Michael Wessels: World leader on San oral literature 1958-2018
Meditating in caves led lover of nature on an unorthodox path to academia
● Michael Wessels, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 60, was the head of the department of English literature at the University of the Western Cape and one of the world’s leading experts on San oral literature.
His interest in this was inseparable from a deep love, knowledge and understanding of nature, and was as profoundly spiritual as it was rigorously academic. He was a great hiker in mountains around the world, particularly the Drakensberg, which he knew intimately.
Before becoming a full-time academic, something he did relatively late in life, he spent a great deal of time meditating in the Drakensberg caves. It was during one such pilgrimage that he encountered San rock art, which inspired him to understand their work further.
Treasure trove
He found a treasure trove of material in the Bleek and Lloyd archive housed at the University of Cape Town and comprising about 12 000 handwritten notebook pages of San narrative, history, autobiography and cultural information.
The archive was assembled in the 1870s by the German linguist Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-inlaw Lucy Lloyd. Their informants were all /Xam men from the present-day Northern Cape who had been held in the Breakwater prison in Cape Town before being released into their custody.
The collection became available to researchers in the 1970s, but in spite of its unique status as probably the largest body of oral literature in the world in a language that is no longer extant, Wessels found that very little of the narrative material had been subjected to close textual analysis.
This is what he proceeded to do, and became an acknowledged leader in the field.
Wessels was born in Durban in 1958 and matriculated at St Stithians College in Johannesburg. His path to academia was unorthodox.
After his national service in the army he travelled in Turkey, Iran — where he was caught up in the Iranian revolution — and Afghanistan, which he had to leave hurriedly when the Russians invaded.
In the early ’80s he taught English in Umlazi where he lived illegally because under apartheid white people were not allowed to live in the townships.
In 1987 he completed a BA honours degree at the University of Natal and started an alternative community outside Pietermaritzburg.
After doing a master’s degree in Marxist and feminist analysis of textbooks he went to Namibia in 1989 to celebrate its independence, and taught there for a year while undertaking solitary meditations in its remote hinterland.
Bushveld exploration
In 1990 he taught at a progressive teacher training college in Giyani, Limpopo, and explored the bushveld.
In 1991 he lived in Paris and on a farm in Tuscany. He then spent three years travelling in India, Pakistan and Nepal, and taking long walks in the Hindu Kush and across Ladakh, and exploring Buddhism and Hinduism.
On his return to South Africa he built a house overlooking the Byrne Valley in Richmond in the mistbelt of KwaZulu-Natal where he lived with friends, cultivating indigenous plants and growing and selling his own vegetables.
In 2003 he began a PhD on Bushman oral literature which grew into his book Bushman Letters, published in 2010.
The following year he began lecturing at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and in 2015 he became a professor of English at UWC.
In his relatively brief academic career he published more than 30 accredited articles and chapters in books and scholarly journals.
His mission was to give validity to and incorporate aspects of South African literary and artistic culture that he felt had been ignored or at best considered of ethnographic rather than literary interest.
Through his close textual treatment of San oral literature he explored the meaning of belonging, and the politics of indigeneity.
He formed a close relationship with the Centre for Humanities Research at UWC, and led a team of colleagues in a collaboration with the Jackman Humanities Institute at Toronto University in Canada to delve into questions around literature and indigeneity which have become the subject of growing academic interest in both countries.
His work on San narratives and attempts to think through the cosmological, religious and literary connections made a valuable contribution to humanities research.
In addition to travel writing and ecocriticism, which flowed directly from his interest in San literature, he was also passionately interested in creative writing.
He wrote an unpublished novel about his experiences before becoming a full-time academic, and had begun publishing his poetry in local
His interest was as profoundly spiritual as it was rigorously academic
literary journals.
He died of a suspected heart attack while swimming in the pool at UWC.
He is survived by his life partner Linzi Rabinowitz and two sons, Tao, 11 and Akira, 13. Chris Barron