INTRODUCTION

Lesotho, which is entirely surrounded by South Africa (Fig. 19.1.), is a small, very mountainous country whose original inhabitants were the San or Baroa (the Sesotho name for the San). During the thousands of years that they and their ancestors lived there, the San, who are now extinct within Lesotho, executed a great number of beautiful and richly symbolic rock paintings. Many of the rock paintings in Lesotho are masterpieces, and it is no exaggeration to say that some are probably amongst the finest rock paintings ever produced (Fig. 19.2.). Not only were the technical skills of the artists of the highest level, but the rich religious symbolism of the paintings adds a further dimension to the art.

Today many, perhaps most, of the paintings are endangered, largely as a result of the fact that most people there are not aware of the importance of preserving them. In the early 1990s in Lesotho, while conducting research on the paintings and history of the San, I came across a considerable number of paintings that had deteriorated badly as a result of human and animal action. The main causes of this are wetting of the paintings, which ultimately causes them to fade; the use of paintings as ‘targets’ for stonethrowing; livestock rubbing up against the paintings on the walls of caves where they are kraaled; smoke from fires made by herders occupying caves in the mountains; deliberate chipping of the paint; making scratches with stones on the paintings; outlining the paintings with scratch marks or charcoal, and adding additional details to the paintings with charcoal ‘crayons’ or by scratching the rock face. (Figs 19.3., 19.4. and 19.5.) Much of this damage, it seems, is caused by children, or sometimes older people, who look after livestock in the mountains.

In 1999, after consultations with the Archaeological Resource Development Project (ARDP) at the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, as well as with members of the Ministry of Tourism, Sports and Culture of Lesotho, I started a project on the viability of producing a poster for primary schools in Lesotho that would educate children concerning the need to preserve the art.