Made in translation by Centre for Curating the Archive

A publication accompanying an exhibition at Iziko South African Museum, November 2010 to September 2011 Previous page: Joachim Lutz, a member of Frobeniusâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s team, at work in Mtoko cave, Zimbabwe

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F RA M I N G I MA G E S F R O M A N D O F T H E LA N D S CA P E

Frobenius setting up camp in Zimbabwe.

R O C K A RT M A D E I N T R A N S L AT I O N FRAMING IMAGES FROM AND OF THE LANDSCAPE

to accompany an exhibition at Iziko South Afr ican Museum curated by Pippa Skotnes and Petro Keene edited by

Pippa Skotnes with contributions by Kapilolo Mario Mahongo 16 Pippa Skotnes 25 Petro Keene 37 Marlene Winberg 47 Jill Weintroub 56 Pieter Jolly 67 José Manuel de Prada-Samper 75 Janette Deacon 83 Renée Rust 91 Stephen Inggs 99 ‘Ukuthula’ and ‘Horizons’ UCT Choir conducted by John Woodland 100 additional contributions to the exhibition by Thomas Car twright, Jos Thorne, Richard Mason, Cara van der Westhuizen, University of Cape Town, South African Rock Ar t Digital Archive

JACANA Johannesburg & Cape Town

A project of the Centre for Curating the Archive Michaelis School of Fine Art University of Cape Town www.cca.uct.ac.za

A PROJECT OF THE VISUAL UNIVERSITY AND ITS COLUMBARIUM First published 2010 by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd 10 Orange Street Auckland Park 2092, South Africa +27 11 628 3200 www.jacana.co.za ÂŠ Pippa Skotnes 2010 and individual authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form and by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN no: 978-1-4314-0080-5 Book design and layout by Pippa Skotnes Printed by Scan Shop See a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za

composition The putting (of things) into proper position, order, or relation to other things; orderly arrangement; ordering. compose, v. To make by putting together parts or elements: to make up, form, frame, fashion, construct, produce. To fashion or frame. To put together (parts or elements) so as to make up a whole; spec. in artistic use, To arrange artistically the elements of a landscape or painting. (for refl.) To enter into composition; to admit of artistic grouping. trans. To construct artistically.

frame, v. To shape, give shape to; to fashion, form. To adapt, adjust, fit to or into something. frame, n. The action of framing, fashioning, or constructing; a contrivance. An established order, plan, scheme, system. Adapted or adjusted condition; definite form, regular procedure; order, regularity, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;shapeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.

I NT R O D U CT I O N Pippa Skotnes and Petro Keene In November 1931 a consignment of painted copies of southern African rock art arrived at the Cape from Germany on the steamship Watussi. It had been assembled a few years prior to this by ethnographer and explorer Leo Viktor Frobenius, accompanied by a team of assistants, during an epic journey through the subcontinent. Almost five hundred paintings were packed into two cases (a purchase for which the Union of South Africa government had paid Frobenius £5000) and these were presented to the South African Museum in Cape Town. Amongst them were several enormous copies, one over ten metres in length, and many others representing rock art from a great diversity of sites. In the same year Dorothea Bleek presented the museum with the collection of paintings that her aunt Lucy Lloyd had purchased from George Stow’s wife not long after his death in 1882. These copies were made by Stow in the 1860s and 1870s during several expeditions into the mountainous regions of the Free State and Eastern Cape, and to the rock engraving sites of the northern Cape. Like Frobenius, Stow was driven to record the remarkable images he found on rock shelters and overhangs, and both their collections are remarkable artefacts of their inexhaustible energy. A few years later, in 1936, Dorothea Bleek gave the museum a small collection of copies she had made herself, along with 105 made by Helen Tongue in the Eastern Cape and Lesotho. Bleek and Tongue had been teachers together at the Rocklands Girls’ School in Cradock, and Helen had introduced Dorothea to rock art sites she was recording. With George Stow’s descriptions of the sites he had copied and visited, the two women undertook three field trips together to record San paintings. Tongue’s copies are amongst the loveliest in the Iziko collection. The Stow, Tongue and Frobenius paintings are at the heart of Iziko’s holdings of rock art copies, which include amongst others copies by Charles Schunke, Joseph Orpen, Thomas Bain, Maria Wilman, Louis Péringuey and Frédéric

Christol, and are also a focus of the exhibition that this publication accompanies. But the exhibition is not only about rock art; it is also, and centrally, about translation, and the ways in which methods of seeing and recording have translated the originals into copies. Our challenge has been not only to present these remarkable copies to the public, but to try to find ways to represent the acts of translation they represent. To this end we have done several things. Firstly, we have drawn attention to the act of framing â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the way in which compositions were created through the art of copying. Every copy requires selection, not least of all a selection of the part of the rock face that is to be included in the composition. The composition then reveals the very subjective choices of the copyist and reflects both his or her own style and attitude to the subject. George Stow, for instance, worked on standard sheets of Whatman paper, his compositions finding their balance within the frame of the rectangle and made with a careful understanding of the edges of the paper. His sense of a beleaguered people, forced out of their land by the intrusion of both black and white farmers, is often emphasised by the way in which he framed the images he copied. Frobenius, on the other hand, employed both smaller sheets of paper cut to different sizes and vast rolls of canvas that attempted to record paintings which covered huge expanses of rock. In these the panoramic view gives the works a quality of timelessness. Secondly, we have selected several instances of translation and asked individuals who have thought about these to write and contribute to the project. These include those who have thought about specific themes in the rock art or historically significant projects that have been important to the way in which we understand it. We have also included instances where other forms of translation provide oblique insights into the space and place of art and image making in the landscape. Marlene Winberg, for instance, explores the remarkable project in which Lucy Lloyd guided four !kun boys (from northern Namibia) to make several hundred drawings and watercolours that detailed life in the home from which they were abducted in the 1870s. Jill Weintroub gives an insight into the work of Dorothea Bleek who was, amongst other things, responsible for some of the earliest and most influential publications of rock art copies. Pieter Jolly shows how cave sites, including ones once occupied by the San, are now used as

spiritual centres and hint at overlapping belief systems that are a very part of the landscape itself. José Manuel de Prada-Samper writes of |k”umm, a presentiment or tapping felt in the body, which was described by |xam who worked with Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. He relates this directly to rock engravings, and in his contribution shows several layers of translation – from sensation to description, from description to text, from text to rock engraving and then to explanation. In Janette Deacon’s contribution she reveals the way in which ideas about rain-making and ancestral spirits are translated onto the rock face at a site mentioned by Dia!kwain in the 1870s. Deacon tracked down the site and copied the images she found there. She then relates these to stories told by Dia!kwain and places his drawings of the rain animal in this context. Her own copy becomes a marvellous realisation of the |xam act of ‘cutting’ the rain. Renée Rust’s essay tackles contemporary translations of images of therianthropic figures in the rock art associated with water. She traces traditions of belief in water beings or watermeide which have interpreted painted figures with putative fish tails as half-fish, half-human beings. She tracks belief in these beings back to the nineteenth century and shows that these ideas are still alive in the Little Karoo in the present. While others have interpreted these figures as swallow or swift-people (see Hollman 2005), the association with rain and water is powerful. Represented in the exhibition is the impressive digitising project of the South African Rock Art Digital Archive at Wits University, funded by that most enlightened of institutions, the Mellon Foundation. In this project, copies of rock art from collections around the country, including the Iziko collection, have been scanned and are available on their website at http://www.sarada.co.za/. Through this project historic collections of copies of paintings, and paintings by different authors of the same sites, can be compared and studied and, for the first time, the scope of the engagement with rock art and the acts of translation it has generated can be apprehended. Our third and our most challenging aim has been to try to represent the landscape itself. In some sense this is impossible, for the landscape is boundless and any representation requires a framing device. Our attempt has been to frame,

therefore, in ways that both draw attention to the frame and suggest there may be different ways of framing and, therefore, of understanding the context which the landscape provides. Kapilolo Mahongo’s contribution (originally spoken in !kun) suggests that the landscape is not only the stage and context for all that happens in it but, for the San, is so much part of it that it defines humanity. People’s lives are so deeply integrated into it and the stories they tell are so much a part of it, that we learn from him how significant, and potentially alienating, is the act of translation when we remove a painting from the landscape in the process of copying it. To overcome, if only in the smallest way, this alienation, we have included images from the landscape. In particular Stephen Inggs’s large panoramic photographs show the vast horizons of the Northern Cape from whence came the |xam – those people whose nineteenth century testimony has done much to animate our understanding of rock art. His photographs help to convey a sense of the land and to imagine a life within it. Other images are created from the colours and textures of the landscape, from objects made of bone and wood, skin and stone, shell and pod, and from photographs of places and sites visited by both the curators. We have also included in the exhibition, and on a CD in this publication, a beautiful evocation of the drama of a thunderstorm culminating in the composition ‘Horizons’ by Peter Louis van Dijk and sung by the UCT Choir conducted by John Woodland. In this, the sounds of animal and insect, the wind and rain, thunder and footfall, powerfully conjure up a space far from the museum and the city, and a time that was long ago. Finally, in some small way, even though massively translated, what is inescapable in this exhibition is the brilliance and creative genius of the San whose paintings are, in the first place, its inspiration.

All photographs were taken by Pippa Skotnes unless otherwise attributed.

Panoramic photograph of |xam lands by Stephen Inggs Arbeidsvreug

ST O R I E S A R E W R ITT E N IN OUR PLACES Kapilolo Mario Mahongo One day, long ago, an aardvark and a !kun hunter lived close to each other. One could say they were neighbours. The hunter’s lover was a beautiful woman, who lived in the same village as he. The only problem was this: she was married to the chief of the village. The hunter and the woman always met each other in secret. One fine day, the hunter went into the bush to find a good animal to shoot for the pot. He was unlucky, but at the end of a long and tiring day, he found a tree to lean against and rest his tired feet. All of a sudden, he noticed a big hole next to the tree. What? An aardvark was lying there! The hunter at once prepared to shoot it with his bow and arrow, but the aardvark spoke up. “Please do not kill me!” “But you are lying on top of the ground and it is daylight! It is your fault that I did not shoot a thing today. It is because you are out in the day while you are an animal of the night and supposed to be underground. Look how you have made things go wrong in this place today! Tja-tja!” “Well,” replied the aardvark, “the sun came up for me today. Tomorrow the sun will come up for you.” The hunter shook his head and thought about these words for a while. Confused, he decided to leave the aardvark and go away. In the meantime, back in the village, the chief was suspicious of his beautiful wife. He could not understand why she always went into the bush by herself, when all the other women went gathering food together and in a group. The chief decided to spy on her and told her that he was going to go away for three days. The beautiful wife wasted no time and told her lover, the hunter, of her husband’s leave. She invited him to her hut that very evening. The chief had no intention of staying away for that long. He was just fooling his wife so that he could spy on her. When it was pitch dark that night, he silently crept up to the door of the hut. He heard her voice and the hunter’s voice whispering inside the hut.

