Notebooks

Story: About the Mantis

Title

About the Mantis

Collection

Summary

|kaggen (the Mantis) and his wife (the Dassie) and what people call her. [Most of this story has not been translated.] The originality of all the preceding myths [about |kaggen], and the impossibility of their owing their origin to anything that the Bushmen may have heard from Dutch neighbours, will be clear from the outlines of the stories given above. At the same time, the mythological character given to the Mantis in them, renders it natural that those among the Dutch who may have had any of these stories related to them by Bushmen understanding Dutch (or may have listened to them in Bushman, for, there have been and still are some farmers’ children who can speak Bushman), should have translated the name of the Mantis (/kággen) with that of the 'Devil'. The above translation may also have tended to introduce some traits of the Christian idea of the Devil into the conception of /kággen among those Bushmen who have intercourse with the Dutch. This renders it uncertain whether the idea, expressed by //kábbo, that the Mantis misleads Bushmen by putting evil and mischievous thoughts into their minds (really into the sides of their throats, where, according to Bushmen notions, the thinking powers of man are to be found), may not be of modern and foreign origin (L II.-4. 500-503). Vide Cape Monthly Magazine for July 1874, p.11.

Comments

1) p.501v: ||kabbo tells of how |kaggen (the Mantis) forces a hungry person to steal animals by going into his thoughts (which he keeps in his throat) while he sleeps and making their thoughts 'one' so the person cannot refuse, 2) This story is found in Book II-4