In April 2023, while revising my paper “Interesting and Uninteresting Unknowns” for JHoK, I visited the Library of Trinity College Dublin to examine a remarkable seventeenth-century manuscript. The TCD MS IE 984 documents a multi-ethnic expedition from the Dutch Cape Colony deep into the heart of Namaqualand, led by the Cape Commander Simon van der Stel in 1685. The trekkers recorded novel descriptions of southern African landscapes – which I wrote about in my JHoK article – as well as plants, animals, and the Namaqua people in their travel journal. Accompanying the text are an astonishing seventy-one folio-sized watercolor paintings by the Silesian apothecary Heinrich Claudius. These were intended to illustrate Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede tot Drakenstein’s Hortus Africanus – a follow-up to his exceptionally influential Hortus Malabaricus – but the book was never finished.

Immediately, I was drawn in by Claudius’s ethnographic descriptions and illustrations. Indeed, I have written more about them elsewhere. I was interested in understanding how the Silesian’s paintings reflected a colonial worldview and early modern European ideas about racial difference. However, something that struck me as particularly odd and in need of explanation was Claudius’s description of the Namaqua people’s diet. He observed that the Namaqua would “eat everything that comes their way, down to rats, dogs, cats, caterpillars, locusts, etc. For hares alone they have the greatest distaste and loathing so that they will not partake of any dish containing hare, whether boiled or roasted.”

This passage struck me as profoundly strange, yet somehow important. I felt it had the potential to open a window – even if only a small one – into Indigenous cultures and practices of knowledge that, at least in the Anglophone academy, remain largely unknown. What could it have been about hares that so offended the Namaqua? What did this practice tell us about their broader cosmologies, or their understandings of the relationship between different beings?

For some time, these questions hovered in the back of my mind, but no obvious answers presented themselves. Gradually, amid the chaos and precarity of academic life, the hares slid out of view, and I began worrying about other projects, applications, and articles.

In November 2023, however, this all suddenly changed. Having embarked on a new research fellowship, I was in South Africa, where I hoped to gain a better understanding of the early interactions between European settlers and the Indigenous Khoekhoe and San. The University of Cape Town has a spectacular collection of oral historical sources, compiled by colonial anthropologists. While over 85,000 items of the university’s precious Africana collections were tragically destroyed in a fire that raged through the Jagger Library in April 2021, one of the oldest archives – the Bleek-Lloyd collection – survived and is currently being digitised. The archive consists of notebooks of interviews conducted by the Prussian linguist Wilhelm Bleek and the British teacher (and Wilhelm’s sister-in-law) Lucy Lloyd with San boys and men released from Cape Town’s Breakwater Prison.

Among the oral histories recorded in the archive is the story of the Moon and the Hare, told independently by ≠kasin and Dia!kwain to Lucy Lloyd in the early 1870s. While the story is well known among Africanists, I was encountering it for the first time. As ≠kasin recounted, one day the Moon sent the Hare down to humankind to bring them a message of immortality and inform them that, like the Moon herself, human life would exist in cycles of rebirth. The Hare, so the story goes, either purposefully or mistakenly gave humans the wrong message, inventing death in the process. The Moon was furious, as were the humans. As a punishment, the Moon heated up a stone and burned the Hare’s mouth, creating the animal’s distinctive split lip. Humans, instead, refused to consume the contemptible animal. Upon reading this story, hares swiftly hopped back into my consciousness, and I made the connection to Claudius’s travel journal of the 1685 trek.

I hesitated though. Could I really project a nineteenth-century source back two centuries to explain a seventeenth-century encounter? The social, cultural, and geopolitical contexts of the two archival sources were exceedingly different, and it would be exceedingly problematic to assume that Indigenous cultures of knowledge remained static across two centuries. Nonetheless, I believed that the sources spoke to each other. The story of the Moon and the Hare from the Bleek-Lloyd archive produced a “thicker” interpretation of Claudius’s early modern ethnography.

A decade and a half ago, Sujit Sivasundaram urged scholars interested in the burgeoning global history of the sciences to “cross-contextualize” sources in disparate archives, and thus read “across genres and cultures.” In particular, he explained the importance of taking anthropological scholarship seriously in the history of science – something that is, fortunately, becoming more widespread with the growth of the history of knowledge as a field. In my own research, bringing Claudius into dialogue with ≠kasin and Dia!kwain was the first time I engaged in cross-contextualization in earnest.

Since then, I have started exploring how the Bleek-Lloyd archive can enrich other early modern colonial accounts of the Cape Colony’s natural and human histories. The practice – encountered serendipitously through my research for my article in JHoK – has come to lie at the heart of my ongoing research on how Asian knowledges were re-articulated with reference to Indigenous astral and botanical sciences at the early modern Cape.

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