The chief roared in anger and jealousy. “I can hear you both in there! You are deceiving me.” The chief closed the door tightly so that the couple could not get out. He woke all the villagers and called them over. “Bring wood! Come! Let us dance! Tomorrow we will kill the man who stole my wife! We will kill the woman who has deceived me!” Inside the hut, the wife and the hunter were shivering with fear. What could they do? Meanwhile, the aardvark had heard this story. He started digging and digging. Just before sunset the next morning, the aardvark had reached their hut. He scratched away at the dirt and popped his head up into the centre of the hut. “Do you remember yesterday? Do you remember me telling you that the sun came up for me and that tomorrow the sun will come up for you? I have a plan for you. Come, come into the underground tunnel with me. The woman must close up the hole I have made with wood, and as soon as we are both out at the other side of the tunnel, she must make a fire.” The hunter followed the aardvark down the tunnel, crawled through and out on the other side. He went into the bush and shot a fat duiker. He slung it over his shoulder and went home to the village just as the sun was rising. He threw the duiker over the branch of a tree, sat down next to it and took out his smoking things. Puff, puff. Yes, the hunter leaned against the tree and casually smoked his pipe. What a commotion he caused! The villagers and the chief were preparing to kill him and here he was sitting next to a tree with a fresh duiker hanging on the tree! Oi-joi! The people were getting worried. “Open the door!” they called to the chief. “Let us see this man who you say is inside with your wife!” When the chief opened the door, he found the woman sitting there alone with no sign of any hunter. The woman was crying. “You have accused me falsely in front of the whole village! I am now finished with you.” The chief hung his head in shame. His marriage was destroyed and he had to pay both the hunter and the woman a large sum of money to compensate them for his accusations.

My story walks till here. Now this story tells us that, because the man listened to the aardvark and spared his life, he received compassion in return. Well, nature always has a solution for us. This is how stories and nature work together, hand in hand; the one cannot go in a separate direction from the other. Even my name has its own story. Kapilolo is the !kun name for a whistle. When I was young it was made from a reed in southern Angola which we cut and pressed on the one side so that we could blow music into it with our breath. This whistling imitated the call of the young duiker to its mother and, in this way, we could call it and hunt it. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s my name. No people in the world can survive without telling their stories. To tell your story makes you human because your humanity comes from your story and your background. The !kun childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s story that Marlene Winberg has written about in this book and exhibtion is an inheritance we did not know existed, because it is kept in books at the University of Cape Town. But inside our thoughts, we know it, because our !kun stories are written in our places where we grew up in Angola and Namibia, which is also where the !kun children grew up. Our greatgrandparents passed on the stories in the Lasanga River, from Kakiva, Chimbalanda, Bandwa, the place of little water and tjuie trees, Kwanda River, and Okavango, where we made up story songs about the tsitsawa and !xo !xo bird, where we fished the !xobe in the Ngongo River with its !xing, its water spirit. This next story belongs to that river. This story about Chamba Tsuma is about the spirit in that river and the people who lived outside the water. One day, two boys went fishing in the river. They caught a number of fish, but the one boy pulled a really strange-looking fish from the water. It was a Chamba Tsumu, a flat fish with only one eye, only one mouth. The boy felt, no, something is wrong here. He wanted to throw it back into the water, but the other boy said no, this is a fish, it must be eaten. In the meantime, there was a whole school of Chamba Tsumu fish under the water who were crying for their friend caught by the human children. They went

to their leader to complain about the humans who had caught their friend and were going to kill a Chamba Tsumu. The leader of the fish said no, above ground, the humans also have a leader. He was sure that the two children would go to their king to ask for his advice. “That leader is a judge. You will see,” said the Chamba Tsumu leader, “the human leader will tell the children to bring the Chamba Tsumu back to the river. You will see,” he said to them. Above ground, the boys went to show the fish to their parents. “What kind of a fish is this? How can he have only one eye?” “No, this is a wrong kind of fish, we cannot eat it.” They went to the leader of their clan and requested a meeting. The leader listened nicely to the boys and also to their parents’ story. The leader replied by saying that this story really worried him. There was only one solution. The boys must take the fish and put it back in exactly the same spot where they pulled it out. The parents accompanied the boys to the river and they threw the fish back exactly where they had found it. Underground, in the river, the Chamba Tsumu fish people were rejoicing. “See, here is Chamba Tsumu, back in the water! Oe-oe! We have a wise leader! He even knows what is happening above the river!” That is where the story ends for now.

Story translated by Marlene Winberg. Left: Painting of a fish by Tamme, 1881. (Iziko)

F R A M I N G R O C K A RT , M A K I N G C O M P O S IT I O N S Pippa Skotnes Translation is a process in which one language is reshaped in another, or ideas are expressed in different terms. It is also the act of rendering something in another medium: paintings translated into drawings and drawings into engravings or lithographs. Its usage implies the removal of something from one place or condition to another, indeed even the removal of a person from earth to heaven or, as in the case of Enoch and Elijah (and later Mary, mother of Christ), the translation to heaven without first undergoing death. Translation entails a point of view and requires a set of decisions, a search for equivalences that, constrained by attitude, time or tradition, render the translation the work of at least two people, never one. This is so much more the case when there are no equivalences. The copies that are at the heart of this project were all created from images that were at once in the context of the landscape and a part of it. Occasionally framed by cracks or other features in the rock surface, rock paintings were and are ultimately framed only by the landscape and by the idea of them as elements of the landscape. But even to speak of landscape is to bring a frame to the space in which the San painted. To refer to ‘landscape’ is already to frame a set of expectations about what it constitutes. A landscape suggests a prospect or vista, a scene taken in at a glance. It implies a form of distance. We photograph or film the landscape, we are able to provide complex panoramic views through it, but we cannot find satisfying equivalences. Being in the landscape is to be alert not only to what one sees but to what one senses. It is a multisensory experience and one which is changed by a thousand different things, from the dipping of the sun behind a cloud, to a shadow appearing in the nearby grass, to the drift up a river valley of an early morning mist. Throughout the history of rock art copying there has been a drive to make copies that are as ‘accurate’ as possible. But what is accuracy? How can one set

of images, rendered on a rock surface and subject to the changing light of day and night and the weathering of time, be translated in a single image on paper or film? What must take priority? What choices are made? And how do those priorities and choices reflect the subjectivity of the translator? Today, scholars and photographers, obsessed with iconography to the exclusion of all other aspects, are finding better ways to record the images that remain on the rocks. Tracing has become much more refined, capturing details that were previously overlooked; photographers are able to filter their photographs through multispectral imaging in ways that reveal images so faded that they are invisible to the naked eye; and digital video can give a sense of the cave or shelter in which the paintings are found. But these are still selective and subjective. There is no way in which the copyist can avoid the artificial framing of his or her translation. There is no escape from the rectangle, the Albertian panoptic frame which, once it had rendered the world in terms of one-point perspective, irrevocably shifted the way in which we see and understand. Moreover, not only are the copies framed versions of the originals, but the landscape itself is, for us, forever bounded in translation. This transformation, not only of the images that were painted on the rock surfaces but of the landscape itself, creates compositions of our own making and remakes the images in our own terms. For the San in pre-colonial times, being in the landscape was to live outside the Albertian frame. It is an existence unimaginable to us who live in towns and cities. This is not to say that the landscape was a ‘natural’ place – natural in the sense that we find it possible to make distinctions between ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’.

Indeed, the landscape was a deeply cultural and, at times, political space. Conflicts were enacted, histories were made in the landscape and resided in sites that resonated with their details. Stories, as ||kabbo so evocatively and by now famously described, floated on the wind. Features of the weather had human agency and the doings of animals and the movements of people were read like maps in the sand. My interest in this project has faced, centrally, two challenges. One has been visually to draw attention to the many ways in which the rock paintings of the San have been translated. This is not an exercise in interpretation, but an attempt to reveal that the act of translation itself is an interpretation. To this end care has been taken to present the copies as they were framed, paying attention to the paper use, the edges of each sheet, the ways in which images were composed by the copyist. Images have been chosen that reveal, quite unequivocally, the style and method of the copyist – his or her own ‘hand’ – for in this revelation the bias of the translator is partially revealed. Allied to this has been a second and continuing challenge: that of representing or translating that crucial component of the rock art which is almost entirely neglected, the landscape itself (although Janette Deacon’s work is a notable exception, and Walter Battiss was all but alone amongst those who copied and wrote about rock paintings in featuring the landscape as a component of the art). I have deemed this attempt important, central in fact, since the very notion of what constitutes a composition in San painting – and therefore the significance of the iconographical components that are chosen to be read in relation to each other – is inextricably bound up in the

way in which the paintings are located within the landscape. Indeed, the space that the paintings occupy, their realisation on the vertical and horizontal space of the rock surface and their spatial relationship to the environment in which they exist are, and must be, expressive of cultural values and ideas and not mere techniques of representation. For the San the landscape was not just a visible field in which the activities of the day and night took place. People’s relations with the land were invested with history, inherited stories, experiences, and a sense of the geography of ideas that were invisible, yet known and understood. In viewing the visible field about them, the San would surely have also seen in their mind’s eye the invisible world that was just as much part of their reality. Their experiences, their ideas about death and the agency of ‘sorcerers’, engaged both a subterranean world and a world that existed above the earth. Portals – and the paintings may well have been one – were important features of the land and the focus of an aspect of this exhibition. The landscape of the Karoo and the Northern Cape is rich with holes in the ground. Below the surface of the earth burrowing animals navigate their way through the roots of grasses and shrubs, small trees and creepers. Holes are made and inhabited by scorpions and spiders, mice and shrews, suricats and mongooses. One of the most energetic of burrowers is the anteater whose holes, in places, transform the landscape. Anteaters are such active diggers and their holes so numerous that abandoned burrows are quickly occupied by bat-eared foxes, hyænas, hares, civets, bats, jackals, owls and porcupines. “The porcupine’s house is stone,” said Dia!kwain, “the inside of the house is earth. The hole is earth; because the anteater is the one who has fashioned it. It (the anteater) also scratches it out along yonder, it makes the throat of the hole meet another’s holes throat, it breaks things.”1 Anteaters (or aardvarks) were animals who lived between two worlds, the world below and the world above. In |xam thought, the anteater also exerted influence at the time when the order of things was established. The Anteater’s Laws, which is also the title of a central story in |xam lore, were laws that determined the proper food for different animals and their appropriate behaviours. They signalled an end to the early times and the beginning of the later order of the world. In Kapilolo Mahongo’s story the

