Michael Wessels
Biographic Data
| ID | 117931 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Wessels |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Wessels |
| SIGNATURE | WESSELS M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of KwaZulu-Natal |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 32 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 31 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Displacement Stressors and Sexual and Reproductive Health Challenges for Internally Displaced Young Adults in Northern Mozambique
Gesundheitskiosk
Separating the Magical from the Real
Zakes Mda’s novel She Plays with the Darkness has been characterised as a magical realist novel. It is notable, though, that the magical elements are reserved almost exclusively for the sections of the novel that relate to the major character, Dikosha, and her world of music, art and dance. Central to this world are the Barwa, better known as the Bushmen or San. This article is chiefly concerned with the novel’s representation of Dikosha’s relati…
San Representation
Representations of Revolutionary Violence in Recent Indian and South African Fiction
Several recent novels in English by Indian and South African authors explore the theme of violent political resistance to the entrenched injustices of the hierarchical Indian social order and South Africa’s institutionalised system of racial and economic domination, respectively. This article will investigate and compare the ways in which this theme is treated in four novels: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Lowland (2013), Neel Mukherjee’s Lives of Others (2015)…
Sifiso Mzobe’s Young Blood
Sifiso Mzobe’s Young blood (2010) generates much of its energy, this article will argue, through its representation of social and physical mobility and its articulation of space with modes of consumption in post-apartheid South Africa. The novel is set chiefly in the township of Umlazi, the city of Durban and some of its middle- class suburbs. The chief protagonist, a young car thief, moves between township, city and suburb with ease in stolen ca…
A glimpse into Bushman mythology’
In 1873, Qing, a young man of Bushman background, recounted a cycle of stories and commented on some of the rock paintings he and the magistrate Joseph Orpen saw on a journey through the Maloti mountains. A year later Qing’s narratives and comments on rock art, as recorded by Orpen, were published along with Orpen’s account of the journey in an article in The Cape Monthly Magazine. The article is a blend of European and indigenous discourses and …
Smoking Around the Campfire
In 1873 Joseph Orpen, resident of Nomansland, engaged a San1 man Qing to guide a combined force of levies and mounted police through the Maloti mountains in present-day Lesotho where they hoped to intercept a group of reluctant Hlubi rebels under chief Langalibalele. Orpen was not only a colonial official but also a keen scholar. In response to his questions Qing commented on some of the rock paintings they saw on their short journey and recounte…
Verbesserung der Performance durch Open Innovation-Ansätze
An integrated care approach to ensure dental care for disabled and in need of care, especially those living in residential care homes / Un enfoque de atención integrada para garantizar la atención den…
San Rock Art
San Rock art is found throughout the southern African region. It occurs in some areas in the form of painting and in others as engravings; the two forms seldom overlap, as David Lewis-Williams's bo
The representation of place and religion in Nkosinathi Sithole's Hunger eats a man
Nkosinathi Sithole's Hunger eats a man, published simultaneously in isiZulu and English in 2011, is set in an area of semi-urban sprawl in an economically depressed zone of the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal. While the village of Ndlalidlindoda (translated as “Hunger eats a man”) borders a lush wild life conservation area, its immediate environment is degraded, infertile and overpopulated. Poverty and unemployment destabilise traditional…
San representation
Additional informationNotes on contributorsMichael WesselsMichael Wessels is a lecturer in English Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg. [email protected]
The creation of the eland
For the most part, the narratives recounted by the San informant Qing to the magistrate, Joseph Orpen, who had employed him as a guide and scout in the Maloti mountains during the Langalibalele rebellion of 1873, have been discussed in terms of rock art. This is unsurprising since Qing's narratives were told, at least in part, in response to Orpen's questions about the rock art they saw on their journey through the Malotis. This focus has meant, …
A Story of a /Xam Bushman Narrative
