San Rock Art - J.D. Lewis-Williams Ohio Short Histories of Africa

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of the Khoisan languages.) In fact, as it stands in the |Xam language without any particles, the motto can be read as indicative or imperative, that is, as a statement about what is happening in South Africa today, or as an injunction to people to come together.

      The President explained the choice of the |Xam language: ‘We have chosen an ancient language of our people. This language is now extinct as no one lives who speaks it as his or her mother-tongue. This emphasizes the tragedy of the millions of human beings who, through the ages, have perished and even ceased to exist as peoples, because of people’s inhumanity to others.’2

      With the coat of arms and motto in the forefront of South Africa’s new, multi-ethnic identity, the San and their rock art have indeed ‘arrived’ – but only after a long and tragic history. The need for ‘people who are different [to] come together’ is still painfully acute.

      Prejudice

      When the early European settlers began to make their way into the interior of southern Africa, they encountered San hunter-gatherers and cattle-herding Khoekhoe, or ‘Bushmen’ and ‘Hottentots’, as they respectively named them. Today descendants of these peoples understandably find the old terms offensive. Soon, the explorers and settlers discovered that the San made rock art. With a few notable exceptions, they were unimpressed by the images that they came across on rock shelter walls. One writer described ‘caves full of coloured drawings by the Bushmen’ and denounced them as ‘hideous’, adding that ‘each one is more ugly than its neighbour’. Two French missionaries, Thomas Arbousset and François Daumas, were somewhat more sympathetic and wished to counteract the colonial notion that the San worshipped the Devil, but they nevertheless described the images as nothing more than ‘innocent playthings’.3

      Prejudice, especially that based on race, dies hard. In the 1920s S.P. Impey, a medical doctor who was much interested in the ways in which different ‘races’ supposedly populated the world, stated: ‘I have known Bushmen all my life, and have been acquainted with paintings in our caves for over half a century, and knowing the Bushmen, I have always been unable to believe that people of such a low degraded type of humanity could have painted the pictures attributed to them.’4That a prominent South African publisher would, in the 1920s, place Impey’s misinformed racist views before the public is indicative of just how enduring prejudices can be. Today such distasteful views are entirely discredited: far from being a ‘low degraded type of humanity’, the San were, and still are, no different from any other human beings. Yet one has to admit that there are still some, though fewer, people who tend to side with the early writers.

      Contrary to the now fortunately minority view that the San were unable to make such delicate and complex paintings, this pocket guide shows that it is San beliefs and practices, and those alone, that ‘fit’ southern African rock art and unlock the meanings of images, such as those on the Linton panel. Despite the popular notion that, because all the painters are long since dead, we shall never know what the images mean, enough of the San’s thought-world has been preserved to make understanding possible. We may not be able to explain everything that we see painted in the rock shelters, but we are able to explain a great deal.

      An embarrassment of riches

      There are two fundamental types of San rock art: paintings and engravings. San rock paintings (sometimes known as pictographs) are concentrated in the many rock shelters of the mountainous rim of the central plateau of the subcontinent, though there are also paintings, generally rather cruder and far fewer, scattered across the interior. By contrast, rock engravings (also known as petroglyphs) are found in the interior on open rocks, sometimes along river beds and often on low hills or rises. The engravings were made by incising, pecking or scraping techniques that caused the generally lighter interior of the rock to show through the darker surface patina (Fig. 4). As the centuries passed, the patina often re-formed, and it is now difficult to see many of the engravings. Engravings were made by both San and Khoekhoe people. San engravings are generally finer than the pecked, and for the most part geometric, engravings that are today attributed to the Khoekhoe, but there is still some debate about which group made many of the engravings. In any event, the San and the Khoekhoe were not entirely separate, despite their different modes of making a living.

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      In addition to San rock paintings, quite different paintings were made by Bantu-speaking agricultural people in the northern and eastern parts of southern Africa. These are easily distinguishable from San paintings: they were generally made with thick white paint that was applied with a finger, whereas the San, using brushes made from small reeds and animal hairs or feathers, achieved much finer lines. The Late Whites, as they are known, were generally made as part of initiation rituals. They tend to be more repetitive than San rock art images. By their very nature, initiation rituals encourage conformity rather than personal insights and variations. There are also some rock engravings that are today believed to have been made by these agriculturalists: they portray stone-wall settlements and kraals.

      This book focuses on images made by the San. Their paintings and engravings are scattered over the entire area of southern Africa and are far more numerous and more widely known than either Khoekhoe images or the Late White paintings. Indeed, San rock art presents researchers with an embarrassment of riches. It is estimated that some 15,000 San rock art sites are known, and possibly as many await discovery. By no means have all the known sites been studied. As more and more sites are studied in detail and, simultaneously, we are able to see more deeply into the complex beliefs and experiences with which San image-makers were concerned, the interpretations of San images that are given in this book will no doubt be expanded.

      How old is San rock art?

      Although new scientific techniques are today being developed, it is still hard to date individual rock art images. But we can give approximate dates for the overall San tradition. We know that the last images were made in the south-eastern mountains of Lesotho, KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape towards the end of the nineteenth century or perhaps even in the first few years of the twentieth century. It was the makers of these images that the early colonists encountered. Some of these ‘contact period’ images depict horses and rifles, which were introduced into the region by white settlers in the nineteenth century. In the Western Cape and elsewhere, there are paintings of oxwagons and people in clearly Western clothing. Some of the nineteenth-century rock art of the Eastern Cape and southern KwaZulu-Natal was made by members of culturally mixed groups that formed as the traditional ways of life broke down. How those images should be interpreted is an issue that researchers are presently studying.

      The other end of the time-scale is more difficult to pinpoint. Rock art images can be dated by two approaches: either by direct dating of the images themselves or by dating associated remains. Direct dating of rock paintings has until recently depended on the presence of radio-carbon in the paint, generally derived from charcoal, which was sometimes used to make black paint. Because radio-carbon breaks down at a fixed rate, researchers can calculate the age of the carbon and thus when the image was made. Recently, sophisticated use of this technique has shown that some of the famous polychrome eland images in the KwaZulu-Natal Drakensberg may be nearly 3,000 years old – much older than hitherto suspected. The radio-carbon technique can, however, be employed only when the painters used charcoal as an ingredient of their paint. Images made entirely with, for instance, red ochre cannot be directly dated. The San mixed charcoal, ochre and other pigments, such as white kaolin, with water, plant juices and, as we shall later see, even animal blood to make paint that they could apply with a brush. Unfortunately, the medium lasted far less well than any of the pigments. More sophisticated dating techniques at present being developed will soon be available to researchers. These techniques extend further back in time than the radio-carbon determinations, which have until recently been the only ones available.

      Indirect dating by association is possible in rare cases only. It is seldom that excavators of rock shelters find a painted stone or a fragment of painted rock that has fallen from the wall of a shelter and been buried in a stratum of the deposit. Nevertheless, a stratum containing a fragment of painted rock can occasionally be dated by carbon from a buried hearth or other source. Some of the most sensational successes of indirect dating

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