aardvark was the one who facilitated an underground escape and saved the life of the story’s protagonist. A rich language exists to describe holes. The |xam dictionary of Bleek and Lloyd demonstrates this with English translations for, amongst others, a hole, a little hole, a big hole, a great hole, the hole made by a digging stick, the ground of the hole, the hole’s house, the hole’s inside, the making of a hole, the hole above the nape of the neck and the hole at the lower back of the head, holes between the toes, a great hole’s house, the den’s big hole’s inside. The hole has a neck and a throat, it has an inside. A hole has, at times, unfathomable depth. ||kabbo told of the great hole to which all went after death and burial and lived there, no matter who or what the cause of death.2 In Korana lore, all people came from a hole in the ground, one hole, from which they emerged into life.3 For nineteenth-century !kun, holes were the day-time residence of stars (Skotnes 2010). Holes found in rock that fill with water are called the !hun. There are names for waterholes that are made in sand or surrounded by bushes. Waterholes are places where girls taken away by the Rain have become like beautiful waterflowers; these will not allow themselves to be plucked and disappear when approached. They become the water’s wives. Stars fall into waterholes, and they are also the home of the spirits of the dead. The holes portrayed in this exhibition are, however, not intended as vehicles for the elucidation of San ideas about the underworld, nor as phenomena that explain animal behaviour. They are also not meant to provide ideas that clarify or interpret the copies of rock paintings that form the rest of the exhibition. What I mean by them is to alert the viewer to aspects of the landscape that, together with others unidentified and those suggested by the panoramas, texts and musical composition included here, form part of the broader spatial and sensorial context in which the paintings exist and to which they must relate.

Holes were photographed in various locations mentioned in the Bleek and Lloyd archive or in historical records that bear testimony to the presence of the |xam.

FROBENIUS Petro Keene

Leo Viktor Frobenius was born in Berlin on 29 June 1873. As a child he was an enthusiastic and frequent visitor to the Berlin Zoological Garden where his grandfather, Dr Bodinus, worked as a superintendent. Here he engaged with Inuit people and others from Africa and Asia (Jahn 1974). Frobeniusâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fascination with Africa and his studies of cultures were influenced by these early visits and they kindled his imagination. Frobenius developed a passionate interest in the continent of Africa. He assembled data and artefacts from Africa, studied and wrote on folklore, while at the same time speculating on such things as the lost civilisation of Atlantis and its descendants (whom he later believed to be the Yoruba). His extensive African explorations formed his world view and he dedicated his life to the study of ethnic groups. Frobenius completed twelve expeditions in Africa between 1904 and 1935. It was, however, during his second expedition of 1907â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1909 in Mali, West Africa, that he began to take an interest in rock art. Frobenius was an immensely influential ethnologist in his time. Trained as an anthropologist, he applied the diffusionist theories of Ratzel and Schmidt to his work, asserting that most if not all important human Left: Frobenius with members of his team and companions, photographed in Pretoria during his tour of South Africa. Right: Frobenius photographed with a monkey at Belingwe, Zimbabwe. 37

discoveries or activities began in one place and spread to surrounding areas. In addition to this, he found cultural practices to be inextricably bound to the material resources available to people, and so geography and the landscape were critical in his researches. The study of Africans was vital, Frobenius insisted, for he believed they embodied otherwise unknowable ways of the human past. Frobenius published widely, and while his many volumes were enthusiastically received by lay people in his day, he has become a controversial character and has been criticised for his paternalism and ‘plundering’ on the African continent. Although he was vehemently opposed to Western materialism and aspired towards Romantic thought, he was undoubtedly a product of the Age of Empire, as his writings reveal. He amassed enormous quantities of valuable objects and on occasion resorted to coaxing and bribing indigenous peoples he encountered to supply him. The aim of his extensive collections was to sell the objects he had acquired to museums in Europe in order to ensure funding for further expeditions on the continent. Expedition to southern Africa, 1928–1930 With determination and commitment, Frobenius and a team of ethnographers and skilled artists undertook a journey to southern Africa from 1928 to 1930. They travelled through parts of South Africa, Lesotho, Namibia and Zimbabwe, as far north as the upper Zambezi. They journeyed by car, aided by oxen and donkeys to traverse the wide and deep rivers. The team set up camps at rock art sites, with tents, makeshift ladders, easels and artists’ paraphernalia.

Right: Images including features of the landscape copied by Frobenius at Makoni and Marondera, Zimbabwe. Below: Frobenius and his team traversing a river with oxen in the Free State, and right: repairing a motor car in Zimbabwe.

Enormous painted copies of rock art imagery were made on large sheets of paper joined together. They also produced fine illustrations of people, landscapes, village scenes and material culture. Team members photographed their journey, collected a wealth of ethnographic material and produced a 16mm film. Dorothea Bleek related in correspondence that soon after the Frobenius party arrived in South Africa, “Frobenius rushed like a storm through Cape Town” en route to Zimbabwe, while the ladies in the team were “painting industriously Bushman paintings” in Lesotho. Three ethnographers, Dr Adolf Jensen, Albert Seekirchner and Heinz Wieschhoff and four artists, Elisabeth Mannsfeld, Agnes Schulz, Maria Weyersberg and Joachim Lutz, accompanied Frobenius and his daughter Ruth. They were aided by local people as assistants during the lengthy and at times hazardous journey. Frobenius and the San world view Frobenius was intrigued by the San narratives documented by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. He regarded their ethnographic studies as a “treasure-trove for anthropologists and students alike” (Haberland 2007:119). The rock art of South Africa was perceived by him to be the “richest in the world”, in style as well as in the “individual or groups of paintings” (Haberland 2007:93). Frobenius (1931) classified southern African rock paintings into two categories. The paintings of the San he regarded as shamanic, while the paintings in the Zimbabwe region he claimed were classic paintings of an advanced

Photographs reproduced with permission from the Frobenius Institute, Germany.

culture whose origins lay in the ancient civilisations of southwestern Asia, Egypt and Crete. Some aspects of Frobenius’s approach to southern African rock art were intriguing and insightful. However, his diffusionist views and his repetitive references to the Asian and Egyptian influence in the art linking it to divine and sacrificial kings have, according to some, overshadowed his more interesting views (see Garlake 1987). Frobenius Institute, Frankfurt Deriving from Frobenius’s numerous expeditions, there exists today a rich archive of painted copies of rock art from all over the world, as well as innumerable notebooks, records of folklore, illustrations, photographs and ethnographic objects, housed at the Frobenius Institute, in Frankfurt, Germany. Amongst these are over two thousand copies of southern African rock art sites produced by Frobenius and his team during the 1928–1930 expedition. Over a thousand of these were produced in the field. Regrettably, some were destroyed during World War Two. The exhaustive collection of folklore assembled by Frobenius during the southern African expedition has recently resulted in a three-volume publication edited by Sabine Dinslage (2009). The Frobenius Institute’s photographic archive covering the southern African expedition comprises about 3500 photographs and these, along with the digitised painted copies, can be viewed online. (http://frobeniusinstitut.neuentwurf.de). Europeans were considered to be searching for scientific knowledge, but Frobenius noted: “[they] … had been enticed into a world of magic as weird as that once experienced by man in his earliest forms of culture, which are most alien to us” (Haberland 2007: 119).

Conclusion The extraordinary collection of paintings, photographs and written archival data that Frobenius assembled is testimony to the unrelenting spirit and dedication of a man entirely devoted to capturing the folklore of Africa and the rock art, which he believed was threatened and was fast-disappearing. His achievement in the face of long distances travelled over arduous and hazardous terrain is remarkable. Leo Frobenius was one of the most influential ethnologists of the twentieth century. He died in 1938 at his country home in Biganzolo on Lake Maggiore, Italy.

Left: Dianaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Vow, copied by Joachim Lutz at Rusape, Zimbabwe. Frobenius wrote in the Illustrated London News (1 March, 1930) of this painting in a flight of imaginitive reconstruction: â&#x20AC;&#x153;The upper subject gives a picture of a royal mummy wrapped in skins and crowned with a horned mask. Below on the right is his second wife, who is buried with her husband. The use of the mummifying process, with decorative wrappings and ornamental head-mask, suggests a prehistoric prototype of the royal burials in ancient Egypt as exemplified by the famous tomb of Tutankhamen [sic].â&#x20AC;? Today paintings such as these are interpreted in terms of San belief. Below: From left to right, details from copies made by Frobenius and Lutz at Goromonzi, Matopo Hills and Marondera, Zimbabwe. Next page: Painting by Elisabeth Mannsfeld, Zimbabwe.

‘ IT I S O N T H E E A RT H I N MY C O U NT RY , IT I S A B U N D A NT ’ L U CY L L OY D A N D T H E I M A G E S F R O M T H E L A N D S C A P E O F ! N A N N I , TA M M E , | U M A A N D D A , 1 8 7 9 – 1 8 8 1 . Marlene Winberg At sunrise, when the sun was small and had not risen because it was still in the ground, the |nu’she bird called out: “Ila ha,Ila ha, Ila ha” !