This article explores the intricate discursive histories that have accompanied the telling, transmission, publication and reception of the narratives in the Bleek and Lloyd collection. I will use as an example the story that David Lewis-Williams calls "The First /Xam Man Brings Home a Young Lion" in his selection of materials from the Bleek and Lloyd Collection, Stories That Float from Afar: Ancestral Folklore of the San of Southern Africa. I arg…
The Khoisan Origins of the Interconnected World View in Antjie Krog's Begging to be Black
Antjie Krog (2009) notes that the spiritual and religious beliefs and practices of the Nguni/Sotho-speaking peoples of southern Africa came as a surprise to the missionaries, who were expecting to have to battle the idolatry, fetishism and sacrificial practices that they found in the rest of Africa. The absence of these features in the religious life of the region, Krog suggests, is attributable to the enduring influence of South Africa's “First …
A Bushman Voice from the Drakensberg
There is a popular perception that the people who are commonly referred to as the Bushmen or San vanished from the Drakensberg region, leaving only their rock art behind. In 2003, however, Zanele Mkhwanazi won The Witness newspaper's “true short story competition” with a piece in English about her Bushman grandmother, Makhulomhlophe, who had passed away a few years before. Mkhwanazi charts her growing realisation of her own Bushman roots, and opp…
The Uncoiling Python
By Harold Scheub, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2010, 240 pp., $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 978-0-821-41921-2 Harold Scheub, one of the doyens of oral literature studies in southern Africa, has produc
Representing Bushmen South Africa and the origin of language
The Story of “!Khwe // na ssho !kui who Brought Home a Young Lion to Use as a Dog”
This paper discusses several aspects of a /Xam Bushman story in which a man brings home a lion cub and insists that it is a dog. The paper seeks to demonstrate that the text is capable of eliciting a range of important critical questions. It argues that the call to exegesis is inherent in most forms of literature, including those that are often treated as folklore or mythology. The paper suggests that there are several aspects of the story that a…
Reading the Hartebeest
The Bleek and Lloyd collection of /Xam materials continues to elicit growing attention from both the wider public and academics such as historians, linguists, literary critics, folklorists, art historian, and ethnologists. Despite this interest, the actual body of writing that engages in close analysis of the texts themselves is surprisingly limited. This small but influential literature has itself not been subjected to a systematic critique. Man…
Representing Bushmen
Reviewed by: Representing Bushmen: South Africa and the Origin of Language Michael Wessels Representing Bushmen: South Africa and the Origin of Language Shane Moran Rochester, NY: U of Rochester P, 2009. 210 pp. ISBN 978-1-58046-294-5 hardcover. The late-nineteenth-century archive of materials that resulted from interviews philologist Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd conducted with /Xam informants, nearly all of whom had been releas…
Text or Presence
The Bleek and Lloyd collection of /Xam materials has elicited a variety of responses from scholars in different disciplines. These include interpretation of the texts, history and biography. Most of this writing has not been subjected to close criticism. I will argue in this paper that Jacques Derrida's critique of the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Claude Lévi-Strauss in Of Grammatology (1976) is applicable to some of the writing that has bee…
Religion and the interpretation of the /Xam narratives
This paper seeks to investigate a single reading of a /Xam text that is based on specific assumptions about /Xam religion and spirituality. In the course of the investigation, particular views about Bushman religion are described and discussed. Several questions are also raised about universal categories such as religion and spirituality and their application to a range of culturally and socially situated practices
Myth of origin or play of difference
This paper argues that some of the interpretation of the /Xam narratives in the Bleek and Lloyd collection has emphasised their aetiological characteristics at the expense of their discursive and ideological properties. The identification of the stories as creation tales has formed an important part of the task of establishing a broader framework in which to understand the corpus as a whole. While this has been an essential project, it has produc…
The Discursive Character of the /Xam Texts
This paper discusses a single /Xam narrative from the nineteenth-century Bleek and Lloyd archive of Southern African Bushman materials. [1] It delivers a critique of functionalist and structuralist approaches to the materials, as well as of the tendency to characterise the narratives that concern the sun, moon and stars as chiefly aetiological. The paper aims to situate the narrative within a wider /Xam discursive field and to demonstrate somethi…
