Standing before the fantastic architecture of rocks that serve as backdrop for the paintings in the Ikanti shelter, and even when standing before the occasionally more ordinary sites hosting such works, I sometimes perceived a disconcerting paradox: an art imbued with the spirit of movement, which reflected a life governed by the material need to remain light, in fact anchored itself to these vast theatres of stone. But looked at differently, the paradox soon ceases to be one. Rock art, by being permanently installed on the spot, freed its makers from having to carry it around. Their roving life simply required them to recreate the performance elsewhere. That might partly explain the profusion of works discovered in southern Africa, revealing a key fact: for the San, visual art was a common – even ordinary – activity, as indeed are all activities indispensible to maintaining a balanced existence. The San had to populate the world with pictures in order to live constantly in sight – or at least within proximity – of them. So what does the spatial location of their works tell us?

Mapping a mental landscape

Even before taking into consideration the rocks on which it was done, San art should be viewed in the vaster landscape where these people roamed. Their art was a geographical as much as a material phenomenon. A territory is never a neutral zone but always – already – constitutes an expanse with its own climate, relief, flora and fauna. So what is common to the arid, endlessly flat steppes of the Karoo – ‘the land of thirst’ where spiky plants survive beneath a scorching sun – and the green hills of Drakensberg, which in summer become a huge velvety fabric fed by streams and inhabited by abundant game? And how can we compare the three Tsodilo Hills in Botswana – which the San see as a man, a woman and a child, and which are surrounded by forests – to the Brandberg in Namibia, a torrid, uplifted mass of granite? While I might perceive similar qualities of openness in these landscapes, the San appreciated them in a different way, not only because the landscape was more legible to the San, but because it was fully experienced, was riddled with specific paths, was inhabited by ancestors, history and gods.