The four !kun boys, !nanni, Tamme, |uma and Da, were the children of huntergatherer parents who lived south of the Okavango River, in the north-east of Namibia, during the 1870s. Their childhoods were dramatically interrupted when the local “Makoba”, with whom the families had previously traded elephant meat and tusks, abducted them from their homes. Despite efforts by their families to secure their safety, the children were given to other traders in the region. For many months, they followed a succession of masters on foot and by ox wagon across the vast Namib Desert to Walvis Bay, where they were told to board the Louis Alfred. With its cargo of ostrich feathers, ivory and families of ‘Berg Damara’ (who were being sent as migrant labourers to the Cape Colony), the schooner set sail for Cape Town. On 1 September 1879, the two oldest boys, !nanni and Tamme, were placed in the Mowbray home of linguist and ethnographer Lucy Lloyd, to whom they told their stories. The two younger boys, Da and |uma, followed a year later, on 25 March 1880. Lloyd learnt the children’s language, recorded their stories in !kun and translated their words into English. The boys transformed their memories of the Namibian landscape into more than 520 watercolours and drawings, in sketchbooks and on loose scraps of paper, illustrating their daily experiences of the home and way of life they had been taken from. Half-eaten remains of a beast of prey killed by another animal. A dead man lying on the ground, bitten by a snake. Tracks. Trees. The roots of an edible plant they had pulled from the soil. The children recorded with remarkable detail the shape of seed pods, berries, fruit, flowers and the many other foods they had

gathered and eaten. The ||kuerre tree, for example, with its sweet-smelling flower, had red fruits which they roasted in the fire. Kani was the name of a plant that crept on the ground – its root was also roasted before they ate it. !karre, the small tree with light-coloured flowers and dark-coloured fruit, was good when boiled, while the Dui was roasted when it was still green and eaten raw when it was ripe. When people were thirsty, they drank the creeping tshaka’s fruit and threw the skins away. The boys described the behaviour of the animals they observed, how they relied on them, feared them and learnt from them. Elephants in particular loomed large in their landscape and imagination. They had a ”country” of their own, close to water and thorn trees, where elephant mothers would dig up “pits” for little elephants to play in and keep cool. The boys were taught that a !kun hunter would respect the heart of the elephant and never eat it, for fear that another elephant might kill him as a result. The children remembered the bird sounds from home, their songs, eggs and nests. !nanni told Lucy Lloyd that the black Kwai bird, who ate fruit from a small tree “laughs at me. It laughs at us.”1 The small |nu’she bird was feared by lizards, but was eaten by !nanni and his friends. At sunrise, when the sun was small and had not risen because it was still in the ground, the |nu’she bird called out: “Ila ha,Ila ha, Ila ha”!2 Karu, !nanni’s close companion and grandfather, told him about |xue, the mysterious character whose spirit was always present in many different shapes and forms, able to transform into a child, adult, animal, tree or many other features of their universe. As a hunter, |xue could be the invisible wind, silently stalking his prey on the hunting ground. As a child, |xue could be in tears, violent or peaceful. As water, |xue lay in the shadow of a tree and at sunset he returned to himself, living as the children did, in a grass hut next to a fire, with a knobkierie, a little hunting bag and other useful items. !nanni was afraid of |xue at night, even though his grandfather told him to “leave off fearing” because |xue was not there at night; he was sleeping. On these occasions, when !nanni was upset and fearful, Karu would comfort him with a bowl full of !naxane, a leafy plant also eaten by |xue when he was a person. The children mapped out their country with Lucy Lloyd, in drawings of the waterways, trade routes, places with trees, roads and the “countries” of the many

different people they had met and traded with, including Damara, Biriko kxao, Ovambo, Herero and Boers. They sketched their camping grounds, and their family graves, and talked to Lucy Lloyd about the night sky and how the moon was home to their ancestral spirits. They explained to her that their dead could manifest in many living forms, including snakes or lizards, and, when recognised as such, should not be killed but respected. The childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s world was one where life and death, transformation and change, were a part of their mental universe. Many of the stories and images from the childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nineteenth-century archive speak to the essence of their loss and innocence so deeply embedded in this collection. Juxtaposed with images and narratives by present-day !kun speakers, who grew up to the north of the Okavango River during the 1950s, before the Angolan war displaced them and their families, these images provide a remarkable sense of continuity to generations of !kun speakers across three centuries, as they translate their experience of disruption in the landscape. My father was !kun. My children, they will not live the life of my father who was !kun. I want to help them live this new life on Platfontein, this life of being a San. The old stories are quiet now. This is why I paint and draw. To show how it was, so that my children can see the life I lived before the new life of being San. (Thaalu Bernardo Rumai 1954â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2006).

1. http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/data/books/BC_151_A2_1_112/A2_1_112_09268.html 2. http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/data/books/BC_151_A2_1_119/A2_1_119_09875.html (note on the verso page)

This essay is illustrated by a selection of drawings made by the !kun boys and annotated by Lucy Lloyd. The full collection can be found at http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/. The image above was taken of the four boys at Mowbray.

From the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;abundant earthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; of the north of Namibia to the dry desert near Walvis Bay, where the boys were shipped to Cape Town in the 1870s.

K N OW I N G T H E LA N D S CA P E D O R OT H E A B L E E K

AND THE

R O C K A RT

OF THE

SAN

Jill Weintroub

Dorothea Bleek believed the rock paintings of southern Africa were important historical documents left by the original inhabitants of the country. “Those who know the people and have seen the great quantities of artistic work they have left, cannot help feeling that only from love of painting would they ever have painted so much, only from a spirit of emulation would they have covered the same rock-surface over and over again,” she wrote in 1930 in the introduction to her edited book featuring George Stow’s copies (Stow & Bleek 1930: xxiv-xxv). For Bleek, the painting tradition was produced by people who had enjoyed an idyllic lifestyle lived in a pristine landscape. The love of painting, she suggested, stemmed from the “large part pleasure, and the search for pleasure,

Above: This undated photograph of Dorothea Bleek with one of George Stow’s rock art copies is taken from the family album compiled by Bleek’s niece Marjorie Scott in the 1980s. (UCT)

plays in the life of primitive people” (Stow & Bleek 1930: xxv). She spent her career working to document and record the art, and to answer questions regarding its age, meaning and authorship. Right from the start, she argued that the scenes depicted on the rocks reflected the daily life, cultural expression and social history of the people who made them. The swathe of rock art sites stretching across southern Africa provided proof for Dorothea Bleek that the whole of South Africa and part of Central Africa had been inhabited for thousands of years by the San until African farmers came from the north-east, expelling or absorbing or exterminating them. Drawing particularly on the work of George Stow and his correspondence with her father, Wilhelm Bleek, and, later, her aunt, Lucy Lloyd, she was adamant that the artists were the ‘Bushmen’, the people whose language, culture and lifeways she had dedicated her life to studying. She thought that most paintings were a representation of what identified the people depicted on the rocks as San – specifically their daily activities such as hunting, dancing and masquerade, cattle raids and battles. In some cases, though, she believed paintings could be interpreted in terms of some of the myths she had read in the notebooks collected by her father and aunt during their ‘Bushman researches’ in their home at Mowbray in the 1870s. She saw evidence of what she understood to be myth or fable in paintings depicting animal-headed men, or of people turning into frogs or ‘fancy’ animals. She believed some paintings featured creatures of the imagination or legend such as rain bulls,- “which Bushman sorcerers are said to lead over the country in order to bring rain” (Tongue 1909: 14). Her feelings about the process of translating the rock paintings onto

Left: In 1932, Dorothea Bleek engaged the sisters Mollie and Joyce van der Riet to make rock art copies at sites in the Eastern Cape near the Grahamstown, Oudtshoorn and Uniondale areas. This image shows Mollie van der Riet copying paintings at Misgund. (UCT)

paper showed a degree of insight into the problem of ‘translation’. She worried that the copying process resulted in loss: “From the nature of the background the paintings seem to melt into the rock in a manner that cannot be reproduced on paper, which invariably gives the figures too sharp an outline,” she wrote (Stow & Bleek 1930: xii). She made thoughtful observations about perspective in paintings where animals were drawn “too long and narrow”, just as the human figures were. “It has been noticed by many visitors to rock-shelters that cattle passing at a distance had just that long-drawn-out appearance given to animals by Bushmen, so one concludes they painted what they saw” (Stow & Bleek 1930: xii). Bleek understood the history of the southern African landscape in terms of encroachment – a paradigm in which the indigenous San were overwhelmed by stronger ‘black races’ migrating from the north and ‘white settlers’ moving in from the south. She interpreted the rock art in keeping with this narrative and, again following Stow, took careful note of paintings reflecting battle scenes between different bands (see Bleek 1929). Bleek’s many field trips to rock art sites around the country had confirmed that animals, particularly the eland, loomed large in the paintings. This finding supported her reading of the Bleek and Lloyd notebook texts, where she similarly found an emphasis on animals as opposed to people in the folktales. Along with her insistence on local authorship of the paintings, Bleek maintained that most were recent and estimated most painted scenes as hundreds rather than thousands of years old. She cited the writings of early travellers in the Cape such as Thomas Arbousset, the French missionary who travelled to Basutoland in 1833, and John Barrow, who travelled in the Cape Colony in 1797-1798 and reported seeing people engaged in making paintings, to support her view. Bleek believed the art should be interpreted with reference to stone tools and other artefacts found near the paintings, and one should also take into consideration what was known more generally

about San cultures in southern Africa. She used her own ethnographic knowledge drawn from work in the field to identify paintings portraying cultural aspects such as clothing, adornment and types of weapon. In some paintings she noted “leather garments and trappings worn by the Bushmen found here a hundred years ago, and still sported by their brethren in the Kalahari”. In others, she noted how painted figures illustrated the custom of securing spare arrows in a band around the head during a hunt or battle. Her recourse to cultural observation was the basis of her critique of theories that the art tradition had been introduced by ancient ‘superior’ or ‘more civilised’ peoples from the East, a view expounded during the 1920s and 1930s by prehistorians such as the Abbé Breuil and Leo Frobenius. She took issue with attempts to date paintings in terms of colour and style, arguing that exposure to weather and type of rock surface differed widely from site to site, which meant that colour preservation could not be used to date paintings reliably. She saw regional differences in style and proficiency but nothing to suggest a different authorship. “To me, there does not seem to be evidence of any change greater than would be natural in an art practised through centuries,” she declared in a 1932 lecture to the South African Association for the Advancement of Science. Bleek was careful to separate engravings from paintings. Her view was that some of those she had seen, first in the Orange River Colony with Helen Tongue and later during her travels to the South West Africa Protectorate, the Kalahari and the northern Transvaal, were by virtue of their weathering of a “very great age”. Most paintings, on the other hand, were of a more recent date, and she used local knowledge of San presence in the landscape to arrive at a late date for the continuation of a painting tradition in particular areas. In the field, Bleek followed a route partly pioneered by George One of Dorothea Bleek’s field notebooks in which she made notes about her rock art trips. (UCT)

Stow, whose rock art copies recorded during the 1860s she had learnt about from her aunt Lucy Lloyd. Her first excursion into the landscape in search of rock art occurred soon after her return to South Africa in 1904. She took a teaching job at the Rocklands Girls’ School at Cradock in the Eastern Cape close to the southeastern Drakensberg, where the richest examples of southern African rock art are located. In Cradock she met Helen Tongue, a fellow teacher. The two embarked on a series of trips that culminated in a collection of one hundred or so rock art reproductions and a co-authored book in 1909. Bleek herself produced seven copies on this trip. Later, she made a small collection of charcoal rubbings while doing language research at Sandfontein in the South West Africa in 1920. After the first expeditions with Helen Tongue, Bleek made further trips into the field to examine examples of rock art. In 1928 she undertook a three-monthlong “cave journey” in search of rock art sites recorded earlier by Stow in the south-eastern Drakensberg and Lesotho. Later, in 1932, she engaged a pair of young artists to record rock art in the Eastern Cape, including Uniondale, Grahamstown, Oudtshoorn and Knysna. In the 1940s she commissioned the making of a further collection of copies in the Oudtshoorn, Uniondale and Albany districts by a team of artists led by James Eddie. These rock art excursions gave form to Bleek’s belief that careful observation and fieldwork would provide the empirical evidence for her comparative research into rock art and language. They gave practical expression to her deeply held view that knowing the landscape was a crucial aspect of scholarship. For Bleek, an intimate and personal experience of the landscape was fundamental to her lifelong project to understand the people she called Bushmen.

