Rock artwork as African historical past: what non secular photographs say about id, survival and alter

To “learn” the historical past of instances earlier than writing, students have historically used excavated proof. Stays like dwellings, burials and pots can reveal quite a bit about how individuals lived way back. In southern Africa, there’s one other archive to “learn” too: rock artwork. Rock artwork is primarily a report of non secular beliefs – but in addition displays the occasions that these beliefs made sense of.

Hunter-gatherers within the area, ancestors of right this moment’s San or BaTwa, made rock artwork for 1000’s of years earlier than African herders and farmers arrived from the north 2,000 years in the past and European colonists adopted by sea 350 years in the past.

On account of these contacts between teams of individuals, ethnic and financial boundaries turned more and more blurred. Rock artwork modified too, in method and material.

Rock artwork tells a story of individuals assembly, negotiating, combating, buying and selling with and marrying each other. The story is advised not in easy narrative, however in non secular beliefs. Our latest paper in Current Anthropology outlines the character, scale and results of contact between individuals in southern Africa, and the methods during which indigenous individuals produced photographs that engaged with change. It reveals that contact and colonisation, in time, created a “disconnect” with the previous that may be understood by taking a look at modifications in rock artwork.

The disconnect obvious within the rock artwork displays the disconnect in indigenous society extra typically. It reveals the blending and altering – and survival – of various individuals’s beliefs concerning the universe. It charts southern African historical past and, though it’s “written” when it comes to non secular beliefs, it’s the solely report that reveals what occurred from the San perspective.

It typically reveals the wrestle to withstand subjugation, and it depicts beliefs concerning the forces that may very well be summoned to withstand.

Shifts in rock artwork

What the San painted or engraved on rock was their imaginative and prescient of what occurred in a trance state. The artists entered this trance state so as to set up connections with animals and spirits in the landscape, to affect their actions, and to derive the facility to make rain and heal the sick.

Rock artwork was by no means unchanging, however new traditions and kinds appeared when African farmers arrived in southern Africa from about 2,000 years in the past, and when pastoralism was later launched. Additional modifications got here with the arrival of Khoe-speakers about 1,000 years ago. These Khoe-speaking herders had been themselves descended from earlier mixing between hunter-gatherers and east African pastoralists.

Adjustments appeared within the rock artwork’s content material – for instance the animals and supplies portrayed – and within the inventive methods used.

Eland antelope (the one with probably the most non secular energy for the San) had been as soon as lovingly drafted and shaded. Later they appeared in vivid, chalky and vivid colors, rendered in a posterlike and blocky style. The drop in pigment high quality was probably because of the breakdown of commerce networks caused by marginalisation, then slaughter, of indigenous individuals, however nonetheless they known as on the facility of the eland to assist them.

We see footage of cattle and sheep showing in rock artwork, and finger-painted and engraved patterns related to women’ initiation, widespread to pastoralist and hunter-gatherer societies. The photographs present that individuals’s id (ethnicity) and the way in which they survived (financial system) weren’t divided into clear teams. Hunters weren’t essentially all San, and all San weren’t essentially hunters. The blurring of boundaries between teams elevated with time.

As time went on, all these individuals turned topic to extermination coverage, slavery and marginalisation. However fairly than being passive receptors of change, they used their faith, comprising multicultural beliefs, to outlive. This may be seen within the rock artwork they created.

Non secular ideas of water

Conceptions of the rain, within the type of photographs of water bulls and water snakes, are significantly helpful for analyzing cross-cultural influences.

For African farmers, snakes had been related to water. Hunter-gatherers and herders with whom they got here into contact acknowledged this as a result of they, too, already had beliefs about water and the animal entities embodied by it.

Folks from completely different language teams could have gathered collectively for women’ initiation ceremonies at websites the place the nice water snake emerged. At these areas, this non secular creature’s physique, the undulating rock, is roofed with markings to attraction to it – the markings that additionally seem on the initiates’ tattoos, face paint, clothes and luggage.

The management of water, to make rain for pasture and crops, was traded (bartered for cattle) between teams, very probably for hundreds of years. Rock artwork photographs of water snakes, water bulls and home cattle intertwine and superimpose each other; typically water snakes have cattle horns. Typically, water bulls or water snakes had been depicted being killed to make their blood – the rain – fall.

Water was additionally extraordinarily vital to these wishing to fight the encroaching colonists. By this time the individuals of southern Africa, no matter background, held many beliefs in common. The individuals or entities that lived underwater may very well be known as upon to affect conditions: torrential rain to scrub away the tracks of stolen animals, for instance.

Raiding and escape

By the point colonists arrived, hunter-gatherers had sheep, and isiNtu-speakers (African farmers) had adopted features of hunter-gatherer beliefs, and vice versa.

San had been more and more marginalised from well-watered pasture appropriate for home herds of African herders and farmers. Some turned herders themselves, some blended with farmers and a few turned raiders. Then, with the enlargement of settler farms within the 18th century (which in addition they raided) they had been decimated, hunted and enslaved.

Within the rock artwork, baboons turned a logo of protecting energy to allow raiders to flee unhurt. The foundation of a strong medication, so-|oa or mabophe – carefully related to baboons – enabled inventory thieves to move unnoticed, and “turned bullets to water”. We see this within the work of individuals taking up the facility and options of baboons, showing alongside horses and cattle.

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Horses, the magical automobiles of violence, passage and escape, had been stored and cared for by their new house owners – the raider teams. They painted themselves in scenes earlier than, throughout and after raids, not as a diary entry however as a part of the [ritual] of making certain the end result was beneficial and the reminiscence made constructive.

We will now see modifications in rock artwork, from “conventional” animals like rhebok and eland, to these displaying rain bulls being killed, rain snakes captured, individuals with shields and spears, or using horses alongside baboons, in a new light.