The San & Southern African Rock Art

In 1917 a slab of sandstone about two metres long was cut out of the back wall of a rock shelter on the farm Linton, in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, and carried to the South African Museum in Cape Town, where it has been on display ever since. It is covered with paintings in red, white and black, made with a fineness that seems impossible on rock: people with arms stretched back, some bending forward, one with lines of red falling from the nose; a long, sinuous red band bordered with tiny white dots, running across the scene; fish, eels, and a scatter of other figures. The Linton panel is one of the masterpieces of the rock art of the San, the hunter-gatherers of southern Africa. Two of its figures, slightly altered, stand on South Africa's coat of arms, above a motto in the extinct |Xam San language. What the panel meant to its painters is one of the most argued questions in the study of prehistoric religion, and it is also one of the few where the people's own words can be brought to bear.

The oldest continuous story

Southern Africa holds some of the earliest evidence anywhere for the symbolic mind.

• At Blombos Cave, on the southern Cape coast, people processed ochre in shells about 100,000 years ago, engraved crosshatched designs on pieces of ochre about 75,000 years ago, and, on a flake of stone from levels about 73,000 years old, drew a crosshatched pattern with an ochre crayon: the oldest known drawing.
• At Apollo 11 Cave in southern Namibia, seven slabs of stone painted with animals, one perhaps a feline with human legs, were found in layers dated to roughly 30,000 years ago, among the oldest figurative art in Africa.
• At Tsodilo Hills in Botswana, a claim published in 2006 that a rock in "Rhino Cave" carved to resemble a python's head was the focus of a 70,000-year-old ritual was widely reported; archaeologists who excavated the site challenged it, pointing out that the dates come from deposits in front of the wall, not from the carving. It remains contested.

The painted and engraved rock art of the region is much younger, mostly from the last few thousand years, and some was made within the last two centuries: paintings in the Maloti-Drakensberg mountains show horses, wagons and men with guns. Radiocarbon dating of mineral crusts over and under the paint shows that Drakensberg art goes back more than 2,000 years. There are tens of thousands of sites across southern Africa, and the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg park alone holds hundreds of shelters with many thousands of images. The makers were ancestors of the people now called San.

Who the San are

"San" is the collective name, originally a Khoekhoe word, for the many hunter-gatherer peoples of southern Africa who speak, or spoke, languages with click consonants; the older English term "Bushmen" is considered offensive by some and accepted by others, and many San prefer the names of their own groups: Ju|'hoansi, !Xun, Naro, |Xam and others. Genetic studies show that the ancestors of the Khoe-San diverged from other human populations very early, perhaps 260,000–350,000 years ago, making them carriers of some of the deepest lineages of our species.

Their history since the arrival of herders and farmers in the last two thousand years, and above all since European colonization, has been one of dispossession. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries colonial commandos and settlers killed many San in the Cape; historians such as Mohamed Adhikari describe it as genocide. The |Xam people of the Karoo, whose words are central to this chapter, were destroyed as a community, and their language is extinct. San communities today live in Namibia, Botswana, South Africa and Angola; in 2006 San and Bakgalagadi evicted from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve won the right in Botswana's High Court to return to their land.

Their own words: the Bleek and Lloyd archive

What makes the San case special is that, uniquely for a rock-art tradition of this kind, there is a large body of testimony from the people themselves. In the 1870s the German linguist Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd in Cape Town recorded, from |Xam men who had been brought to the city as prisoners, among them ||kabbo, Diä!kwain and |han≠kass'o, more than 12,000 pages of narratives, beliefs, songs and personal histories, written in |Xam with English translation. The Bleek and Lloyd collection, now held by the University of Cape Town and other institutions, is on UNESCO's Memory of the World register. The |Xam narrators also commented on copies of rock paintings shown to them. In the twentieth century anthropologists, among them Lorna Marshall, Megan Biesele and Richard Katz, recorded the religion of the Ju|'hoansi and other Kalahari San, who still practised it.

