Such a long time after having written a first book on the art of the San people, I still hesitate a moment before breaking the silence, because silence is the very substance of which paintings are made. Visual artists know and experience this silence – which the act of depiction reiterates in forms that sustain it – beyond measure. Poets are likewise familiar with that muteness from which, when briefly shattered, words spring, and to which words return. That is why painters have for so long found poets to be partners in a dialogue in which they all retain a shared if strange frame of mind differentiated only by their choice of materials.1 None of them, however, now have any further say in the matter: they have been stripped of the right to their own view ever since the establishment of special fields – art history, literature, aesthetics, sociology, anthropology – has appropriated them as simple subjects or objects of academic study. Their acts and words are no longer accorded the authority arising from their experience, itself a kind of organic knowledge. I reclaim the right to their view.

My first book on South African rock art, titled San, was published in French by Adam Biro in 2000. Nothing of the sort existed in France, and in many respects it differed from the few books and articles published in English, based as it was on the conviction that anthropological studies, which did not interrogate the art of making pictures, were necessarily incomplete, especially since those studies unwittingly embodied an extremely conventional view of the role of those pictures. What I didn't realize, however, was that my intellectual venture, triggered by an intense passion for an ancient art to which I committed two full years, would become a lifelong affair.

It was nearly twenty years ago that I first came across paintings and carvings in South Africa and Namibia. I was totally unprepared to see them. They abruptly rose before me, like the mountains that often serve as their setting – in one of those jolts I so appreciate, it was like being suddenly hailed from afar.