Rock Art

Southern Africa has one of the longest and richest rock-art traditions in the world.

The rock engravings normally occur in the plateau regions of southern Africa. We think they were made by pecking, scratching and/or abrading selected rock surfaces with stone tools. The majority of the engravings are formed by the complete removal of the outer skin of the rock surface within the outline. Relatively few engravings were made by cutting extremely fine outlines only. Surfaces used by the artists range from outcrops and boulders of hard dolerite and diabase to large slabs of relatively soft sandstone.

The paintings, on the other hand, are normally found where shelters or overhangs are formed by eroding rock formations or large boulders. They were probably produced in many ways, such as with fingers, animal hair brushes, sticks and feathers. The painters used pigments ground from lumps of iron oxides for the reds and yellows, manganese oxide or burnt bone for black and fine clay for white. Binders, which have not been positively identified but which would most likely have been egg albumen, plant sap, blood or urine, were mixed with the colouring matter to make it adhere to the rock. The artists often painted over earlier images or made additions to existing ones. They also incorporated natural features such as cracks on the rock surface.

In the Drakensberg and Natal Midlands there are many Bushman paintings, however, the sandstone canvass on which they are painted is exposed to the elements and sadly, this means that this beautiful ancient art wil only be here for a little over 100 years unless something drastic happens to the climate!

Taken from The Sunday Times Travel Article:

The first reluctant dialogue between San and colonial settler ultimately helped the world appreciate the rock art of Southern Africa. GEOFF BLUNDELL tells their story

By the time Europeans moved into Natal in the 19th century, many thousands of San lives lay shattered in the Cape Colony. Yet, the San of Natal continued to resist domination by the invaders. Having acquired horses and guns they were a highly mobile and evasive foe. They would sneak up to the farms in the Midlands, round up cattle and other livestock and then beat a hasty retreat into the labyrinthine Drakensberg - The Mountains of the Dragon.

In 1849, under pressure from the farmers, the Natal colonial government forcibly moved the Hlubi, a Nguni-speaking people, into the area between the Drakensberg Mountains and the farming community of Mooiriver, the worst-affected area. The intention was to let the Hlubi deal with the San raiders. But it soon became apparent that the Hlubi got on well with their new neighbours, who would offer them a portion of the spoils of their raids in exchange for protection and concealment.

The colonial government continually pressured Langalibalele, the leader of the Hlubi, to deal firmly with the San, with little effect. Then in 1873, the colonial government ordered the Hlubi to register all the guns in their possession. Knowing that this was the first step towards complete disarmament, Langalibalele refused to co-operate and, fearing reprisals, led his people into Lesotho.

The government sent troops after them and asked Joseph Millerd Orpen, a British resident in the northeastern parts of what is today the Eastern Cape, to enter Lesotho from the south, through Nomansland - the area just south of Lesotho and north of what used to be the Transkei homeland - intercept Langalibalele and convince him to return. Just inside Lesotho, Orpen recruited as a guide a San man called Qing (the Q represents a click, made by placing the tip of the tongue against the roof of the mouth and then bringing it down sharply).

One can only imagine the tension at the first meeting between Orpen and Qing, given the horrific treatment of the San by the colonists. As Orpen noted, Qing had "never seen a white man but in fighting".

As the journey continued, Orpen's party suffered violent lightning storms, often backed by extreme winds, and it was perhaps the arduous conditions of the journey which slowly brought Qing and Orpen closer. Whatever it was, Qing began to speak more easily as the days turned into weeks. Working through a translator, he would tell Orpen myths and stories and describe the various habits of the San. Intrigued, Orpen recorded these in his diary. Most important of all, Qing explained some of the rock paintings that the expedition saw.

Rock paintings and engravings had been observed by European colonists from the earliest days of their settlement in South Africa, but none had ever bothered to ask the San, who had made them, what they were all about. Instead, they gazed at the art and guessed what its meaning might be. Given the bitterness, and even hatred, most Europeans felt for the San, it is not surprising that they saw the art as simplistic, crude and debased - the work of savages.

Typical of this attitude are the comments of Frances Colenso, the daughter of the famous bishop. Writing under the nom de plume Atherton Wylde, she recorded the events following the end of the Langalibalele Rebellion, as it became known. In 1874 Major A W Durnford, of the 75th regiment, was sent to the Giant's Castle area in the Drakensberg to dynamite the passes leading into Lesotho, through one of which Langalibalele had escaped. The intention was to prevent the Hlubi from fleeing again as well as to stop the San from coming down the passes from Lesotho and raiding. Durnford pitched camp in the Bushman's River Valley and proceeded to dynamite the passes. It was a pointless task as dynamite had little effect on the gargantuan rocks of the Drakensberg. Durnford was intimately involved with Colenso and so she accompanied him on the expedition. Close to their camp were caves (known as Main Caves) about which Colenso noted: "These caves are full of coloured drawings by the Bushmen, hideous representations of eland hunts, cattle raids, or fights. Each one is more ugly than its neighbour." She would probably never have appreciated the irony of her comments. She could not have foreseen that the events of the rebellion would lead to the first direct comments on rock art by a San person to a European. Indeed, it was those very comments made by Qing a year or so earlier that would eventually change the minds of Europeans about the complexity and beauty of San art.

Orpen, realising that he had valuable information, sent a copy of Qing's comments to Dr Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek, a linguist who, together with his sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd, had been working with the San to record their language, beliefs and practices. Upon seeing Qing's comments, Bleek declared San art an attempt at a "truly artistic conception of the ideas which most deeply moved the Bushman mind, and filled it with religious feelings".

Yet Bleek and Orpen were too far ahead of their time. For many decades the attitude of Colenso would prevail and it was only in the '70s, some 100 years after Orpen's journey, that archaeologists began to read the Bleek and Orpen material again. Walking the same mountains through which Orpen and Qing had passed in the Eastern Cape, they discovered many hundreds of rock art sites. They also revisited the sites that Orpen and Qing had been to in Lesotho.

Slowly, they began to decipher the art and today it is understood to be a system of metaphors and symbols that relate to San shamanistic religion. The art is now well appreciated for its aesthetic and intellectual complexity.

So well understood is San rock art that the methods and techniques used to study it have been adopted in other parts of the world, and today Qing's comments are included in textbooks throughout the world.

The fame of this art and the beautiful culture that produced it have recently been acknowledged in the new South African coat of arms, which depicts a rock art image from the Eastern Cape and carries a motto in the /Xam language that Bleek and Lloyd so laboriously copied down.

One wonders what they, Langalibalele and, above all, Qing would have said had they known that the events in which they were embroiled would one day place them on a global stage.

As it was, Orpen and Qing never contacted Langalibalele - he was apprehended north of the pass through which he crossed into Lesotho. After the journey, Orpen never saw Qing again and it is not known what happened to him. Perhaps he was gunned down like so many other San or perhaps he lived the rest of his days among Basothospeaking people, slowly losing his language and culture.

All that is now left of that magnificent San culture are traces of language and certain practices in some Nguni-speaking groups, small bits of stone and bone in archaeological ground deposits and vast quantities of fading rock art sites.

Yet one can still visit the sites that Qing and Orpen saw and one can still climb the pass through which Langalibalele fled to Lesotho. Most important of all, one can still visit the parts of the Eastern Cape that used to be called Nomansland and catch a glimpse of the artistic splendour that was once the thriving practice of San painting on the rocks of the Drakensberg.

# Blundell is a researcher at the Wits University Rock Art Institute