In conjunction with our new iLecture film 'San Rock Art of South Africa', the Bradshaw Foundation presents a brief background to the San culture of southern Africa. The San, Bushmen, Basarwa, ?Kung or Khwe are indigenous people of southern Africa. The name ‘San’ comes from the Khoi word sonqua, meaning ‘those without cattle’. The name ‘bushman’, or in Dutch, Boschjesmans, was first used as early as 1652 by Dutch settlers to describe the hunter-gatherers they met when they first arrived at the Cape.
According to Dr Ben Smith, genetic evidence suggests they are one of the oldest, if not the oldest, peoples in the world, going back to perhaps 60,000 years. They have genetic traces that no one else in the world has, that put them at the root of the human tree – we are related to them, but they are not as closely related to us. They have unique markers that we don’t have.
They were traditionally hunter-gatherers, and their kinship system reflects their interdependence as traditionally small, mobile foraging bands. Their gathering gear was simple yet highly effective: a hide sling, blanket, and cloak, called a kaross, to carry foodstuffs, firewood, smaller bags, a digging stick, and perhaps a smaller version of the kaross to carry a baby. Women would gather - fruits, nuts and roots - and men hunted, mainly various kinds of antelope, using poison arrows and spears in days-long excursions. Leisure was very important to the Bushmen. They spent large amounts of time with conversation, music, and sacred dances.
They speak a variety of languages, all of which incorporate 'click' sounds represented in writing by symbols such as ! or /.
They make their own temporary homes from wood that they gather. Many Bushmen who have been forced off their lands now live in settlements in areas that are unsuitable for hunting and gathering - they support themselves by growing some food, or by working on ranches.
In terms of archaeology we have a seemless stone tool tradition, and a seemless art tradition, going back 27,000 years with the ‘Apollo 11’ stones – indeed, the San have longest continuing art tradition in the world.
The general features of southern African San art are explained in terms of concepts that pervade the cognitive systems of San people from all areas. Amongst all San groups the most important ritual is the Great Dance. In this dance, through trance, the San say that they harness a kind of spiritual power that is like electricity.
They use this power for things such as healing, hunting, removing societal tensions and making rain. It is aspects relating to this dance that are pervasive in San rock art, partly because this dance was of such great significance to the San, but more importantly because the act of making rock art seems to have been part of the process by which San ritual specialists harnessed and shared the power
of the dance.
In all areas, therefore, rock art images depict aspects of the dance, most often just fragments of the dance rather than entire dance scenes. We see individual or small groups of dancers bending forwards, wearing dancing rattles, holding wildebeest tails or dancing sticks and bleeding from the nose: these are all features particular to the dance.
Around these fragments of the dance are placed animals, but not just a random selection of animals. Those animals that have special supernatural potency are the ones particularly chosen and repeated often. It is from these animals that the San say they draw power in the dance and the rock art sometimes shows this. Lines of power connect animals to dancers in the art. More than this, dancers are regularly depicted taking on features of powerful animals such as their hooves or heads.
The art also shows the magical other-worldly things such as rain-animals (above left), monsters and spirit people that are encountered by dancers on their out-of-body vision journeys. We thus understand San art as a deeply spiritual art, one that harnesses and shares with others the power of successive generations of San spiritual experience and enlightenment.
How do we know this?
By linking specific San beliefs to recurrent features in the art, researchers have been able to crack many of the codes of San rock art. Unfortunately there are no recorded interviews with the painters themselves, in order to shed light on the paintings. However, in the late nineteenth century a Bushman named Qing guided Joseph Millerd Orpen, a magistrate from the Cape colony, through the Drakensberg.
On their journey, Qing and Orpen came across many magnificent paintings in rock shelters. Orpen was so impressed that he copied several of them. He then sent these to a magazine editor in Cape town, who showed them to a Dr Wilhelm Bleek. Bleek was a German linguist who was living in Cape Town. He was studying the language of the /Xam people – a San group from the Northern Cape – at this time. When Bleek showed Orpen’s drawing of the strange looking animal to the group of /Xam San he was interviewing, they immediately saw in it ‘the rain animal’, and proceeded to explain its spiritual and religious significance. It was this historical explanation that began the decoding of the paintings.
It was then the work of Professor David Lewis-Williams which threw more light on the paintings. The ‘Rosetta Stone’ of this rock art is located at the Game Pass Shelter in the Drakensberg Mountains. "One day, I was looking at a picture in which there was a dying eland and a man apparently holding its tail. The man had hooves, like the eland; his hair was standing out, like the eland's hair; his legs were crossed, in imitation of the eland's legs," he explained.
'Rosetta Stone'
Game Pass Shelter
Studying this detail, the meaning fell into place: both the eland and the man are behaving as if they are dying. The man is a shaman going into trance. He is about to leave this world for the spirit world, and he is taking on the power of the eland, the most powerful animal of all, and the god /Kaggen's favourite.
Trance is so overwhelming that it is difficult to describe. To explain it and to help people who were not shamans to see what they had been through, the painters of rock art images looked for comparative experiences. Crossing over to the spirit world during trance could be compared to 'death'. This did not mean that they actually died, but that they believed that while they were in trance, their spirits would leave their bodies and meet others in the spirit world. 'Death' is used as a metaphor for the trance state. Trance is very much like death. Sometimes it is called 'half-death'.
Professor Lewis-Williams explained how all this suddenly made sense to him: “I saw that the dying eland was a metaphor for the dying medicine man. Shamans are said to die when they enter the spirit world through trance. And sthe dying eland is a source of potency (spiritual power)."
To show their experiences, the artists also used visual metaphors such as showing shamans ‘underwater’ and ‘dead’. These capture aspects of how it feels to be in trance. The artists also show their actions in the spirit world, such as their capturing of the rain animal, their activation of potency for use in healing or in fighting off enemies or other dangerous forces. But, the art was far from just a record of spirit journeys. Powerful substances such as eland blood were put into the paints so to make each image a reservoir of potency. As each generation of artists painted or engraved layer by layer of art on the rock surfaces their expansion created potent spiritual places.
New Documentary Film
The Drakensberg Mountains of southern Africa are home to not only some of the world's oldest rock art paintings, but also one of the worlds oldest cultures - the San Bushman. The fascinating relationship between the people and their art is revealed as one of the most famous rock art panels is decoded.
