San Rock Art

3. Keys to the past

49 3 Keys to the past As I have pointed out, the image that appears in the centre of South Africa’s coat of arms (Fig. 1) is merely a small part of the large, crowded Linton panel (Fig. 2). At first glance, we may think that these apparently jumbled images are all independent of one another. But that idea must be abandoned when we notice that there is a bifurcating thin red line fringed with small white dots that runs through the whole panel: it joins images that are far apart and others that are closer to one another yet seem to be in no ‘scenic’ relationship. For instance, the ‘hunts’ that are sometimes thought to be a central feature of San rock art are entirely absent from the panel; although a few figures hold bows, none is shown shooting at an animal. Then, too, the line itself is clearly not ‘realistic’: it appears to enter and leave human figures as well as animals. Most of the antelope look like real antelope and are beautifully delineated. On the other hand, 50 some of the images are, like the line with dots itself, clearly not‘realistic’. There is, for instance, a snake with an antelope head that seems to bleed from its nose, and a supine human figure that has antelope hoofs (Fig 2A). All in all, the whole panorama leads us away from any real world in which we can identify things we know and into a realm that is ‘rich and strange’. Faced with this sweep of enigmas, we feel forced to say that we shall never understand such flights of the human mind. All we can do is gaze and marvel at the images and try to guess at what they could possibly have meant to the San who painted them and who looked at them daily as they lived in the rock shelters. Is anyone’s guess as good as anyone else’s? After all, the people who painted the images died a long time ago and we cannot question them. Still today, there are people who cling to this ‘we-shall-never-know’ position. Sometimes, mystery is more attractive than knowledge. Fortunately, the paintings are only one part of what we know about the San. As I noted at the end of the previous chapter, we must maintain a balance between the images themselves and the records of San beliefs and life that are available to us. But the record of San beliefs, the ethnography, is itself made up of separate records that were compiled at different times and in different places. The ethnography is not just a key to the mystery of the paintings: it is a bunch of keys. 51 Nineteenth-century records First, there are the writings of early European travellers and missionaries who struck out into the unknown interior of southern Africa. By and large, the information contained in their books is slight and prejudiced, though there are exceptions, such as the missionaries Thomas Arbousset and François Daumas, who garnered much information in the Maloti Mountains and to whom I refer in subsequent chapters. But if we had to rely entirely on colonial explorers,we should know very little about the San who made the art – that is, beyond their nomadic life style and their deadly poisoned arrows which so fascinated and terrified the early explorers. Fortunately, there are two other nineteenth-century sources: they have become foundational to San rock art research. Both these nineteenth-century records were made at the time when the San were painting their last images in the rock shelters. The San people whose words were recorded, though not themselves painters or engravers, knew about the art and recognised the paintings, copies of which some of them were shown, as the work of their own people: they held the same belief system as the artists. I say ‘whose words were recorded’ because that is exactly what happened in one remarkable case. Being a philologist who had studied ancient 52 languages, Wilhelm Bleek, whom I mentioned in the previous chapter,was able to record in a phonetic script the exact words and sentences that the San used. This means that we can today utter the words of a language that has been extinct for over a century. Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd took down approximately 12,000 pages of texts – and...