San Rock Art. J.D. Lewis-Williams

      If we can call these pieces of engraved ochre ‘art’, then they are the oldest art known anywhere in the world. But the engraved patterns of crosses are not ‘pictures’ of recognisable things. Some researchers argue convincingly that the engraved crosses are symbols that stand for concepts we cannot now uncover. The engraved ochre, together with shell beads (some of which were stained with red ochre) found in the same deposit, suggests that Blombos is one of the earliest known sites where fully modern human beings lived. If we accept the Blombos ochre as art, we can safely say that the evidence so far available suggests that southern African rock art is the longest artistic tradition known anywhere in the world. Further, if these Blombos people can be seen as the forebears of the people we today know as San, they may well be said, in President Mbeki’s words, to be ‘the very first inhabitants of our land’.

      For the earliest known representational art, we must go to the Apollo 11 Cave in southern Namibia where painted pieces of stone have been found to have images of animals and a creature that appears to be a feline with human legs. The Apollo 11 pieces were dated to about 27,000 years before the present by means of radio-carbon found in the layer in which they were buried. Though reliable, they are therefore not direct dates. Interestingly, the Apollo 11 paintings are as much as 10,000 years older than the wall paintings in the famous Upper Palaeolithic cave Lascaux in France.

      The study of this immensely long and complex tradition has passed through a number of phases. Far from being a purely detached, ‘scientific’ endeavour, the study of southern African rock art has, in some ways, paralleled the development of race relations in southern Africa. As the next chapter shows, what people say about San rock art is often (some would say inevitably) governed by the times in which they live.

      2

Conflicting perspectives and traditions

      The initiation, efflorescence and demise of research perspectives are always situated in specific social circumstances. A history of such perspectives should therefore try to identify the social, political and personal forces that created conditions for their acceptance and, in many instances, eventual rejection. There is a catch here for the historian. The characterisation of research contexts and the circumstances and values to which individual historians of research point will inevitably be in many ways framed by their own, often unarticulated, values and aims. We tend to judge the past by the present. All I can hope for is that the critical periods in the history of southern African rock art research that I identify in this chapter are, whatever gloss I may place on them, empirically discernible in the literature. People wrote about San rock art in different ways at different times: there tended to be periods of consensus separated by times of disagreement and sometimes quite bitter conflict.

      To provide an understanding of this often turbulent history, I identify three periods of consensus separated by what I term ‘nodes of conflict’. As I use the phrase, a node of conflict is created when trajectories of research, personal interests and socio-political trends come into conjunction in such a way that research, successfully or unsuccessfully, contests deeply held, unquestioned political or religious convictions of the public at large, not just the research community. Unlike some more abstruse scientific research, the nature of San rock art has always been part of the general public’s conception of South Africa’s past. The very phrase ‘Bushman paintings’ is known to virtually everyone in South Africa. Unfortunately, the prejudice evoked in many people by the word ‘Bushman’, even though they would not consider themselves racist, tends to obscure the depth and subtlety of the art.

      The debates that characterised the nodes of conflict were conducted on at least two levels: personal and conceptual. In this pocket guide, I avoid comment on personal conflicts. Suffice it to say that, over the decades, rock art research has provided a public platform for numerous, sometimes forceful, personalities who have been reluctant to admit rivals. On the more interesting conceptual level, rock art research has been implicated in a classic struggle to define and control a key, one could say ‘archetypal’, component of southern Africa’s past – the San. More than just the painted images was at stake.

      Colonial consensus (to 1874)

      During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries San hunter-gatherers were considered an impediment to colonial expansion. Because they did not till fields or tend herds of cattle or flocks of sheep, they were thought to have no land rights. They came to symbolise the irreducible, irredeemable essence of all southern Africa’s indigenous people: they were seen as simple, untameable, childlike, idle and, crucially, incapable of adapting to more ‘advanced’ Western ways. As we saw in Chapter 1, San rock art was at that time regarded as primitive, incomprehensible, a sacrilegious affront to Christianity and, in some instances, indecent. All in all, the result was genocide, and military commandos were sometimes raised to exterminate them. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the Swedish naturalist Anders Sparrman wrote: ‘Does a colonist at any time get view of a Boshiesman, he takes fire immediately, and spirits up his horse and dogs in order to hunt him with more keenness and fury than he would a wolf or any other wild beast.’5

      Those who escaped the colonists’ bullets were absorbed into other ethnic groups and, in the second half of the twentieth century, were eventually classified under the apartheid system (along with others) as ‘coloured’. Although some Kalahari Desert groups in Namibia and Botswana have maintained a measure of independence to the north, no traditionally functioning southern San communities remained by the end of the nineteenth century.

      The first node of conflict (1874)

      In 1874 the first node of conflict was jointly generated by Joseph Millerd Orpen (1828–1923) and Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek (1827–1875) (Fig. 6). Orpen, a colonial administrator, and Bleek, a German philologist who was studying the Khoisan languages, both took time to listen to San people talking about rock paintings or, in Bleek’s case, copies of rock paintings that had been made by Orpen and George William Stow. Stow was a geologist who worked in what are now the eastern Free State and the Eastern Cape. After reading Orpen’s article on San mythology and contemplating the copies of paintings that Orpen had made in the Maloti Mountains of southern Lesotho, Bleek challenged the current negative assessment in a short piece that the editor of the Cape Monthly Magazine asked him to write. It was published at the end of Orpen’s article. In it, Bleek used Orpen’s word ‘mythology’ to cover general beliefs and, as we shall see, rituals. ‘The fact of Bushman paintings, illustrating Bushman mythology, has first been publicly demonstrated by this paper of Mr. Orpen’s; and to me, at all events, it was previously quite unknown, although I had hoped that such paintings might be found. This fact can hardly be valued sufficiently. It gives at once to Bushman art a higher character, and teaches us to look upon its products not as the mere daubing of figures for idle pastime, but as an attempt, however imperfect, at a truly artistic conception of the ideas which most deeply moved the Bushman mind, and filled it with religious feelings.’6