An encounter between eland and hunters

The encounter between eland (or other large animals such as elephant, giraffe & kudu) and hunter is a central theme in southern African hunter-gatherer culture, but it is not merely a record of a hunt or of an intention to hunt.

Ntate Sekotlo guiding us to the rock art site above the Sebapala River. The paintings are NOT in the large krans at the top of the picture. They are in an overhang of which you can only see a small part just above Ntate Sekotlo's head

The interior of the low and shallow overhang, with Renaud Ego on the right

Painted in an unobtrusive shelter above the Sebapala River in southern Lesotho are images that give us insight into the worldview of ancestral Bushman hunter-gatherers. Ntate Sekotlo guided us to this rock art site above the Sebapala River. The paintings are NOT in the large krans at the top of the picture to which Sekotlo seems to be pointing. They are in an overhang of which you can only see a tiny part just above Ntate Sekotlo’s head. The interior of the overhang is low and shallow. Renaud Ego on the right.

Encounter with an eland: eland on the left and hunting figures at the right. One of the central themes in southern African hunter-gatherer rock art is the meeting of hunters and one of the big meat animals, such as this eland.

Large and beautifully painted eland. The hunter-gatherer painters in South Africa's southeastern mountains spent more time and effort on eland images than almost any other.

At left is a very large and magnificent eland with a large dewlap. It is probably an older, bull eland. The hunter-gatherer painters in South Africa’s southeastern mountains spent more time and effort on eland images than almost any other category of image.

Facing this massive eland are a few human-like figures. A section of the rock on which they are painted has broken off so we cannot see much of them. But we can see a figure in red (the head is obscured) that is holding a strung bow (note the white bowstring) and pointing it at the eland.

Next to this is another larger figure in orange with its hands raised high and bent at the elbow. This is a common posture that is often found in painted contexts in which a human figure confronts large meat animals. To the left is the figure’s bow and arrows. These are hunters.

Bowman with strung bow and arrow. The head and shoulders are obscured but you can see both hands gripping the bow and the (white) bowstring

The figure with both arms raised. This is a common posture that is often found in painted contexts in which a human figure confronts a large meat animals

Anthropologists and rock art researchers have long recognised that ‘hunting’ is a religious matter. Mary Douglas goes so far as to say that the significance of hunting in cosmological terms ‘far surpasses its primary object—the supply of meat’.

‘Hunting,’ says Megan Biesele of the Ju|’hoansi, ‘is an activity for which special power must be cultivated through supernatural disciplines’. Hunters do not simply go out and shoot an animal—they find and kill animals because supernatural forces permit it.

Eland (and other animals too) were created by the entity (god) called /kaggen. He did his best to frustrate the intentions of the hunter. Hunters had to follow a ‘code’ of behaviours in order to be successful.

On the other hand, people had developed the ability to ‘own’ animals, that is, to control animals, their behaviour and their movements. These powers could bring an animal under a hunter’s arrow and make it die quickly of the effects of the arrow poison.

The emphasis on human-animal encounters like the one in this post points to a persistent underlying conflict between hunter and prey, and the taking of life. And in order to have some understanding of the significance of rock art we must try to apply what we know of the beliefs of the hunter-gatherer artists to understand them.

The dancing kudu of the Waterberg

It’s not often that I get to work in the northern parts of South Africa so I was excited to get an assignment recently in Limpopo Province, which borders on Zimbabwe to the north.

My brief was to document and develop management plans for two rock art sites at the Lapalala Wilderness, about 3,5 to 4 hour’s drive north of Johannesburg. Lapalala is in the Waterberg, a mountainous massif that takes its name from the Northern Sotho name, Thaba Meetse, literally, ‘water mountain’. It is a dramatic landscape of cliffs, hills and gorges of red sandstone and conglomerate that have been carved out by rivers over hundreds of millions of years. The sandstone stores underground water and has attracted animals, human ancestors, as well as modern humans, for millions of years.

The Later Stone Age hunter-gatherers who made the rock paintings occupied this area for about 1000 years. These people were the ancestors of those we now call ‘San’ or ‘Bushmen’. Both of these terms have negative connotations and I only use them because there are no alternatives. Later, in the early 19th century Northern Ndebele people built extensive (10 ha) stone-walled settlements on Melora Hill and Melora Saddle, both of which fall within the boundaries of the Lapalala Wilderness. There is also rock art in the Waterberg, probably made by the Northern Ndebele farmer communities, although I did not see any on this occasion. These paintings look totally different to the hunter-gatherer paintings: they are drawn with the finger, using white clay. The images are usually of schematic animals and the art is believed to be part of initiation rituals.

