San Rock Art by J. D. Lewis-Williams (review)

In San Rock Art, J. D. Lewis-Williams, a former director and professor emeritus of the Rock Art Research Institute, provides a well-written and engrossing historical-archaeological study of the rock art of the San, known also as Bushmen and southern Africa’s first people. This book holds a lot of importance in African cultural and demographic history because it treats an important subject, written by a world-class expert on San culture, who as well happens to be a professor emeritus at the University of Witwatersrand.

Lewis-Williams’s book discusses several aspects of San rock paintings, which are scattered in various areas of southern Africa. Most of these paintings are priceless, what the book describes as one of the world’s most important cultural treasures. About 15,000 rock-art sites are known to exist, and more may be discovered, thanks to excellent and dedicated scholars like Lewis-Williams, who specializes in San culture and has written other acclaimed works about the San and their culture, including such recently published books as The Mind in the Cave, which has won awards, and Inside the Neolithic Mind, coauthored with David Pearce and considered so important that Nature has described it as a literary and scientific tour de force.

An obvious query concerns how society generally is to make sense of the San paintings, whose complexity and strangeness baffle observers. Lewis-Williams’s book does explain them well, especially as he takes as his starting point what is seen as a magnificent Linton panel, found in the Iziko–South African Museum in Cape Town. In that realm, the author clearly shows how the panel can generally shed light on San rock art and lead observers to the heart of the San thought-world.

Starting with chapter one, “An Ancient Tradition in Today’s South Africa,” Lewis-Williams makes a revelation that many people of South Africa “are unaware that the central image in their country’s coat of arms derives from a San rock painting” (p. 7). He goes on to underscore how South Africa, in 1994, moved out of what he describes as dark decades of apartheid to set out on a new democratic path in a time of renewal, when President Thabo Mbeki, in 2000, unveiled the country’s new coat of arms. He and the government “had decided that it would be appropriate to incorporate a San rock painting in the new design. They therefore approached the Rock Art Research Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand for suggestions, and then chose one image from a range that was submitted to them” (p. 7). At the unveiling ceremony, Mbeki explained to an audience of diplomats and others that the people who had made the paining that was being incorporated into the new coat of arms “were the very first inhabitants of our land, the Khoisan people” (pp. 7–8). Apart from this disclosure, Lewis-Williams provides an important historical anecdote:

There is a story behind this image. In 1916 Dr. Louis Peringuey, Director of the South African Museum in Cape Town, received a letter from Mr. G. S. T. Mandy, a field assistant in the Provincial Roads Department . It informed him of the possibility of removing “really magnificent” rock paintings from a remote rock shelter on the farm Linton in the Maclear district of what is now the Eastern Cape. Much correspondence followed, in which Mandy described the tragic destruction of other valuable paintings and the growing threat to the panel in question. He told Peringuey that the cost of removal would be about £30 (a fair sum in those days), but that he considered “the paintings will be worth any money if successfully removed.” Peringuey agreed. Both he and Mandy were determined to save the paintings, and work on their removal started in July 1917. This proved a very difficult and time-consuming task. . . . A stonemason and a blacksmith were employed to undertake the work. At last, on 25 May 1918, Mandy...