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.

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.

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.

I am not an equipment “queen”, one of those people who are more concerned with the equipment than doing the actual work for which it designed. But I do know that “the glass”, or lenses, are at the heart of the photographic documentation of rock art. Image quality is the goal and to get the best pictures one needs the best glass. Choosing the lenses and purchasing them was one the most exciting things I have done in my professional life.

So, let me introduce my star performers, my companions in the field, the lenses that get the job done. They are manual focus lenses and have none of the more advanced features such as image stabilisation and so on. But that moment when one turns the focus ring and suddenly everything jumps into focus is one of the pleasures of rock art photography.

These lenses started their working life recording rock art sites in the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg in KwaZulu-Natal and as my colleagues and I worked with them they got names and personalities.

The big, fat Zeiss wide angle lens is called isidudla, the fat one. No space is too cramped or (mostly) too big for the 15 mm isisdudla to cover. It loves landscapes too, devouring the wide open spaces in its gaze. The colours and resolution are supreme and I always look forward to viewing them when I get back to camp after a day’s work.

Then there is encane, the little one. This is a 50 mm Zeiss macro lens that I use a lot for overall photography of clusters of rock art and also for close up work. It is smaller than the others but it is very solidly built. When you hold it in your hand you can feel it is not a lightweight. No plastic, or even aluminium inside. Encane can take images up to half life size and is sharp and clear. Once I’m inside a site this is the lens that works the hardest.

Last but not least is isilenda, the slender/thin one. As the name suggests this lens, a second (third/fourth?) hand lens I bought on the internet is much longer than the others. It is a 125 mm Voigtlander, believed by some to be one of the best macro lenses ever, although it is no longer made. With its ability to take life-size images of tiny things, this lens opens worlds within worlds. It is one of the most exciting lenses to work with. One can see details of paintings or insects or plants or whatever else you like with crystal clarity. It is the eagle’s eye that can discern the smallest detail.

I cannot talk about these lenses without mentioning another comrade in arms – the tripod. I take a lot of photographs at really slow shutter speeds and small apertures so the camera must be absolutely stable or the images will be blurred. That’s why I often mount the camera on the tripod. It goes everywhere with me. When it’s on site it can bring the camera to exactly where I want it, whether that is standing on all three legs on the level ground, or half way up the back wall of an overhang. It’s like a goat that can graze anywhere it wants to, and so I call it imbuzi, the goat.

Just as human beings get dusty, tired and scratched when out in the field, so the lenses also get their scratches and dents. I have a lens into a mountain stream and dropped a large, steel lens cap 20 m over a cliff. But dust is the biggest problem. Rock art sites are dusty places and the lenses spend the whole day inside these places. Try as I might to keep the lenses closed and in bags within bags when Im not using them, inevitably it seems that they get dirty. After finishing several weeks of fieldwork they have to be serviced, which is very expensive because the lens has to be dismantled, all the seals replaced (which you have to get from Europe) and then reassembled. But what else can one do? No point spending time and money getting to the sites and then using dirty equipment is there?

The lenses are core element of my equipment. I chose the best back as I carry them though the landscape, to their weight in my hand and their cool metallic feeling. They take me to places I would otherwise never have got to. And if I look after them, they will serve me for the rest of my life. Why settle for less?

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!

These well-known paintings, close to Toghwana Dam, in Zimbabwe’s Matobo National Park, are important in understanding mysterious paintings that have long puzzled researchers – the so-called ‘formlings’. These are large, segmented, organic-looking shapes, different in their details, but still recognisable as the same basic thing. They are painted at hundreds of rock art sites, mostly in Zimbabwe, but also in Limpopo Province in South Africa and, possibly, in Namibia too. 
What‘s striking about the Toghwana Dam paintings is that they show a human figure interacting with a ‘formling’ in a very purposeful manner. A figure – with tasselled hair and what may be a porcupine quill in its hair – kneels on one leg and holds an object in right hand towards the ‘formling’. Three sets of dashed lines seem to enter or exit the ‘formling’.
What is being shown here? One explanation is that the figure is smoking out a bees’ nest. The object in its hand is a torch of smouldering plant material whose smoke will confuse and stupefy the bees. The ‘formling’ is a bees’ nest with red honeycombs inside, and the three dotted lines depict the flight paths of bees. Not surprisingly, variations of this composition are very popular with beekeepers – they use it on their labels – as you can see on this bottle that I took to Zimbabwe!
An alternative interpretation is that the ‘formling’ is a termites’ nest and that the dotted lines are winged termites leaving the nest. These creatures are a delicious food, sweet and nutty, and very nutritious. Kalahari San people apparently watch the entrances of termite nests and may close them with a grass plug in order for large numbers of winged termites to build up at the exit from the nest. Then they remove the plug and are able to gather large quantities very efficiently. The Toghwana Dam paintings may therefore show somebody who is controlling the flow of the winged termites.
How does one decide which explanation is right? After all, the artists themselves are dead, so there can be no final proof from them. But then that’s the point of research – to construct explanations for things (like rock art) that puzzle us. And in the absence of final proof, explanations cannot be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ – rather, they compete with each other – one explanation strives to be better than another.
So which explanation (if any) is best? To find out we need to look at more examples of ‘formlings’ at other rock art sites, to see if there are ‘patterns’ in the way they are depicted and associated with other images. In future posts I’ll show how ‘formlings’ are painted in more complex painted panels that include serpents, a menagerie of animals, fish and plants.