South African Folk Tales
BLEEK, D.F. (editor). The Mantis and His Friends. Bushman Folklore. Cape Town & London. T. Maskew Miller and Basil Blackwood. 1924.

Slim 4to.; publisher’s pinkish brown pictorial boards panelled in blind and blocked in black; pp. [xii] + 68; with a few illustrations in monochrome after Bushman drawings; externally fine and sharp, internally equally clean and crisp with only one or two small spots and the usual offset toning to endpapers; scarce in this condition.

First edition.  A collection of oral /Xam Bushman tales collected by the editor’s father and aunt in the 1870s. The narrators hailed from the rolling plains south of the Orange River in the Prieska, Kenhardt and northern Calvinia districts of Southern Africa. The book has a short glossary of Bushmen names at the rear. Their language is now extinct, as are the Bushmen people. They lived in central South Africa for thousands of years. The arrival of European settlers heralded a genocide against the indigenous people lasting several hundred years.