Gods, tricksters and the dead

San religion varied from group to group, but some themes recur.

• A trickster-creator. Among the |Xam the central figure is |Kaggen, whose name means "mantis": a trickster who could take the form of a praying mantis, an eland, a hare or a louse, who created the eland, his favourite animal, and the moon, which in one story he made from his shoe and threw into the sky. He is foolish and wise, creative and troublesome, and he protects the eland from hunters. Among the Ju|'hoansi a great god, ||'aen or ≠Gao!na, creator of all things, stands with a lesser god, ||'ausi or ||Gauwa, who brings both sickness and help, and with the spirits of the dead, the ||gauwasi, who hover around the living and bring illness.
• Potency. Many San speak of a supernatural power, n|om among the Ju|'hoansi, present in certain people, animals, songs and plants. It is strongest in the eland, the largest antelope, fat and full of power.
• Rain. The |Xam told of a rain-animal, a great creature of the waterholes, sometimes like a bull or a hippo, which rain-makers would capture in trance, lead across the land, and cut, so that its blood and milk fell as rain.
• The dead and the stars. Stories place the dead among the stars; the |Xam narrators described how a girl threw ashes into the sky to make the Milky Way.

The trance dance

At the heart of Kalahari San religion, as recorded in the twentieth century, is the healing dance. At night, around a fire, women sit and clap complex rhythms and sing medicine songs, while men, and sometimes women, dance around them for hours. As the dance intensifies, the healers' n|om "boils" in their bellies and rises up the spine. They enter !kia, an altered state of consciousness: they tremble, sweat, stagger, sometimes fall, and sometimes bleed from the nose. In this state they lay their hands on everyone present, drawing sickness out of their bodies and shrieking it away into the night, and they may travel out of the body to argue with the gods and the spirits of the dead for the lives of the sick. Richard Katz's study of the Ju|'hoansi, Boiling Energy (1982), found that healing power was not restricted to a few specialists: many adults, men especially but also women, had learned to heal. The dance also heals quarrels, and brings the community together. It is still performed.

The trance interpretation of the art

For most of the twentieth century, the rock paintings were read as simple records of daily life, hunting scenes, or "art for art's sake". In the 1970s and 1980s the archaeologist David Lewis-Williams and colleagues proposed a very different reading, which transformed the field. Drawing on the Bleek and Lloyd testimony and the Kalahari ethnography, they argued that much of the art, especially in the Drakensberg, refers to the experience of healers in trance:

• figures bleeding from the nose, bending forward, with arms stretched back, as dancers are described in trance;
• figures merging with animals, especially the eland, a dying eland with its lowered head and crossing legs being compared to a healer in deep trance, "dying" to enter the spirit world;
• rain-animals being led across the rock, as the rain-makers described;
• lines of dots, zigzags and nested curves, compared with the geometric patterns seen in the first stage of altered states of consciousness (the "neuropsychological model", which Lewis-Williams later extended to European cave art, ch41);
• the rock face itself as a veil between this world and the spirit world, with animals and people entering and leaving through cracks.

On the Linton panel, Lewis-Williams reads the long red band edged with white dots as a line of potency, and the figures as healers.

The debate

The trance interpretation won wide acceptance, but it has serious critics.

• Anne Solomon, Pippa Skotnes and others have argued that the model reduces a diverse art, made over thousands of years by many groups, to a single meaning; that the |Xam of the nineteenth-century Karoo, who painted little, were different from the Kalahari San of the twentieth century and from the Drakensberg painters; and that the Bleek and Lloyd texts say little directly about trance dancing among the |Xam. Solomon has emphasized the dead, the spirits and myth as themes of the art.
• The neuropsychological model's claim that geometric forms reflect universal brain states in trance has been challenged by neuroscientists and archaeologists (it is also contested for European caves, ch41).
• Some researchers stress that paintings may have served many purposes: rain-making, initiation, marking territory, telling stories, and recording contact with herders and colonists.