The Story of “!Khwe // na ssho !kui who Brought Home a Young Lion to Use as a Dog”
This paper discusses several aspects of a /Xam Bushman story in which a man brings home a lion cub and insists that it is a dog. The paper seeks to demonstrate that the text is capable of eliciting a range of important critical questions. It argues that the call to exegesis is inherent in most forms of literature, including those that are often treated as folklore or mythology. The paper suggests that there are several aspects of the story that a…
Representations of Revolutionary Violence in Recent Indian and South African Fiction
Several recent novels in English by Indian and South African authors explore the theme of violent political resistance to the entrenched injustices of the hierarchical Indian social order and South Africa’s institutionalised system of racial and economic domination, respectively. This article will investigate and compare the ways in which this theme is treated in four novels: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Lowland (2013), Neel Mukherjee’s Lives of Others (2015)…
The creation of the eland
For the most part, the narratives recounted by the San informant Qing to the magistrate, Joseph Orpen, who had employed him as a guide and scout in the Maloti mountains during the Langalibalele rebellion of 1873, have been discussed in terms of rock art. This is unsurprising since Qing's narratives were told, at least in part, in response to Orpen's questions about the rock art they saw on their journey through the Malotis. This focus has meant, …
Smoking Around the Campfire
In 1873 Joseph Orpen, resident of Nomansland, engaged a San1 man Qing to guide a combined force of levies and mounted police through the Maloti mountains in present-day Lesotho where they hoped to intercept a group of reluctant Hlubi rebels under chief Langalibalele. Orpen was not only a colonial official but also a keen scholar. In response to his questions Qing commented on some of the rock paintings they saw on their short journey and recounte…
San representation
Additional informationNotes on contributorsMichael WesselsMichael Wessels is a lecturer in English Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg. [email protected]
Reading the Hartebeest
The Bleek and Lloyd collection of /Xam materials continues to elicit growing attention from both the wider public and academics such as historians, linguists, literary critics, folklorists, art historian, and ethnologists. Despite this interest, the actual body of writing that engages in close analysis of the texts themselves is surprisingly limited. This small but influential literature has itself not been subjected to a systematic critique. Man…
New directions in/Xam studies
Interest in the Bleek and Lloyd archive of /Xam materials continues to grow each year. This has resulted in a proliferation of writing on the subject. Several major preoccupations can be discerned in this body of writing: these include the actual process of the collection of the materials and the relationships between the main players in the colonial context of Victorian Cape Town, the status of the materials as oral literature and their interpre…
Sifiso Mzobe’s Young Blood
Sifiso Mzobe’s Young blood (2010) generates much of its energy, this article will argue, through its representation of social and physical mobility and its articulation of space with modes of consumption in post-apartheid South Africa. The novel is set chiefly in the township of Umlazi, the city of Durban and some of its middle- class suburbs. The chief protagonist, a young car thief, moves between township, city and suburb with ease in stolen ca…
A glimpse into Bushman mythology’
In 1873, Qing, a young man of Bushman background, recounted a cycle of stories and commented on some of the rock paintings he and the magistrate Joseph Orpen saw on a journey through the Maloti mountains. A year later Qing’s narratives and comments on rock art, as recorded by Orpen, were published along with Orpen’s account of the journey in an article in The Cape Monthly Magazine. The article is a blend of European and indigenous discourses and …
Foraging, Talking, and Tricksters
This essay discusses some aspects of Mathias Guenther’s work on the /Xam narratives that are contained in the Bleek and Lloyd collection. While his writing on the narratives themselves has been very influential in the field, it has not, itself, been adequately critiqued. I especially examine Guenther’s criticism of functionalist and structuralist approaches to the narratives and his characterization of the Mantis figure, /Kaggen, as a trickster i…
Improving Choice of Prescribed Antibiotics Through Concurrent Reminders in an Educational Order Form
Soumerai, Stephen B. ScD; Avorn, Jerry MD; Taylor, William C. MD; Wessels, Michael MD; Maher, Donna RN; Hawley, Sharon L. BA Author Information