The Waterberg hunter-gatherer rock art features different animals to the rock paintings further south such as the Drakensberg. In the Waterberg and elsewhere in Limpopo, kudu (Tragelaphus strepsiceros) is the most commonly painted animal image, whereas in the Drakensberg it is the eland.

Interestingly, most of the hunter-gatherer paintings of kudu elsewhere in Limpopo Province are female. At Mdoni Shelter I recorded an interesting cluster of paintings of kudu and humans. There is a row of five kudu each with only one front and one back leg depicted, without horns, and moving in procession from right to left, with four of them in a group and a single kudu further to the right. Because the kudu are hornless they probably depict kudu cows. Each kudu image is slightly different in shape. At left are a large kudu (possibly a female) and a small kudu (calf?) following behind.

When it comes to understanding rock art, things are seldom what they seem at first glance. For a Westerner, a realistic-looking rock painting of an animal or a human figure is only that – a beautiful painting. For the hunter-gatherers however, those images could depict spirit animals and people in the spirit world. Take this sensitively painted image of a female kudu, its neck extended, the head slightly raised, and the tail lifted. This stance is typical of female kudu courtship behaviour and indicates that the kudu cow is ready to mate. But why did the painters make this image?

To investigate this question I turned to records of San/Bushman beliefs and to Ed Eastwood’s work on kudu paintings in Limpopo (Animals behaving like people: San rock paintings of kudu in the central Limpopo basin, southern Africa. South African Archaeological Bulletin 61(183): 26–39 [2006]).

In contemporary San/Bushman communities in the Kalahari it is said that ‘women like meat’ and that ‘women are like meat’ (see Megan Biesele’s 1993 book Women like meat). Men are praised when they bring meat to women, but men also ‘hunt’ (i.e. marry and have sex with) women. In women’s initiation ceremonies of women the initiate is compared to a female antelope. A special dance is held at the conclusion of the initiation in which the women remove their aprons to show their buttocks and dance the Eland Dance. During this dance the girl is said to ‘become’ an eland (see Tricksters and trancers [1999] by Matthias Guenther). Elsewhere in southern Africa the dance is named after one of other large, ‘strong’ animals, like a gemsbok, or giraffe, or kudu.

What has this got to do with the painting of the female kudu in a mating posture? Well, first we need to recognise that the female kudu image may in fact be a female initiate, not ‘just’ a painting of a kudu. Secondly, close to the kudu in the mating posture are three rather strange-looking kudu. They have long back legs and short front legs. One of them has its tail raised like the kudu in the mating posture. These images look like kudu but there is also something subtly human about them. Instead of standing on all their legs they are standing on their back leg(s) and the front ‘legs’ are like arms. So why were they painted in this way? The artists could certainly paint realistic-looking animals when they wanted to. But they chose instead to create images in which women and kudu cows are merged in a sublime moment in the life of hunter-gatherer women – the dance of initiation in which women become kudu cows.

These are the dancing kudu of the Waterberg!

Formlings 2: variations

Following up on a previous post about a very distinctive element of the Zimbabwe hunter-gatherer rock art – paintings of large bee or termite-like nests that are known as ‘formlings’. I posted photographs of the Toghwana Dam formling that one might imagine depicts hunter-gatherers of the past harvesting insects or insect products (honey).
All the formlings seem to be based on the same basic model. Each is made up of individual lozenge-shaped cells or chambers, usually stacked more or less upright.
Often, these chambers are filled in with solid colour – usually red, sometimes yellow or a combination of red and yellow. Chambers sometimes have ‘caps’ painted in a contrasting colour on either end. Chambers are sometimes partially painted with rows of white, sometimes red, dots. Some formlings are shown with an opening through which ‘things’ (minute painted flecks) enter or leave these massive ‘nests’.
Paintings of formlings are often surrounded by other images, as though the presence of a formling draws other images, of powerful animals and human figures, to cluster around them. As a result there are paintings around and on top of many formlings.
But most of the paintings of formlings are just too big and complex to be realistic representations of bees’ or termites’ nest. It has long been recognised that the paintings of so-called formlings depict things beyond realistic illustrations of gathering honey and/or termites. So what are the formlings about?
In a following post I will show you one of the most spectacular formlings in Zimbabwe and present the latest ideas about their meaning and significance