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"I asked …[Qing]
what the pictures of men with rhebok’s heads meant.
He said "They were men who had died and now lived
in rivers, and were spoilt at the same time as the elands,
and by the dances of which you have seen paintings."
I asked him when were the elands spoilt and how. He
began to explain..." |
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Joseph Orpen (1874)
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| Southern
African Rock Art |
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| For thousands
of years, Khoisan-speaking San, popularly known
as Bushmen,
were the only inhabitants of southern Africa.
These people hunted and gathered wild plants.
There are 15,000
known San rock art sites in South Africa, perhaps
as many as 50,000
in southern Africa. The highest concentrations
of rock art are found at Tsodilo,
Botswana, Brandberg and Twyfelfontein - Wikipedia in Namibia,
Drakensburg Mountains of Lesotho and South Africa,
and the Matobo Hills (Matopos National Park) of
Zimbabwe. Direct dating
of these paintings is difficult. Rhino Cave, Tsodilo Hills, is the site of one of the earliest examples of symbolic art and ritual practice. A snake-shaped rock with hundreds of carved scale-like indentations dates between 40,000 and 77,000 years ago. Painted slabs or mobile art (see
first photo) excavated by Eric Wendt in the Apollo
11 Cave, Namibia are
associated with charcoal that was dated between
25,500
and 27,500
BP (Wendt
1976). The next oldest date is 10,500 BP in
the Cave of Bees, Matopos, Zimbabwe (Thackeray
1983). Painting persisted into the 19th century.
David Lewis-Williams, Patricia Vinnicombe, Thomas
Dowson, Sven Ouzman, and Anne Solomon have used
ethnographic
accounts recorded in the 1870's by Wilhelm
Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd and Joseph
Orpen together with modern research on the Kalahari
Bushmen and neuropsychological research on the
representation of figures and shapes perceived
during altered states of consciousness to infer
specific meanings for the Drakensburg rock paintings.
This art was not painted to decorate the walls
of a rock shelter or depict everyday life and
hunting scenes. Animals commonly eaten by the
Drakensburg Bushmen such as small antelope and
tortoise were rarely shown in their art. Lewis-Williams
concluded that this art had a powerful ritual
significance and is associated with the trance
dance and trance experiences of shamans.
Shamans would enter the spirit world by activating a supernatural
force in certain animals that would allow them
to enter the ethereal world. The shamans later
painted these trance experiences to portray contact
with the spirit world and produce rain, control
game animals, and heal people. Bushmen have no
word for trance so they used metaphors
in the art for the trance experience like nasal
bleeding, dancers bent-forward with arms thrown
backward, use of sticks in each hand to take the
weight of the shaman's body, and transformation
of the shaman wholly or partly into animals (therianthrope).
Look at the quotation at the top of this page.
Lewis-Williams interpreted Qing's statement about
"men who had died and now lived in rivers" to
be a trance metaphor for the trance experience
has been described like being underwater. Other
trance metaphors are depicted in the pictures
to the left. Images of the trance experience also
include hallucinations,
symbols of supernatural potency like the eland,
and rain-animals such as hippos, elephant, giraffe,
and eland. There are regional differences in the
animals that have a spiritual significance—eland
in the Drakensburg, elephant in southwestern South
Africa and Zimbabwe. Kudus particularly females
are the most common animals depicted in Zimbabwe
art, but they are believed not to have played
the same role as the eland in Drakensburg art
(Garlake
1995). More recently, Anne
Solomon argues that mythology influenced the
visions experienced during trance, so the paintings
should be viewed in terms of religious beliefs.
She interprets Qing's statement that "[men] were
spoilt at the same time as the elands" as a reference
to the second creation when the therianthropes,
the half man/half animals who were the spirits
of the ancestral Bushmen and lived under water,
were transformed into men and animals. In the
"The Hunter's Vision", Peter
Garlake points out that Zimbabwe rock art
was not focused on the supernatural exclusively,
but was also concerned with daily life. Likewise,
most Nambian rock paintings do not deal with trance
experiences, but with the social skills and rituals
needed to cope with life in an arid, harsh environment
(Lenssen-Erz
1997). |
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| San art is not
the only rock art in southern Africa. About 2,000
years ago, closely related Khoikhoi
or Khoekhoen
herders, popularly known as Hottentots, migrated
south into western parts of southern Africa. They
also spoke Khoisan 'click' languages, but unlike
the San, their art consisted primarily of finger-painted
geometric designs, large dots, and hand prints.
About the same time, Bantu-speaking farmers with
their cattle crossed the Zambezi and migrated
to the eastern parts of southern Africa. There
are about 500
Bantu art sites mostly in the north depicting
wild animals, probably part of initiation instruction,
and more recent contact art. For more information on southern African rock art, take a look at African
Rock Art, Archaeology
of Africa, Archaeology of Southern Africa, Art of Africa, Bradshaw
Foundation, Discovering Southern African Rock Art, Driekopseiland Engraving Site , Maarten
van Hoek, McGregor
Museum, Origins Centre, Paintings
of the Spirit, Rock Art at Rice, Rock
Art in Namibia, Rock
Art Research Institute, Southern
African Rock Art Sites, Trust
for African Rock Art, and World Wide Web of African Archaeology. |
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