Antjie Krog, Stephen Watson and the metaphysics of presence
In this paper I explore some of the questions that follow from Stephen Watson's assertions that Antjie Krog's the stars say ‘tsau’ exhibits elements of plagiarism. In particular, I examine different conceptions of originality that can be identified in Watson and Krog's statements concerning the reworking of the /Xam materials into poetry. I investigate the degree to which both Krog and Watson's writing on the /Xam displays an underlying assumptio…
The Discursive Character of the /Xam Texts
This paper discusses a single /Xam narrative from the nineteenth-century Bleek and Lloyd archive of Southern African Bushman materials. [1] It delivers a critique of functionalist and structuralist approaches to the materials, as well as of the tendency to characterise the narratives that concern the sun, moon and stars as chiefly aetiological. The paper aims to situate the narrative within a wider /Xam discursive field and to demonstrate somethi…
Text or Presence
The Bleek and Lloyd collection of /Xam materials has elicited a variety of responses from scholars in different disciplines. These include interpretation of the texts, history and biography. Most of this writing has not been subjected to close criticism. I will argue in this paper that Jacques Derrida's critique of the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Claude Lévi-Strauss in Of Grammatology (1976) is applicable to some of the writing that has bee…
Religion and the interpretation of the /Xam narratives
This paper seeks to investigate a single reading of a /Xam text that is based on specific assumptions about /Xam religion and spirituality. In the course of the investigation, particular views about Bushman religion are described and discussed. Several questions are also raised about universal categories such as religion and spirituality and their application to a range of culturally and socially situated practices
Myth of origin or play of difference
This paper argues that some of the interpretation of the /Xam narratives in the Bleek and Lloyd collection has emphasised their aetiological characteristics at the expense of their discursive and ideological properties. The identification of the stories as creation tales has formed an important part of the task of establishing a broader framework in which to understand the corpus as a whole. While this has been an essential project, it has produc…
Foraging, Talking, and Tricksters
This essay discusses some aspects of Mathias Guenther’s work on the /Xam narratives that are contained in the Bleek and Lloyd collection. While his writing on the narratives themselves has been very influential in the field, it has not, itself, been adequately critiqued. I especially examine Guenther’s criticism of functionalist and structuralist approaches to the narratives and his characterization of the Mantis figure, /Kaggen, as a trickster i…
New directions in/Xam studies
Interest in the Bleek and Lloyd archive of /Xam materials continues to grow each year. This has resulted in a proliferation of writing on the subject. Several major preoccupations can be discerned in this body of writing: these include the actual process of the collection of the materials and the relationships between the main players in the colonial context of Victorian Cape Town, the status of the materials as oral literature and their interpre…
The Story in which the Children are Sent to Throw the Sleeping Sun into the Sky
This article examines a single story from the /Xam materials in the Bleek and Lloyd collection. After briefly relating the narrative, I discuss its aetiological implications. Various interpretations of the story are then offered and critiqued. The article proceeds to consider the story in terms of power and agency and to investigate its discursive features: its chain of speaking, the nature of the laughter it presents and its mode of interpellati…
The /Xam Narratives
David Lewis-Williams noted in an article in this journal that ‘given the rich heritage of indigenous southern African folklore, it is surprising that so few scholars have attempted detailed exegesi
Reading the Hartebeest
The Bleek and Lloyd collection of /Xam materials continues to elicit growing attention from both the wider public and academics such as historians, linguists, literary critics, folklorists, art historian, and ethnologists. Despite this interest, the actual body of writing that engages in close analysis of the texts themselves is surprisingly limited. This small but influential literature has itself not been subjected to a systematic critique. Man…
Representing Bushmen
Reviewed by: Representing Bushmen: South Africa and the Origin of Language Michael Wessels Representing Bushmen: South Africa and the Origin of Language Shane Moran Rochester, NY: U of Rochester P, 2009. 210 pp. ISBN 978-1-58046-294-5 hardcover. The late-nineteenth-century archive of materials that resulted from interviews philologist Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd conducted with /Xam informants, nearly all of whom had been releas…
