CERTAIN RITES OF TRANSITION AND THE CONCEPTION OF !NAU
AMONG THE HOTTENTOTS1
A. W. Hoernle
The following notes have been put together from the materials which I collected
during the years 1912 and 1913 on two expeditions made among three different tribes of
Hottentots. In 1912 I visited the remnants of certain tribes of the Little Namaqua,
among whom some fugitives from the tribe of !Gamf-#nun or Bondelzwaarts of German
South West Africa were living. It was a very scattered community on the southern bank
of the Orange River, about fifty miles inland from its mouth, and in British territory.
The following year I spent among the # Aunin or Topnaars of Walfish Bay and among
the /Hei /Khauan, who live now in the territory round Berseba in German South West
Africa. This latter tribe crossed the Orange River in the beginning of the 19th century,
after its members had absorbed a great deal from the Dutch among whom they had lived,
and with whom there had been a considerable amount of intermixture. As a result of
the mixed blood and the adoption of many Dutch ways, the pure Hottentot customs and
beliefs had been considerably modified among them. They are an offshoot from the
Cauquas, who in the time of Simon Van der Stel (17th century) lived in the present
Worcester district of the Cape Colony in the valleys of the Breede River,2 and belong there-
fore to the so-called Colonial Hottentots, not to any branch of the Namaqua people with
whom the other tribes I visited must be classed. It is, therefore, extremely interesting
to find that all four of the transition rites (rites de passage) which I am about to describe
in this paper are practised by them with but slight variations. Whether they brought
these customs with them, or whether they adopted them from the tribes with which they
came in contact when they crossed the Orange River in their progress northwards, it is
impossible to say. The ^Aunin, though but a miserable remnant of what was never,
1 In this paper I have used, as far as possible, the notation employed by J. G. Krbnlein, Wortschatz der Khoi-
Khoin, Berlin, 1889. /, indicates the dental click; the palatal; ! the cerebral; //the lateral, x indicates a gut-
tural ch; the mark ” over a vowel indicates that it is long; ~ indicates that it is nasalised. A short vowel has no
special sign; ' represents the low tone of the vowel; ' the middle tone; ’ the high one. The sign o under a vowel
indicates that it is very short; while " indicates that the vowel is to be separately pronounced.

Cf. T. Hahn, Tsuni-//Goam, London, 1881, p. 19.