Right: Dorothea Bleek travelled by ox wagon to Kakia (now Khakhea) in the then Bechuanaland Protectorate (now Botswana) with her friend Margarethe Vollmer in 1913. This photograph of the women with unidentified members of their transport crew was taken by Bleek’s guide Ompilletsi. (Iziko) Dorothea Bleek’s knowledge of the notebooks recorded by her father and aunt allowed her to draw parallels between rock art and |xam folklore. Animals, she noticed, loomed large in both the rock art and the folktales. She commented on the number of painted eland she saw, describing the eland as the “favourite” animal of the “Bushmen”. Left and right: Detail from one of Helen Tongue’s copies.

Copies of rock paintings made by Helen Tongue in the Eastern Cape. (Iziko) Right: Helen Tongue’s notes about the paintings at Buffelsfontein record that she copied a “curious painting of a vulture attacking a dead eland” and “a couple of baboons, one holding the other’s tail” (Tongue 1909: 14) on this farm situated halfway between Molteno and Dordrecht in the Eastern Cape. At that site, she wrote, the farmer, Mr Henry Stretton, showed her what he considered to be the best paintings, and found her bits of red ochre, which he believed the “Bushmen” used “to decorate the walls of their dwelling”. She also found several representations of leopards on the walls of the cave, “one said to be climbing a tree”. Tongue noted that the paintings “have been very fine, but are fast becoming obliterated”.

W R ITT E N O N ST O N E , T R A N S L AT E D T H R O U G H T I M E R E L I G I O U S R O C K W R IT I N G I N S O M E O C C U P I E D S O UT H E R N A F R I C A N R O C K S H E LT E R S Pieter Jolly Rock shelters have been occupied for hundreds of thousands of years, not only in southern Africa but also in the rest of the world. They were humankind’s first permanent shelters and the form of shelter that has been occupied by them for the longest period of time. It was only relatively late in the history of their occupation, however, that people first began to ‘write’ on them. The earliest reliably dated San painting on the wall of a rock shelter is from the Thukela Valley in KwaZulu-Natal and is about 6500 years old. The San have been painting on the walls of rock shelters from at least this time, and probably much earlier, as portable painted stones from Namibia have been dated to around 27,000 years before the present. Research on the San rock art tradition over the last thirty years or so has revealed that it is, essentially although not exclusively, a religious art – one that is intimately bound up with shamanic beliefs and practices. Although the caves on whose walls the San painted served the utilitarian function of providing shelter from the elements, it seems very likely that, as natural ports of entry into the rock, they were also sometimes viewed as sacred spaces which provided entry to the spirit world behind the rock face. Paintings of people, animals and mythical creatures shown disappearing into, or emerging from, the rock face strongly suggest that this was the case. Moreover, the occupation of caves by ‘holy people’ worldwide indicates that this attitude to caves has been shared by many different groups of people through time. As well as serving the prosaic function of protecting people from the elements, caves were thus also seen by spirit

Mautse valley. A decorated shelter associated with the spirits who heal children.

mediators as suitable spaces for the performance of sacred rites. It is no coincidence, therefore, that Sotho and Nguni traditional healers, the counterparts within these societies of San shamans, have sometimes chosen to occupy structures built in caves and in the shelter of cliffs. These people combine traditional religious beliefs and rites based on veneration of the ancestors with Christian beliefs and rites. In some cases they have made their own distinctive religious markings, usually based on biblical texts, on the walls of rock shelters and cliffs. The religious rock painting tradition of the San has thus been supplanted by another form of sacred iconography, associated with a different culture. The process constitutes a translation of one visible means of communication with and about the spirit world (associated primarily with a hunter-gatherer world view) into another form (associated with an indigenous farming world view that has intersected with a European religious tradition). Cave and cliff sites in the Free State, such as the cave church at Modderpoort, the huge Motouleng cave, and the sacred valley of Mautse with its many shelters and cliffs, are visited by traditional healers and members of the African Independent Churches who have been called to these places by the ancestors. Some worshippers stay at Motouleng and Mautse for longer or shorter periods until they are cured of physical and mental ailments by the traditional healers who stay there. Others, themselves called in dreams and trance to become healers by the ancestors, stay at these places while they await further instructions from the shades concerning the spiritual journey they have begun. For shelter they build a wide range of unconventional structures from mud, stone and grass. These often represent a form of ‘dream architecture’, as it is in dreams that many of the structures’ forms are revealed to the builders. They place biblical texts and imagery on the walls of the caves and cliffs at these places as a means of adding spiritual power to the sites and marking out places of particular religious significance – as the San did with their paintings. Where San rock paintings are close by, as at the shelter above the church at Modderpoort, they appear to be perceived as adding power to the site. It is well

Above right: San painting near the cave church at Modderpoort. Above: Zionist religious texts inscribed on a stone wall within Motouleng Cave. Right: Grass structures built in Motouleng cave by people called by, and awaiting the instructions of, the ancestors.

known, for example, that Sotho and Nguni traditional healers believe that the paint has magical powers, and it is sometimes used in traditional medicines. Perhaps that is the reason why the great Sotho seer Mohlomi is said to have exclaimed when he first saw a cave with San rock paintings: â&#x20AC;&#x153;The shades have written here!â&#x20AC;? There is little doubt that San paintings are associated with the ancestors in the minds of some Sotho people, and it is for this reason that letters of supplication to the ancestors are sometimes placed in front of the San paintings in the Modderpoort rock shelter by visitors to the cave church.

This practice represents just one form of overlap in the belief systems of the San and Sothoâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;Nguni farming groups. In this process of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;spiritual interactionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, which would have begun some time after the arrival of Bantu-speaking farmers within the territories of the San of present-day South Africa and Lesotho, the cultures of the hunter-gatherers and the farmers had a mutual influence on each other, resulting in the development of syncretic beliefs and rites within both cultural groups. Some beliefs and rites of this kind are represented in the rock paintings of San communities that existed during the contact period.

Left: Cave church at Modderpoort with inscriptions on its walls. Below: Prophet/diviner from the Mautse valley. Grass prayer shelters in the foreground and rocks inscribed with biblical texts in the background. Right: Detail of the rocks inscribed with religious texts. Photographs by Pieter Jolly and Neil Rusch.

Panoramic photograph of |xam lands by Springbokoog

Stephen Inggs

ST R O K E S I N R O C K A N D F L E S H P R E S E NT I M E NT S , R O C K E N G R AV I N G S A N D LANDSCAPE IN ||KABBO’S PLACE José Manuel de Prada–Samper The !gwe: of the |xam people are in / inside their bodies. They (the !gwe:) talk, they move, they make their (the |xam’s) bodies move. They (the |xam) order silence to them (the other |xam); The man is altogether still / quiet, because he feels that his body / flesh is tapping (inside). A dream is that which deceives, it is that which cheats; the |k”umm is that which speaks truly, it is the one with which a |xam person is wont to perceive meat; because it (the |k”umm), was that which stirred / tapped / quivered. The |xam people do perceive the people coming, with it / by means of it.1 Thus begins a testimony which ||kabbo dictated to Lucy Lloyd in February and March 1873 and which, when published in Specimens of Bushman Folklore, bore the title of “Bushman Presentiments” (Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 330-339). The testimony explains the concept of |k”umm, a term which can be both a verb and a noun, and that Lloyd rendered as ‘presentiment’. This |k”umm manifests itself in the form of a ‘tapping’ (darruken) in the body of the person who feels it. Intriguing in itself, the concept of |k”umm becomes even more fascinating if we consider that the term !gwe: used by ||kabbo at the beginning of the narrative in connection with the ‘presentiments’ is, in all likelihood, the same one employed to refer to the rock engravings that mark the landscape in many places of the |xam territory.2

