Hans-Joachim Heinz Botswana Collection

The Hans-Joachim Heinz Botswana Collection is a compilation of music archives by the late Hans-Joachim Heinz, an anthropologist, who from 1961 worked amongst the !Ko Bushmen (San) of the Kalahari. Having married into the local community, Heinz lived among the !Ko for 40 years.

With a total number of 13 items, the collection include recordings of vocal solos and duets, healing songs, musical games, and a range of instruments including musical bows and other stringed instruments and lamellaphones. Most of the recordings were made as the community went about its daily life; they therefore include casual conversation, laughter and other sounds of the society.

The extraordinary collection consists of mounted 35mm photographic slides, original 16mm film, audio tapes, photographs, published academic articles, journals and reviews, maps and illustrations, bibliographic collection, copies of reports articles and reprints, personal documents and artefacts.

A significant part of the Heinz Collection are the 35mm slides of which there are more than one thousand. The slides have been digitally scanned. They date from between 1960s and 1980s. The slides show a wide variety of then, normal, daily activities: hand craft, leather tanning and working skills, construction of houses, roof thatching, hand gestures used in dance and hunting to depict species of animal. Others depict the construction of the ‘Bushman Development Scheme’ building, with cement and wood working. Other sequences of slides show rites of passage to adult maturity including preparations for hunting trips.

There are also 70 catalogued short films these record diverse cultural activities of the !Xo San peoples. Audio tape recordings are also catalogued and comprise stories, songs and sounds of nature. The copyright to this entire collection was transferred to the University of Botswana at the time of purchase.

During the 1960s Hans Joachim Heinz made sound recordings of the! Xo people’s traditional music, dances and healing rituals. Thirteen of these recordings have been archived at the British Library Sound Archive.