Summary The Bleek and Lloyd collection of /Xam materials has elicited a variety of responses from scholars in different disciplines. These include interpretation of the texts, history and biography. Most of this writing has hot been subjected to close criticism. I will argue in this paper that Jacques Derrida's critique of the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Claude Levi-Strauss in Of Grammatology (1976) is applicable to some of the writing that has been produced in relation to the Bleek and Lloyd archive, Derrida's work also illuminates Bleek's ideological framework and the attitudes displayed towards the Bushmen during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
