San Rock Art. J.D. Lewis-Williams
Lest there be any doubt, he went on to say that the publication of further high-quality copies of paintings would ‘effect a radical change in the ideas generally entertained with regard to the Bushmen and their mental condition’. In this forthright way he challenged the views of his contemporaries on at least three important issues.
First, long before the phrase became fashionable with archaeologists, Bleek urged the necessity of an ‘insider’s view’ of San rock art. At that time (and even today) people simply looked at the art and ‘read’ it in terms of their own Western beliefs and conventions. By contrast, Bleek compared the information that Orpen had secured from a young San man with the much larger record of San beliefs that he and his sister-in-law and co-researcher Lucy Lloyd (1834–1914) were compiling. He concluded that certain religious beliefs were not only widespread but were also expressed in the paintings. He realised that an ‘insider’s view’ was the only key to the art. He wrote: ‘A collection of faithful copies of Bushman paintings is, therefore, only second in importance to a collection of their folklore in their own language. Both collections will serve to illustrate each other, and contribute jointly towards showing us in its true light the curious mental development of a most remarkable race.’7Although we may see here some phraseology that is typical of Victorian thinking, Bleek is clearly saying that the ethnography and the rock art are two sides of a single coin.
Secondly, Bleek fully realised that the rich mythology that he and Orpen were compiling contradicted the contemporary colonial view of the San and their art. The words that Bleek chose seem to suggest that he was directly answering Arbousset and Daumas, who, as we saw in the previous chapter, declared that San paintings were ‘innocent playthings’. Bleek strongly rejected the notion that the art was, as he put it, ‘the mere daubing of figures for idle pastime’. On the contrary, he knew that some colonial writers had denied that the San had any form of religion, and his use of the phrase ‘religious feelings’ must have been startling at the time.
Thirdly, and most importantly, Bleek realised that this new conception of the art challenged his contemporaries’ low estimations of the status of the San as human beings. The publication of further copies of San rock paintings would, he wrote, ‘effect a radical change in the ideas generally entertained with regard to the Bushmen’.8He fully recognised that rock art research was, in today’s parlance, a concept-forming practice that went beyond the images themselves to ideas about the people who made them.
Wilhelm Bleek was thus well ahead of his time. Why did he risk confronting his contemporaries? To answer that question we need to look at the intellectual and social tradition from which he came. His father, Professor Friedrich Bleek, was a liberal theologian who was prepared to question the Bible. It was through another liberal theologian and friend of the Bleek family, Bishop John William Colenso, that Wilhelm was invited to the British Colony of Natal to compile a Zulu grammar. Colenso had just been appointed Bishop of Natal. Some years later, Colenso was arraigned on a number of charges of heresy. Some of these were posited on his belief that God was in all people, even the unconverted ‘heathen’ whom he was supposed to convert. In the event, he refused to go to Cape Town to face his accusers because he did not recognise the authority of the Bishop of Cape Town. His friend Wilhelm Bleek, not himself a believer, consented to conduct his defence in the ecclesiastical court – unsuccessfully, as it turned out, and Colenso was excommunicated.
At the time when Bleek was conducting his San researches, there was thus a major struggle being waged between colonial views, aided and abetted by the British government, and a more liberal tradition. Within the Anglican Church this power struggle led to the rift between Colenso and the Bishop of Cape Town, and eventually to a schism in the Anglican Church which endures to this day, though on different theological grounds.
The publication of Bleek’s and Orpen’s confrontational work in 1874 seemed to set the stage for socially sensitive rock art research. Unfortunately, it was not to be. Orpen was increasingly drawn into colonial administration and what was known as ‘native affairs’. Even more unfortunately, Bleek died in August 1875, and his hopes for ‘a radical change in the ideas generally entertained with regard to the Bushmen’ were not fulfilled. Bleek knew what changes could have resulted from the rich insights that he and Orpen had begun to uncover. If he had lived longer, would he have been surprised at the failure that lay ahead? Probably not. His friend Colenso’s excommunication must have shown him just how entrenched conservative colonial opinions and attitudes were. They were too deeply ingrained to admit change.
Bleek’s and Orpen’s work produced invaluable records of San beliefs, myths and rituals, but those records lay dormant until their significance was realised only a century later. The first node of conflict thus did not immediately affect the course of rock art research. During the decades that followed it, researchers showed little interest in seeking an ‘insider’s view’ of San rock art.
Decades of consensus (1875–1967)
For many decades after the death of Wilhelm Bleek, writers reverted to explanations that denied the San symbolic or religious thought. When Bleek died, his work was continued by Lucy Lloyd, who had already contributed so much to what is now known as the Bleek and Lloyd Collection. After her death in 1914, the family mantle fell on the shoulders of Wilhelm’s daughter Dorothea Bleek (1873–1948). Strangely, and despite the immense amount of valuable work that she did, she became partly responsible for a reversion to the old ways of seeing the San. In 1923 she wrote: ‘The Bushman … remains all his life a child, averse to work, fond of play, of painting, singing, dancing, dressing up and acting, above all things fond of hearing and telling stories.’9Dorothea Bleek’s highly respected reputation as ‘the world’s greatest expert on the Bushmen’10 gave the stereotype of the San as being no more than children the status of orthodoxy. We can only guess what Bleek’s reaction would have been to his daughter’s shallow characterisation of the San.
In 1928 the Cambridge archaeologist Miles Burkitt visited South Africa and wrote an influential book in which he said that rock paintings should be studied by the same methods as were then used to study stone tools: stratigraphy and typology. Accordingly, researchers set about producing stylistic sequences based on analyses of the superimposition of images one upon another, a feature of San rock art. But as time went by, researchers seldom, if ever, found the suggested stylistic sequences very convincing or, for that matter, illuminating. All too often, a sequence established in one shelter was contradicted by the paintings in another shelter.
More significantly, and in direct contrast to the future of San rock art research that Bleek and Orpen had envisaged, Burkitt wrote: ‘As regards the motives which prompted the execution of the paintings and engravings, little can be said.’ As a result, the meaning, or meanings, of the art were for many years considered unknowable. For Burkitt, the Western concern with technology (stone tools) was more important. This emphasis maximised both the technological and, by extension, the ‘mental’ distance between Africa’s past and its industrial colonial present. ‘They’ were primitive; ‘we’ are sophisticated.
This ‘distance’ between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is evident in the work of one of the most influential figures of this period, Alex Willcox. Echoing Dorothea Bleek, he wrote: ‘Palaeolithic man and his modern representative the Bushman remained, in their capacity for abstract thinking, always young children’.11Unlike some of his contemporaries, Willcox resolutely rejected fanciful explanations and remained a sober researcher who tried always to be ‘scientific’. But when he went beyond the objective, ‘scientific’ study of the art, colonial prejudices began to surface.
Nevertheless, the perspective that saw the San as ‘children’ seemed to clash with the sophistication of at least some of the images. Could people who were mentally no more than children produce such beautiful images of eland and other animals? In the 1870s Wilhelm Bleek expressed the hope that photographs would correct the public’s misapprehension: ‘Where photography is available, its help would be very desirable, as the general public is skeptical, and not infrequently believes that the drawings are too good not to have been vastly improved in copying, thereby doing scant justice to Bushman art.’12
As a result of the colonial attitude, some researchers did not take the route that Bleek advocated. Instead, they postulated the arrival of people of Mediterranean