Lingering ghosts

Along with Australia, southern Africa is the region of the world with the most rock paintings and carvings. Its sites number in the thousands, and there are hundreds of thousands of images, although the large majority of them have been damaged or erased by erosion. Over this vast area encompassing South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and, to a lesser extent, Mozambique and Tanzania, people continue to discover signs of pictorial activity that was consistently carried out over a very long period. The corpus of paintings is immense. It constitutes a splendid bestiary populated by giraffe, rhinoceroses, elephant and ostriches, not forgetting springbok, rhebok, kudu and, above all, the largest and most majestic of African antelope, the Cape eland. Seen among or alongside these animals are human figurines in groups or alone, recorded in a variety of poses and situations that prompt us to discern scenes, however sketchy. And then there are strange, hybrid creatures: antelope-men, snakes with ears, and other freaks born from sensorial intercourse that transgresses the species barrier, as also invented by so many other civilizations. Sometimes such motifs are found alone, at other times they are combined, indeed may be superimposed on one another in panels of great complexity.

Most of these images are attributed to nomadic hunter-gatherers called the San, and although we now know that other regional cultures also made rock art (at a later date, and reflecting other visual traditions, notably geometric), I will stick to the San's naturalistic art. They were long the sole inhabitants of southern Africa, along with the Khoekhoen, notable for their pastoral lifestyle, and with whom the San form the Khoesan ethnolinguistic group. Other herders, originally from Black Africa – such as the Zulus and Xhosa – completed the population of this region of the world some two thousand years ago. The San are still known as Bushmen but, depending on the area they occupy, in small clans, refer to themselves as /Xam (central South Africa),! Kung or Ju/’hoansi (on the border of Namibia and Botswana) and Nharo,! Xo or G/wi (in the Kalahari). The tiny percentage of them who still lived as hunter-gatherers just half a century ago are now also being sedentarized.