Thus, although both in the manuscript and in the published text, Lloyd rendered the first sentence “|xam ka !ke ta !gwe:, e: |e|eta hi eng-eng” as “the Bushmen’s letters which (are) in / inside of their bodies / flesh”, arguably it could be better rendered as “the pictures of |xam are in / inside their bodies”. Crucial to any interpretation of the sentence is the explanatory gloss to !gwe:. This term, we read in the published version (331), “was used to denote both letters and books”. However, the manuscript version reads “J. T. [||kabbo] says that this [!gwe:] resembles the letters which take a message or account to another place” (L.II.28: 2531v, my emphasis). This phrasing strongly suggests that ||kabbo did not use the term !gwe: as an approximation to the English concept of posted letters or had had it in mind when dictating the text, but rather that, when translating the testimony with Lloyd, he pointed out to her the similarity of the |xam’s !gwe: with the ‘letters’ that convey a message from one place to another. If I am right, in his testimony ||kabbo establishes a direct connection between the |k”umm and the rock engravings. The narrative describes how a man perceives the proximity of his father because he can feel in his own body a scar the old man has. Then he feels the proximity of a herd of springbok because, he says, “I am the one who feels a tapping in my calves (of the legs) when the blood will run down them (the springbok’s blood)” (2540). Later we are told, “we feel the tapping in our eyes, on account of the springbok’s eyes’ black marks” (2555-2556). A wound is a stroke in the body; the black stripe around the springbok’s eyes is a stroke in its fur; the blood that will run down the hunter’s calves will paint a red stroke in his legs. Strokes or markings are thus the essential element that channels the ‘tappings’ through which the |k”umm described in ||kabbo’s narrative manifest themselves. Strokes in the body connect the man with his father, the hunters with their potential prey. This kind of long-distance and interspecies communication would not be possible without the strokes or markings that, ||kabbo says, are !gwe:, ‘pictures’, which are in, or inside, our bodies, no doubt because the !gwe:, the rock engravings, are made of strokes in the rock, strokes which, unlike the others, are indelible and stand immutable in the landscape.3 If I am interpreting ||kabbo’s explanations correctly, these !gwe: outside

people’s bodies would also produce the |k”umm or ‘presentiments’, much in the same way as the body marks, thus establishing a bond between the place where they stood and the game animals, not necessarily those represented in the engravings. If that was the case, !giten specialised in the game might then have been able to channel such |k”umm to their own bodies and in this way perceive, and perhaps influence, the movements of the game over the land. As a matter of fact, “Bushman presentiments” is set in a very specific landscape, and movements of both people and animals in this landscape are central to ||kabbo’s explanation of what the |k”umm are. He tells how children are told by adults to ascend a certain hill, where they “may look around all places” (2537). The word used to refer to this hill is |kao:, a term that appears to have been employed mostly in connection with hills which have a pointed top, in some instances called in Afrikaans spitskop. Another man assents to what his companion is saying, and, among other things, he says, “for the ||xau: yonder standing is high”. In this case, ||xau: is the term for flat-topped, mesa-like hills. There can be no doubt that ||kabbo is talking about two different hills.4 These can be conclusively identified with the flat-topped hill which the |xam called ||gubbo gwai, “||gubbo male”, and which in modern maps appears as

1. All quotations are from the original manuscript, accessible at http://lloydbleekcollection. cs.uct.ac.za/data/stories/287/in dex.html. I have slightly edited the text and, for convenience’s sake, here and elsewhere I have replaced the English equivalent of the key terms with the original |xam. I have also somewhat simplified the orthography of the |xam words. "Bushman presentiments" is a complex narrative, and I hope to be able to offer elsewhere a fully annotated edition of, but I would like to outline here some of the essential elements derived from the interpretation of the term !gwe: I have just proposed. 2. See, Bleek 1956: 392, !gwe:, "letter, picture". See also http://lloydbleekcollection.cs. uct.ac.za/data/books/BC_151_ A2_1_076/A2_1_76_06074. html, where |han≠kass'o uses the word in relation to a rock art copy. 3. Scarifications would also be a kind of stroke in the body which would facilitate the |k"umm. In another testimony, ||kabbo described how the |xam used scarification "that the arrow may fly well at the springbok" (Bleek 1936: 145; Hollmann 2004: 301).

4. For another view of how the |xam classified hills, see Deacon (1998; 138-139). In the same landmark article, Deacon shows that the word "Brinkkop", with which both |xam terms are rendered in the English text, is generic rather than specific, and is how Lloyd spelled the Afrikaans term bruinkop.

Photographs were all taken at ||kabbo’s home in the Northern Cape. The first image is the south view from |kwobba. A herd of about 15 eland engraved in a boulder in the northern slope points towards the leegte in the background. The top of the koppie is littered with stone tools, ostrich eggshell and bones, testimony of its intensive use by the |xam as an observatory for the game. Arbeidsvreug, Northern Cape

Tafelkop (Bank 2006: 144), and with a much smaller koppie, with a narrow summit, which stands about three kilometres to the south of ||gubbo gwai. There is good reason to believe that the smaller koppie is a ‘little hill’ called |kwobba, included by ||kabbo in a list of his uncle’s places which he dictated to Wilhelm Bleek in September 1871 (B.II: 371). Both hills are home to engraved dolerite boulders. While the extensive summit of ||gubbo gwai does not allow the observation of the surrounding area from a single point, |kwobba is indeed a spot from which it is possible “to see all places”. Its top is littered with stone tools and fragments of ostrich egg-shell, as well as with bones, no doubt the remains of the meals of those who stayed there for hours watching for game. The rock engravings at |kwobba, or at least some of them, could very well be connected with its function as an observatory for game. The splendid group of about fifteen eland engraved in a rectangular boulder at the foot of the hill supports this notion, as they are heading south, in the direction of the leegte or dry riverbed which lies a few kilometres from the hill, and which ||kabbo mentions in his description of the area (2538-2539). If, as I have argued here, the engravings scratched in the rock worked as the markings in the body, their function, at least in places like ||gubbo gwai and |kwobba, could very well have been that of attracting, or maybe guiding, the game to areas where their movements could be conveniently observed by the hunters. Thus, for the |xam they would do much more than mark the landscape: they would literally project onto it an intricate web of invisible signals linking rock and flesh, hunter and prey.

T RA C I N G T H E ! K HWA KA X O R O , O R W AT E R - B U L L Janette Deacon

The challenge for rock art researchers is not to lose, but to make something of the translation of images from the rock face to the printed page or archive. It can be rewarding if the term ‘tracing’ engages at more than one level. In the example below, the first level deals with tracing nineteenth-century records of |xam San rain-making rituals. The second deals with the landscape by tracing the location of a place where rock engravings were made by a rain-maker in the nineteenthcentury. The third deals with the engravings themselves by copying original images onto tracing film in the 1980s and in the process identifying details relating to rain-making. Tracing the |xam rain-making ritual Detailed information about San rain-making was recorded from the testimony of |xam-speaking men who lived in the Northern Cape in the mid-nineteenth-century (Deacon 1988; Deacon & Foster 2005). The explanations were written down in Cape Town by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd between 1870 and 1882, after the |xam men had served sentences at the Breakwater Prison (Bleek & Lloyd 1911). Between June 1874 and January 1875, Dia!kwain, one of the |xam men, told Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd about the khwa:-ka !giten (medicine men (Bleek 1933)) who used to make rain fall so that the wild onions would grow. He explained how his father, Xaa-ttin, used to call on the spirit of his (Dia!kwain’s) late great-grandfather, !nuin /kuiten, when he wanted rain to fall (Bleek 1933). The rain-maker and his companions would go at night to a spring in a deep hole, where they knew the water-bull lived. They waited for the water-bull to return and threw a thong over its head. If necessary, they calmed it with sa, a sweet-smelling herb like buchu. Then they walked along and killed it on the way. “They cut it up, and rain falls at the place where they threw it down” (Bleek 1933).

Tracing the place where Xaa-ttin made engravings In May 1875, Dia!kwain drew a picture of the water-bull to show what it looked like. The caption (Bleek & Lloyd 1911) describes it as “An animal which is said to live in the water, and to be captured by the sorcerers and led about the country by them when they want to make rain”. In a report (Lloyd 1889: 19) and in the Preface to Specimens of Bushman Folklore (Bleek & Lloyd 1911: xiv), Lucy Lloyd wrote that Dia!kwain told her that his father, Xaa-ttin, had “himself chipped pictures of gemsbok, quaggas, ostriches, etc., at a place named !kann where these animals used to drink before the coming of the Boers”.

Photographs taken by Janette Deacon and Craig Foster at Varskans. Previous page: Kans se Vloer and the water-bull at Varskans. Right: Ouma !Uma, a N|uspeaking elder, poses with the Varskans waterbull; above: engravings at Varskans.

Dia!kwain and his brother-in-law were chased and arrested after they shot a farmer in 1869. Details of the search for them were found in police reports, now in the Cape Archives. I listed the places they mentioned and identified them on maps, and then drove around back roads enquiring from the present landowners. The grave of the farmer was pointed out on the farm Gifvlei, about 50 km west of Brandvlei. About 20 kilometres south-east of Gifvlei is Kans se Vloer, a large pan that fills with water after rain, and two neighbouring farms called Kans and Varskans. The name Kans, I was told by local farmers, came from a |xam word meaning a spring where water could always be found. It seems very likely that !kann was the origin of the word Kans, and that this was where Xaa-ttin had made rock engravings (Deacon 1988). Tracing rock engravings of water-bulls Within a hundred metres of one of the permanent springs on Varskans is a dolerite hill with between 20 and 30 rock engravings. They include images of gemsbok, quagga and ostriches, as well as eland and some recent graffiti. On the western side of the hill, three large boulders all have similar images engraved on them. Each depicts a large antelope that could be either a gemsbok or an eland, accompanied by wraith-like human figures. The technique used by the engraver was to first outline the animal, using a hard stone to break through the weathered crust of the dolerite, creating a colour contrast between the black crust and the grey unweathered inside. The crust over the body of the animal was removed by scraping it off and then smoothing it over, perhaps with grit on a leather pad rather like sandpaper. The human figures, whose bodies are smaller and thinner, were only scratched, with occasional smoothing where larger surfaces were exposed. Details became evident when I traced the images on the three engraved boulders, and related them to details of the rain-making ritual: • Lines from the head suggest the thong used to lead the water-bull. • Vertical lines across the body of the animal suggest the cuts made to kill the water-bull. • Most of the ‘human’ figures are wraith-like with therianthropic detail, suggesting portrayal of ancestral spirits called upon to help the rain-maker.

Tracing all three threads strongly suggests that the engravings on the three boulders depict the water-bull that was captured by rain-makers with the help of ancestral spirits. It is also possible that rain-makers used the engravings subsequently in their rituals and might have literally cut the engravings as well.

Tracing, by Janette Deacon, of one of the engravings of a large â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;water-bullâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; accompanied by a human figure representing a rain-maker and possibly ancestral spirits.