Most specialists now accept that the art is deeply religious and that trance and potency are among its themes, while debating how central they are and how far the same meaning applies everywhere.

The believer's lens

For many San today, the dance, the songs and n|om are living realities, and the paintings are the work of their ancestors, places where power still resides. Some communities are Christian, many combine Christian and older practice, and some healers are consulted by non-San. The San Code of Research Ethics, launched by the South African San Council in 2017, the first such code written by an indigenous people in Africa, asks researchers to show respect, honesty, justice and care, and to share benefits; it is a statement that San knowledge belongs to the San. The archive reports San belief as belief, and notes that the question of what the art "means" is, for San communities, also a question of who has the right to say.

The skeptical lens

Four cautions apply.

1. Time. The testimony of the 1870s and the ethnography of the 1950s describe particular San groups in the last centuries, often under colonial pressure. Using them to read paintings that may be thousands of years old, made by other groups hundreds of kilometres away, assumes a continuity that has to be argued, not presumed. The same applies, still more strongly, to using the San as a window on the religion of the first modern humans. 2. The "living fossil" error. The deep genetic lineages of the Khoe-San do not make their culture or religion "ancient" or unchanged. San societies have their own long histories, of change, contact and trade, like everyone else's. Presenting them as Stone Age survivals has a long, damaging colonial history. 3. Very early claims. The Blombos drawing and the Apollo 11 stones are secure, but what they meant is unknown; they are evidence of symbolism, not of any particular religion. The Tsodilo "python ritual" is disputed. 4. The single-key problem. The trance interpretation is powerful, but any single explanation of a whole art tradition risks becoming unfalsifiable: whatever is painted can be read as trance.

Symbology and sacred encoding

• The eland. The great antelope is the most frequently and carefully painted animal in the Drakensberg, often shaded in several colours. For the |Xam it was |Kaggen's favourite, for Ju|'hoansi the animal richest in n|om, and it plays a role in girls' puberty rites (the "Eland Bull dance") and boys' first-kill rites. Its prominence in the art encodes its religious weight; it is not a mere record of diet.
• Nasal blood and arms-back posture. Painted figures bleeding from the nose, or with arms held back, match descriptions of healers in trance, and are among the strongest links between the art and the dance.
• The line of potency. Red lines fringed with white dots, like the Linton panel's, are read by Lewis-Williams as threads of potency or paths to the spirit world; others see different meanings. The reading is interpretive.
• The rock as veil. Figures appear to emerge from or disappear into cracks and steps in the rock surface, suggesting that the rock itself was a boundary between worlds.
• Therianthropes. Figures part human and part animal, some with antelope heads or hooves, are read as healers transformed in trance or as spirit beings.
• The rain-animal. Large, strange creatures, sometimes with lines coming from their mouths or surrounded by fish, are identified with the |Xam rain-animal: a sacred scene of rain-making.
• The coat of arms. South Africa's coat of arms (2000) uses two figures from the Linton panel, facing each other in greeting, and the |Xam motto !ke e: |xarra ||ke, rendered "diverse people unite". The choice honoured the San; critics have noted the irony of using the words of an extinct language whose speakers were destroyed.

Connections

The deep antiquity of symbolic behaviour at Blombos and Apollo 11 belongs with The Paleolithic (ch41), where the neuropsychological model and its critics also appear for European caves. The San trance dance invites comparison with shamanic traditions elsewhere, from Siberia to Korea's mudang (ch71) and the ecstatic rites of African Diaspora Religions (ch40). The relationship between San and the farming peoples of the region belongs to African Traditional Religion (ch33). The use of ethnography to interpret ancient images is also at issue for Aboriginal Australian Dreaming (ch61), whose rock art and living traditions raise the same questions of continuity and of who may speak for sacred knowledge. Rain-making links to kingship and the control of weather in Sacred Kingship (ch49), and the healer's journey to argue with the gods for the sick to Journeys to the Underworld (ch47).

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From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/chapters/ch66.html · a comparative library of the sacred.