Giraffe Reflections. Dale Peterson
necks are, ribbony even, yet very flexible and immensely strong.
In the Namibian desert, at a place called Twyfelfontein, we found giraffes in their most ancient and ethereal form: wispy, rising representations carved into rock by Bushman artists who lived a few or several thousand years ago.
Twyfelfontein. A recent name, Afrikaans in origin, it describes the wistful hope a white farmer formed for this spare spot in the sparse desert. The name translates into English as Doubtful Spring.
The Bushmen camped in a small plateau or terrace just above the doubtful spring, and their camp was a gathering place, a passing refuge in the hard life of hunting and gathering. They were protected by a high cliff and mountain behind them, while before them lay the flat and splendid valley consisting mainly of rust-red stone and sand, which is spotted, after the rains, by the green of small thorn trees and scrub. The valley is surrounded by flattened, red-rocked mountains. The red rocks are Etjo sandstone, consisting of alluvial conglomerates and eolian sandstone—stone, that is, formed from sand that has been sifted by the wind and is thus fine grained and capable of breaking into smooth, even blocks.1
The spring and the remnants of that camp are surrounded by a chaos of great broken sandstone boulders, arranged like a mythical giant’s fallen house of cards, with the smooth surfaces covered by art. As many as 2,500 separate etchings on some 200 sandstone tablets depict a swirling congregation of antelopes, elephants, leopards, lions, ostriches, rhinos, warthogs, zebras—and giraffes—as well as some humans, the occasional animal and human hand or foot print, and a number of purely abstract forms and designs. The representations are convincing and accurate and yet boldly stylized. There are rhinos, for example, with impossibly long upturned horns, tapered and fragile. There is a lion with a preternaturally long tail that curls back and then up and finally terminates in a leonine paw print. A giraffe stands on finely tapered footless legs that look like wisps of smoke rising from a fire. Another giraffe, elsewhere in the stone, stands proudly with a five-pointed head, five projections (two ears and two horns on top, a smaller horn pointing back) that strangely evoke the five digits of an outstretched human hand.
Rock etchings from Twyfelfontein camp done by Bushmen. Photo by Karl Ammann.
Before writing came art, and so it is art that draws us back to the beginning of memory. Africa is covered with such memory, which has been painted on or carved and chipped into rock. The art embraces the artists themselves and their people, and it embraces the animals people lived with, the animals they saw and dreamed about and hunted when hunger so required.
The art can be found far to the north, from the western edges of the Nile River all the way west across the Sahara, from there down to the eastern middle of Africa, and down again to the south. The northern art reminds us that the Sahara Desert was once, before a shift in climate that happened four to six thousand years ago, wetter and richer and far more hospitable to large mammals and large-mammal hunters than it is today. Giraffes are depicted there, often, in the context of hunting and trapping. But the southern carvings and paintings, all done by Bushman artists and revealed in thousands of different sites across Africa’s great southern foot, evoke, I think, a more ancient life that took place under the sun and stars within a coherent and whispering cosmos.2
The Bushmen were despised by the first white settlers in Africa, who saw them as wild men with clouded minds and filthy ways, a people inherently incapable of grasping the higher logic of Christian and colonial authority, with (in the words of one early missionary) “a soul debased, it is true, and completely bound down and clogged by his animal nature.”3 They were “savages,” to repeat the calumny used by Sir John Barrow in his memoir of explorations in southern Africa done more than two hundred years ago. Barrow, though, was expressing a common prejudice, and he probably did so ironically, while describing his early discovery of the glorious art surrounding a Bushman camp, art so forceful and spirited, so accurate and yet expressive, that, he wrote with a critic’s understated certitude, “worse drawings . . . have passed through the [European] engraver’s hands.”4
Barrow recognized the skill and intelligence involved in such art, and he responded to it in aesthetic terms. This art is not the fading remnant of a feeble attempt at decoration or of casual vandalism, the graffiti of bored teenagers. It is the studied production of an active mind. Barrow saw beauty, and he recognized training and skill. That is an appropriate response, yet it is inappropriate to imagine that the Bushman artists intended these works to be, in the European way, aesthetic productions that might be bought or sold or traded, thereby distinguishing the artist as an individual. Nor is there any clear suggestion in this art of the simplistic tit-for-tat of sympathetic magic: the effort to capture or freeze game animals symbolically with the fervent belief that an artist’s triumph can become the hunter’s.
The fires were scarcely extinguished, and the grass on which they slept was not yet withered. On the smooth sides of the cavern were drawings of several animals that had been made from time to time by these savages. Many of them were caricatures; but others were too well executed not to arrest attention. The different antelopes that were there delineated had each their character so well discriminated, that the originals, from whence the representations had been taken, could, without any difficulty, be ascertained. Among the numerous animals that were drawn, was the figure of a zebra remarkably well done; all the marks and characters of this animal were accurately represented, and the proportions were seemingly correct. The force and spirit of drawings, given to them by bold touches judiciously applied, and by the effect of light and shadow, could not be expected from savages; but for accuracy of outline and correctness of the different parts, worse drawings than that of the zebra have passed through the engraver’s hands. –SIR JOHN BARROW, 1806
Yes, individual artists must have been particularly skilled, and surely this art would have generated aesthetic pleasure as well as a sense of wonder or magic. But its primary purpose may have been collective rather than individual, and it must have worked in the same way that stained-glass windows did for illiterate medieval Christians: as a cultural expression, a shimmering communal statement in which the ways and logic of a people within their cosmos were confidently remembered, rehearsed, and realized.5
Our guide at Twyfelfontein, a slender and composed young Damara woman who introduced herself as Thekla Tsaraes, explained that the carved rock art was done by Bushman shamans who had gone into a trance. During the trance, she said, they used their art, those ethereal representations of animals, as a route of entry into the spirit world. The giraffes, for instance, were usually shown without their hooves, with their legs drawn away into long, thin lines expressing the shaman’s experience of rising in the air when he enters a trance. Sometimes a giraffe etching would be twisted, in the way a shaman feels his own body changing, transforming as he enters the spirit world.
When she spoke of the Bushmen, Tsaraes said “Boesman,” and her English was sometimes hard to follow. “So the Boesman people,” she said, “have used their footprints to enter the solid rock without being seen.” When I pressed her about the giraffe images, she declared, “Sometimes even the giraffe is regarded as a holy animal. They believe it’s close to the clouds and is bringing down the rain.” And when I asked her how we could know such things about people who lived so long ago, she responded that anthropologists had studied their culture.
It is true. We know a good deal about the cultures of surviving Bushman groups from the work of twentieth-century anthropologists. None of those survivors made the art, however, and the primary source of knowledge about the art-making Bushmen comes from the nineteenth-century labors of Wilhelm Bleek, a German linguist living in South Africa. Bleek was interested in studying the several languages of Africa’s First People, and when, in 1870, he learned that some /Xam Bushmen were imprisoned in Cape Town for various petty crimes, he convinced the colonial governor to release a number of them to his care. One of them, a man named //Kabbo who was, in Bleek’s assessment, “a gentle old soul, lost in a dream-life of his own,” proved to be his most prolific informant, although the other /Xam also contributed.6 They lived in Bleek’s house, taught him their language, and in the process described their lives and vanishing culture.
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