Representing Bushmen South Africa and the origin of language
The Story of “!Khwe // na ssho !kui who Brought Home a Young Lion to Use as a Dog”
This paper discusses several aspects of a /Xam Bushman story in which a man brings home a lion cub and insists that it is a dog. The paper seeks to demonstrate that the text is capable of eliciting a range of important critical questions. It argues that the call to exegesis is inherent in most forms of literature, including those that are often treated as folklore or mythology. The paper suggests that there are several aspects of the story that a…
The Khoisan Origins of the Interconnected World View in Antjie Krog's Begging to be Black
Antjie Krog (2009) notes that the spiritual and religious beliefs and practices of the Nguni/Sotho-speaking peoples of southern Africa came as a surprise to the missionaries, who were expecting to have to battle the idolatry, fetishism and sacrificial practices that they found in the rest of Africa. The absence of these features in the religious life of the region, Krog suggests, is attributable to the enduring influence of South Africa's “First …
A Bushman Voice from the Drakensberg
There is a popular perception that the people who are commonly referred to as the Bushmen or San vanished from the Drakensberg region, leaving only their rock art behind. In 2003, however, Zanele Mkhwanazi won The Witness newspaper's “true short story competition” with a piece in English about her Bushman grandmother, Makhulomhlophe, who had passed away a few years before. Mkhwanazi charts her growing realisation of her own Bushman roots, and opp…
The Uncoiling Python
By Harold Scheub, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2010, 240 pp., $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 978-0-821-41921-2 Harold Scheub, one of the doyens of oral literature studies in southern Africa, has produc
A Story of a /Xam Bushman Narrative
This article explores the intricate discursive histories that have accompanied the telling, transmission, publication and reception of the narratives in the Bleek and Lloyd collection. I will use as an example the story that David Lewis-Williams calls "The First /Xam Man Brings Home a Young Lion" in his selection of materials from the Bleek and Lloyd Collection, Stories That Float from Afar: Ancestral Folklore of the San of Southern Africa. I arg…
The representation of place and religion in Nkosinathi Sithole's Hunger eats a man
Nkosinathi Sithole's Hunger eats a man, published simultaneously in isiZulu and English in 2011, is set in an area of semi-urban sprawl in an economically depressed zone of the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal. While the village of Ndlalidlindoda (translated as “Hunger eats a man”) borders a lush wild life conservation area, its immediate environment is degraded, infertile and overpopulated. Poverty and unemployment destabilise traditional…
San representation
Additional informationNotes on contributorsMichael WesselsMichael Wessels is a lecturer in English Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg. [email protected]
The creation of the eland
For the most part, the narratives recounted by the San informant Qing to the magistrate, Joseph Orpen, who had employed him as a guide and scout in the Maloti mountains during the Langalibalele rebellion of 1873, have been discussed in terms of rock art. This is unsurprising since Qing's narratives were told, at least in part, in response to Orpen's questions about the rock art they saw on their journey through the Malotis. This focus has meant, …
Verbesserung der Performance durch Open Innovation-Ansätze
An integrated care approach to ensure dental care for disabled and in need of care, especially those living in residential care homes / Un enfoque de atención integrada para garantizar la atención den…
San Rock Art
San Rock art is found throughout the southern African region. It occurs in some areas in the form of painting and in others as engravings; the two forms seldom overlap, as David Lewis-Williams's bo
Sifiso Mzobe’s Young Blood
Sifiso Mzobe’s Young blood (2010) generates much of its energy, this article will argue, through its representation of social and physical mobility and its articulation of space with modes of consumption in post-apartheid South Africa. The novel is set chiefly in the township of Umlazi, the city of Durban and some of its middle- class suburbs. The chief protagonist, a young car thief, moves between township, city and suburb with ease in stolen ca…
Sociology (21 works) · Archaeology and Rock Art Studies (19 works) · Art (15 works) · History (15 works) · South African History and Culture (14 works) · Literature (13 works) · Narrative (12 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Political science (10 works)