A drawing of the “Water-Bull”made by Dia!kwain for Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd in Mowbray, 1875. All Dia!kwain’s drawings can be found online at http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/

R O C K P A I NT I N G S I N T H E L ITT L E K A R O O A N D A L I N K T O A L O C A L ST O RY Renée Rust Ichthyoidal figures in the rock art, known as therianthropes, have a link to the socalled watermeide1 of a folklore in the Little Karoo and surrounding regions. Beliefs, old and of the present, are embodied in the numinous stories of the water creatures of the watermeid legend, in a landscape where vital interface takes place between the visual and the mythical. It is significant that the stories collected from the |xam people more than a hundred years ago are similar to those of the local people from Zoar and Amalienstein, Calitzdorp, Gamkaberg, Oudtshoorn and Baviaanskloof. The story and descriptions of the watermeid have remained the same as those told by Afrikaander, an elderly Bushman from Oudtshoorn, in the 1870s. Watermeide have human upper bodies and fish tails. They are alluring creatures with, in modern description, gleaming long hair. They live near water sources, in waterholes and rivers in the Little Karoo. Their mystical influence in local communities is still strong today as they hold powers to heal or cause illness, and to transform into other water creatures, especially snakes. If provoked, they can cause waters to flood and to harm people, but they can also bring on gentle rain. They draw people underwater to live with them in their watery domains. If these people return, they are given shamanic powers to heal and to foretell the future. The words of Hendrik Januarie, a poet from Zoar, make a strong linkage to living heritage when he is asked about the embodiment of the flooding waters in his poem ‘Noue Ontkoming’. He describes the water(s) as “ ‘n watergevaar” [an aquatic danger] (Januarie 2007: 20). He states: “Dit is water wese … soos die watermeid gevaar kan inhou, so is water ook ‘n krag” [It is a water being … as the watermeid may be dangerous, so water is a power] Painted figures at Ezeljagdspoort. Photographs by Renée Rust and Jan van der Poll. 91

(Januarie 2007, pers. comm.). Personification of the water creatures is woven throughout all the stories like a golden thread making the link. |han≠kass’o, a speaker of the |xam language and stories and teller of stories, whose accounts of water creatures and the Rain’s people in the Karoo were recorded in the 1870s; Afrikaander, the elderly Bushman from Oudtshoorn; and the informants of the Little Karoo today, all characterise water entities as influential spiritual forces. The personification of water, rain, and going into the spirit world of the water pits are recognised themes in the |xam texts. “Our mothers used to tell us, that a sorceror’s heart’s sound makes a noise like rain taking him away, because it feels that it goes away dying. Then his heart falls down into the water-pit. It sounds like rain as it goes into the water-pit which is alive, (into) its water. That is why it sounds like rain, because it enters water which also lives, as does he who is a sorceror” (Dia!kwain in Bleek 1935: 32). Ichthyoidal rock paintings in the Little Karoo The paintings at Ezeljagdspoort and other ’fish-tailed figures‘ of the Little Karoo resemble ’mermaids‘, according to a popular view today. The Ezeljagdspoort site is situated on the Brak River, south of the Kammanassie Mountains, near Oudtshoorn. These well-known rock paintings enjoyed ambiguous interest for more than 160 years after they were first reproduced in a book by Sir James Alexander (1837), because the figures resembled mythical beings with ichthyoidal lower limbs. These paintings were first copied in 1835 by Major CC Michell for Sir James Alexander on a visit to the site (Alexander 1837: 316). The upper part of these figures is human, with round heads, well-defined shoulders and arms sometimes holding sticks, while the lower part suggests fish tails. The lengthening and thickening of the lower body resembles the caudal peduncle length of a fish (the body section from behind the anal fin to the base of the caudal fin). The figures from Ezeljagdspoort are akin to other ichthyoidal therianthropic figures in rock art throughout the Little Karoo. Some examples are found near Cloete’s Pass, in the Langeberg, near Herold, in the Outeniqua Mountains and the Kammanassie Mountains, at Matjiesrivier, Calitzdorp and Minwater,2 south of the Gamkaberg. In other examples in the Kammanassie Mountains these figures are

painted in pigments of red-pink and white with red stripes decorating the bodies, with squared-off shoulders, arms and defined fingers. In some depictions the section of the lower body that resembles the caudal peduncle of a fish is painted with a band of colour, highlighting the lengthening and thickening of the lower body. Ezeljagdspoort and mythical water creatures In the 1870s, HC Schunke sent copies of the Ezeljagdspoort paintings to Wilhelm Bleek. Bleek described these figures as water maidens and made the connection to the story of the watermeid told by Afrikaander to D Ballot near Oudtshoorn. In 1875 Bleek wrote: “The subject of it (the watermaidens), was explained in a fine old legend to Mr. D. Ballot (who kindly copied it for Mr. Schunke), by a very old Bushman still surviving in those parts” (Bleek 1875: 20). Afrikaander had the firmest belief in the watermeide or water women and professed to know stories about them (Leeuwenberg 1970). One of them was about a girl dragged under the water as she stooped to pick a flower on the surface of the water. She lived with the water people and found it pleasant. She was careful not to say she wanted to eat fish as this would have been perilous, because the water people are half fish. After her mother threw a dried and powdered shrub onto the water, the girl returned from under the water to her family unhurt, with stories to relate about the water people (BC151 F1.16). In 1878, only three years after Afrikaander told his story of the watermeid, |han≠kass’o, the |xam informant, was shown the Ezeljagdspoort paintings by Lucy Lloyd. |han≠kass’o called these figures ‘Rain’s people’, which points to their mystical nature. He identified them as people because they had human arms and they held sticks1. The carrying of sticks was interpreted as ritualised behaviour. Dia!kwain, another |xam informant, explained that sorcerers (shamans) carry sticks when they dance (Bleek 1935). |han≠kass’o identified the long line with human head and human arms and fingers joining the other figures as !khwa: !hai:n, which dwells in the water and is worm-like.2 |han≠kass’o’s attitude to the water entities in the rock art substantiates the link with ritualized wisdom still active today in the Little Karoo. Left: The cave at Ezeljagdspoort and a detail of the painted figures.

Essentially the theme of the events that form part of the Ezeljagdspoort paintings and Afrikaander’s story concerns the mystical concept of water. Both events involve a concept of water people that live under water and are connected to the living. These San folktales can be linked to stories of the watermeide as told by informants living today in the Little Karoo of whom Hendrik Hefke is one. Hefke is retired and lives near Calitzdorp, at the foothills of the Rooiberg. The term watermeid is a colloquial term to denote a mythical water maiden. The word is an Afrikaans term, the language mostly spoken in the Little Karoo.The term is not used pejoratively in the text. Although watermeid is used more frequently, another descriptive term in the vernacular is meermin (mermaid) to describe the therianthropic ichthyoidal figures that occur in the rock art of the Little Karoo. The Minwater therianthropes are grouped, all facing in the same direction, some superimposing on others and touching. These figures are shown horizontally, symptomatic of ‘underwater’ postures. White finger dots in a row join this group of figures to the head of the large serpent, superimposing the image of a yellow bird pointing to the head of the serpent. Above the serpent figure are yellow human figures, one with a box-like head (no fill-in), lines emanating from these; another has horn-like projections from the head. They have red lines outlining well-defined legs, and red-coloured bands just above the buttocks reminiscent of the red band across the lower body of a fish-like image lower down and to the right of the serpent. These figures are also in a horizontal position with the legs ‘kicking’ upward and intertwined as if in a ‘swimming’ posture.This frieze of paintings at the Minwater site suggests metaphorical implication in image. The underwater metaphor is suggested by the fish-like human images ‘swimming’; by human figures in similar position; by shamans who are ‘underwater’ or ‘underground’ suggesting the spirit world; and these surrounding a serpent figure. The serpent/snake image suggests an image of a mythical water creature, and is linked to the spiritual and mythological world. It is a prominent figure in this frieze of paintings and its segmented underbelly distinctly shows how it twists out of the fissure in the rock face. The upper body is depicted ‘rearing up’ as if in threat display. The bird figure above the head of the serpent may be another metaphorical depiction of a shaman and his experience of transforming in trance, suggesting the metaphor of flight. These incongruent parts of the painting fit together and are essentials of the same belief tradition. The dominant part of this frieze confirms the significance and feature of water in allegory.

1. http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/data/books/BC_151_A2_1_076/A2_1_76_06063.html 2. http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/data/books/BC_151_A2_1_076/A2_1_76_06074.html

Noue ontkoming Aangeland is ek oorkoepel deur ’n skulp van ’n rots en teen ’n wand sien ek dié figure in roeserige rooi: wesens hand aan hand, party met arms wild omhoog, andere drywend, één met die hande en die knieë op die grond. Uit die talle stippels, oënskynlik druppels water, kon ek vermoed dit toon ’n vloed. Mettertyd Was dit helder: ’n instromende watergevaar soos tóé ervaar deur grotbewoners eeue en eeue terug.

Below: Hendrik Hefke at home in Zoar. Hefke relates in a verbatim account: “I know of a man who lived with the watermeid and water-people for months. Flowers drifting on the water took him in. He was pulled deeper and deeper into the water. The man was not allowed to say that he wanted to eat fish as they would have killed him … as they are half fish. It was beautiful in this place … When he returned to his people he was given great wisdom and could tell the future.” Translated from Afrikaans. (Hefke 2004, pers comm). Photograph by C Rust.

(Januarie 2007: 20)

Left: Minwater figures. 95

PA N O RA M I C P H OT O G RA P H S O F | XA M LA N D S, A R B E I D SV R E U G A N D S P R I N G B O K O O G Stephen Inggs The translation and visual representation of a landscape into a photographic image present a number of challenges that extend beyond optical depiction. Being in the landscape is a sensorial experience, in which one is in a central position relative to the surrounding environment. In contrast to binocular human vision coupled with the other senses, the single lens of a camera, no matter its precision, angle or depth-of-field, cannot express this tangible corporeal experience in the flat plane of a photograph. A translation from space to surface must take place. Moreover, a photographic image of the landscape is the capturing of an instantaneous moment that is forever made different by the time of day, light, weather, season and the succession of plant life. However, by introducing some of these variables into the photographic process together with imagination and craft, it is possible to begin to capture some the experiential nature of landscape. The time at which a photograph is taken is significant in establishing an anticipation of what is to follow â&#x20AC;&#x201C; whether it be dawn, midday, afternoon or dusk â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it sets the score. Working with small apertures to capture the detail in scene, it is possible to concentrate on light and texture. Positioning and rotating the camera and making a series of multiple exposures with a standard focal length lens can create a more natural expanse of image even if, when stitched together, the result is a surreally proportional (1:15) format, which, when coupled with printing at a large scale, can give a greater sense of being in the landscape. It is testimony to the image quality possible with medium-format film and high-resolution digital scanning and printing that the scale of these landscape photographs in the exhibition has been realised. In this publication the interspersed panoramic images each extend to over two metres in length and give a sense of the expanse of the home place of the |xam, whose nineteenth-century testimony has done so much to assist in the understanding of southern African rock art.

