in her 1928 volume on the Naron [Nharo] includes a section on their 'Capacity as workmen', which has contributed to a perception of her as a racist.^{[5][page needed]}

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.^[6]

• The Mantis and his friends, 1923
• The Naron, a Bushman tribe of the central Kalahari, 1928
• Comparative vocabularies of Bushman languages, 1929
• Dorothea Bleek, Bushman Dictionary at Google Books; ISBN 9785882327261, 1956