‘ U K UT H U L A ’ A N D ‘ H O R I Z O N S ’ University of Cape Town Choir conducted by John Woodland

‘Ukuthula’ (peace) is an African lullaby sung in the midst of the sounds of nature. This cradle song attempts to soothe and to ward off fear, often as much for the benefit of the caregiver as for the child. The calming first verse is followed by a call for ‘ukunqoba’ (victory) and, finally, ‘usindiso’ (salvation). The serenity of this soft plea for slumber is broken by the approach of a thunderstorm, representing our turbulent history, but also signifying hope, cleansing and renewal. As the storm dies away, the now-intensified appeal (“Sleep, my springbok baby”) opens Peter Louis van Dijk’s Horizons. Written for the King’s Singers in 1995, this poignant work is based on an eighteenth-century San painting of a Dutch ship, resplendent with flags and sails. The San, who identified with the springbok, anticipated the arrival of foreigners with awe, not knowing they would be the cause of their own demise. The piece’s harmonies, syncopation and percussive effects evoke a pre-colonial way of life lived in the landscape. Note on the University of Cape Town choir The UCT Choir is a fully student-run ensemble at the University of Cape Town. It has the distinction of being the most diverse musical group on campus and welcomes students from every faculty and discipline, external members and UCT alumni, and international students from across the globe. The forty-person choir, currently

under the direction of John Woodland, was founded in 1985. This year marks the choir's 25th anniversary. The UCT Choir enjoys exposing its singers and its audiences to a rich variety of cappella works from early classical to contemporary genres, both sacred and secular. The choir has toured extensively around the country and hopes to make its international debut soon. Annual events include participation in the Last Night of the Proms charity concerts in the Cape Town City Hall, a winter concert at St Paul’s Church in Rondebosch, a traditional choral service at St George's Cathedral and various other performances on campus and around Cape Town. The year always ends with the choir’s showcase ‘Jammie Concert’ in Jameson Hall on UCT’s Upper Campus.

Soprano: Elinor Auerbach, Caitlin Cooke, Adrienne Daniels, Natasha Karimakwenda, Keri Kirk, Alex Mayugba, Inez McGregor, Stephanie Pulker, Hannah Stuart-Clark, Kathryn Wicht Alto: Emily Chapman, Megan Gorven, Nolwazi Mjwara, Lindiwe Ngwevela, Gabby Reichert, Kate Rosholt Tenor: Michael Awood, Craig Howes, Nkosiyati Khumalo, Michael Marchant, Samkelo Mgobozi Bass: Sean Bethell, Simon Bethell, Felix Greif, Erik Mortensen, Edmund Rodseth, Jireh Sabapathy Director: John Woodland

Thanks to all the participants in this project and to staff at Iziko and the University of Cape Town who assisted in the preparation of the exhibition. ElbĂŠ Coetsee and Hella Rabbethge-Schiller generously loaned material from their private collections. Many thanks, once again, to Russell Jones and Scan Shop. A very special thanks to Dr Stuart Saunders and the Mellon Foundation who have given such extraordinary support to the project to conserve, document, research and publish historical collections of material relating to the San of pre- and early colonial times in southern Africa.

Left: These fragments are photographed slips of paper which form part of the |xam dictionary compiled by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. The dictionary, comprising tens of thousands of entries, and created with the assistance of the |xam who worked with Bleek and Lloyd, is now, along with their stories, what remains of the |xam language and the ideas it embodied. Bleek and Lloydâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s translations have been deeply influential in understanding rock art in southern Africa.

R E F E R E N C E S A N D S E L E CT E D OT H E R R E A D I N G S Alexander, JE. 1837. A narrative of exploration among the colonies of western Africa, and of a campaign in Kaffir-land. London: Henry Colburn Publisher. Bank, A. 2006. Bushmen in a Victorian world: the remarkable story of the Bleek-Lloyd collection of Bushman folklore. Cape Town: Double Storey. Bassett, ST. 2001. Rock paintings of South Africa: revealing a legacy. Cape Town: David Philip Publishers. Bassett, ST, Lewis-Williams, D and Smith, B. 2008. Reservoirs of potency: the documentary paintings of Stephen Townley Bassett. Johannesburg: Rock Art Research Institute. Battiss, W. 1948. The artists of the rocks. Pretoria: Red Fawn Press. Bleek, DF. 1929. Bushman folkore. Africa 2: 302-13. Bleek, DF. 1932. A survey of our present knowledge of rock paintings in South Africa. South African Journal of Science 29: 72-83. Bleek, DF. 1933. Beliefs and customs of the |Xam Bushmen. Part V: The Rain, Part VI: Rain-making. Bantu Studies 7: 297-312, 375-92. Bleek, DF. 1935. Beliefs and customs of the |Xam Bushmen. Part VII: Sorcerors. Bantu Studies 9: 1-47. Bleek, DF. 1936. Beliefs and customs of the |Xam Bushmen. Part VIII: More about sorcerors and charms. Bantu Studies 10: 131-62. Bleek, DF. 1956. A Bushman dictionary. New Haven: American Oriental Society. Bleek, WHI. 1875. Second report concerning Bushman researches. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of His Excellency the Governor. Cape Town: Saul Solomon & Co. Bleek, WHI and Lloyd, LC. 1911. Specimens of Bushman folklore. London: George Allen. Blundell, G. 2004. Nqabayo's Nomansland: San rock art and the somatic past. Uppsala: Uppsala University; Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press. Charteris, P (ed). Selected southern African rock art. Craighall: South African Archaeological Society. Chippendale, C. 2004. Pictures in place. London: Cambridge

Unviersity Press. Coulson, D and Campbell, A. 2001. African rock art: paintings and engravings on stone. New York: Harry N Abrams. Deacon, J. 1986. 'My place is the Bitterpits': the home territory of Bleek and Lloyd's |xam San informants. African Studies 45:136-55. Deacon, J. 1988. The power of a place in understanding southern San rock engravings. World Archaeology 20: 129-40. Deacon, J. 1998. My heart stands in the hill: rock engravings in the Northern Cape. In Andrew Bank (ed.), The proceedings of the Khoisan identities and cultural heritage conference. Cape Town: Infosource, pp. 135-41. Deacon, J & Foster, C. 2005. My heart stands in the hill. Cape Town: Struik. Dinslage, S. 2009. Animal husbands, magic horns and water spirits. folktales from southern Africa collected by Leo Frobenius. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe. Dowson, TA. 1992. Rock engravings of Southern Africa. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. The digital Bleek and Lloyd [online]. Available at: http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/ Fock, DML. 1972. Rock gongs at Keurfontein. South African Journal of Science 68: 246. Frobenius, L. 1931. Madsimu Dsangara: Südafrikanische Felsbilderchronik. Berlin and Zurich: Atlantis Verlag, Vols. 1-2. Graz: Akademische Druck und Verlagsanstalt. Garlake, P. 1995. The hunter’s vision: the prehistoric art of Zimbabwe. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Goodall, E. 1959. Prehistoric rock art of the Federation of Rhodesia & Nyasaland. Rhodesia and Nyasaland: National Publications Trust. Haberland, E. 2007. Leo Frobenius on African history, art and culture: an anthology. Princeton, New Jersey: Markus Wiener Publishers. Heyd, T and Clegg, J. 2005. Rock art and aesthetics. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Hollmann, JC (ed). 2004. Customs and beliefs of the |Xam

Bushmen. Johannesburg and Philadelphia: Wits University Press and Singing Rock Press. Jahn, J. 1974. Leo Frobenius: the demonic child. African and AfroAmerican Studies and Research Centre. Austin: University of Texas. Januarie, H. 2007. Nagjakkals. Cape Town: Kwela Books. Jolly, P. 2010. Rock shelter: some cave and cliff structures in Lesotho and South Africa. Cape Town: Vernacularch. Leeuwenberg, J. 1970. A Bushman legend from the George district. South African Archaeological Bulletin 25: 145-6. Lewis-Williams, D. 2003. Images of mystery: rock art of the Drakensberg. Cape Town: Double Storey. Lewis-Williams, D. 2004. The mind in the cave: consciousness and the origins of art. London: Thames and Hudson. Lewis-Williams, D and Dowson, T. 1990. Through the veil: San rock paintings and the rock face. South African Archaeological Bulletin 45: 5-16. Lloyd, LC. 1889. A short account of further Bushman material collected. Third report concerning Bushman researches presented to both Houses of Parliament of the Cape of Good Hope. London: David Nutt. Maggs, T (ed). (1979) 1991. Major rock paintings of southern Africa: facsimile reproductions by R Townley Johnson. Reprint, Cape Town. Mitchell, P and Smith, B (eds). 2009. The eland’s people: new perspectives in the rock art of the Maloti-Drakensberg Bushmen: essays in memory of Patricia Vinnicombe. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Nhamo, A. 2007. Immortalizing the past: reproductions of Zimbabwean rock art by Lionel Cripps. Harare: Weaver Press. Orpen, J. 1874. A glimpse into the mythology of the Maluti Bushmen. Cape Monthly Magazine 9 (49): 1–10. Pager, H. 1972. Ndedema. Graz: Akademische Druk. Parkington, J. 2002. The mantis, the eland and the hunter. Cape Town: Creda Communications. Parkington, J. 2003. Cederberg rock paintings. Clanwilliam: Living Landscape Project.

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C O NT R I B UT O R S Pippa Skotnes is an artist, Professor of Fine Art and the director of the Centre for Curating the Archive at the University of Cape Town. Petro Keene is Pre-colonial Archaeology Collections Manager at Iziko South African Museum. Kapilolo Mario Mahongo is a storyteller and collaborator on the Kulimatji story-telling project. He is leader of the !xun Traditional Council. Marlene Winberg is an author and collaborator on the Kulimatji story-telling project, and is completing a masters degree in the Centre for Curating the Archive, at the University of Cape Town. Jill Weintroub is completing her PhD on Dorothea Bleek at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape. Pieter Jolly is Research Associate at the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cape Town. JosĂŠ Manuel de Prada-Samper is a folklorist and Post-doctoral Fellow at the Centre for Curating the Archive, University of Cape Town. Janette Deacon is Honorary Research Associate at the Rock Art Research Institute University of the Witwatersrand. RenĂŠe Rust completed her PhD in the Department of Geology, Geography & Environmental Studies, University of Stellenbosch. Stephen Inggs is an artist, Associate Professor of Fine Art and current Director of the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. John Woodland is the current conductor of the University of Cape Town Choir.