This is about Bushman paintings. And about friendship, personal history and private passions. It involves a lot of driving, some scrambling and late-night talking.
I was brought up on stories about Bushmen and their paintings. My mother was raised on a farm in the Kalahari and told many stories about the indigenous people who once lived there. Her grandfather, a sheep inspector, could speak their complicated click language (or so I was told). We had a tea tray made from ceramic tiles that depicted Bushman paintings: running men, graceful animals; naïve and exotic. I would stare at the tray, fascinated but not understanding why.
At school we learned about the Bushman tribes. As with all the history we were taught in the South African school system in the 1970s, it was filtered through a colonial lens and the ideology of Apartheid. Bushmen we learned were skilled hunters, ingenious at finding water in the desert and surviving without drinking for long periods. They shot their prey with poisoned arrows, then pursued them for miles and miles waiting for the animals to collapse. They painted on rock overhangs where they lived for short periods before moving on as hunter gatherers.
Their stone age life of 20,000 years (see box) changed dramatically when pastoral people moved south, and Europeans arrived on the southern coast in the mid-1600s and began to move north. They were hated by the white farmers because they stole farm animals and were driven away or indiscriminately killed, treated like vermin. I heard stories of white people killing Bushmen, burying their bodies in the Kalahari sand and returning later to extract the skeletons to sell to museums in Europe. These stories were disturbing but within the context of South Africa’s violent past and violent present, not particularly shocking for a little white boy growing up in some of the darkest days of Apartheid. It was easy then to have a particularly warped view of the world even though my background was Christian and liberal.
Then I met Ben, the eldest son of a family of academics who came to live across the road. He was in my class at the local school. He was tall, very bright, introverted and sensitive. In a rugby-mad school he was immediately put in the line-out because he towered above the rest. But much to the annoyance of the coach, Ben had no interest in jumping for the ball or the close, sweaty body contact that followed. His sensitivity surprised classmates one day when the maths teacher used Ben’s stout ruler to whack another pupil, breaking it. The beaten boy was stoic but Ben burst into tears: the ruler was a gift from his grandfather who had survived the First World War and whom Ben adored.
I liked Ben and we became friends. I introduced him to a fellow school mate, John Hodges, with whom I went fishing in his uncle’s farm dam. The property had a shallow cave which we explored, finding a Bushman smoking pipe. With Ben’s encouragement we took it to the local museum for identification. After a stern reprimand for interfering with an archaeological site, it was agreed that we could join a dig in the cave, supervised by the museum. My interest in Bushmen art and artifacts increased.
A word about naming: San, KhoiKhoi and Bushmen
Given the politics of southern Africa, the naming of indigenous people is understandably sensitive. It is generally agreed that for about 20,000 years the people who lived in the large area now known as South Africa were the Bushmen, also known as the San. They were hunter-gatherers who used stone tools and ostrich eggs to carry and store water. They lived by hunting wild game and gathering plants. Those on the coast fished and harvested shellfish, creating middens which are still visible today.
About 2,000 years ago a pastoral people called the Khoikhoi began moving south into the area occupied by the Bushmen. The KhoiKhoi brought with them fat-tailed sheep and cattle, originating from the Middle East. Their presence created conflict as the grazing animals displaced wild game. The Khoikhoi were also hunters, further diminishing the resources of the San who either dispersed or converted to a pastoral existence, often plundering the KhoiKhoi’s livestock.
The Dutch arrived in the mid-1600s to find the Khoikhoi, whom they called Hottentots, as the dominant grouping in the Cape. The Dutch referred to the San people as Bosjesmans – Bushmen. Today, a small group of San people live in the Kalahari area of Botswana. Academics refer to them and their ancestors as Bushmen. This naming is considered politically correct.
Ben spent most of his life working as a journalist, ending his career reporting on the South African parliament for a wire service. His passions lay elsewhere, and he wrote books on local history and continued his childhood fascination, inspired by his grandfather, with the First World War. On retirement he bought an isolated farm literally at the end of the track, in a depopulated region in the north- Eastern Cape, near the mountainous kingdom of Lesotho. The area is high altitude with snowfalls frequent in the winter, and searing summer heat. Except for valleys choked with European poplars, the landscape is treeless and covered with a tough grass. Farmers run cattle and sheep and only cultivate for fodder. The views are stunning, beautifully bleak.
Ben’s farm had been unoccupied for decades, and the house, close to the family burial ground, left to rot. While Ben’s wife, Gill, cared for her ageing mother in Cape Town, he moved to the farm alone in 2011. The nearest town, Dordrecht, is almost an hour’s drive away over roads that are bad at the best of times and appalling when it rains, and the nearest neighbour farmer five kilometres distant. Over the past 14 years he has with the help of occasional labour, renovated the house, planted a variety of oak trees (some now big enough to shade a small car) and brought life back to the farm. Living conditions are, at best, agricultural and reflect Ben’s priorities: an outside composting lavatory with a roof but no door; an outside shower heated by a coil of black pipe; a kitchen-cum living room where baths can be taken in a pioneer style tub from water heated on a wood-burning stove. Teeth are brushed at an industrial sized sink built to a height that suits tall Ben. Shorter people, like me, use a stool provided to ensure they spit cleanly.
Ben is chairman of the community-run museum in Dordrecht, where he has set up displays on the turbulent Anglo-Boer War history of the area, and its equally impressive plant and dinosaur fossil record. But he has another, more driving, passion. He has spent an inordinate amount of time walking, scrambling, and clambering through thorn bush on his land and neighbouring farms in search of Bushman paintings. These are found for the most part in shallow sandstone overhangs, forming a sort of multi-venue outdoor art gallery. It’s an extraordinarily rich heritage, but one that’s under constant threat from the weather, rubbing by animals, vandalism and the simple decay of the rock on which it’s painted. Ben is doing his best to record as much as possible, before it vanishes forever. Thus far he has documented just under 300 sites in the area around his farm and in neighbouring valleys – and believes he has only scratched the surface.
I had not seen Ben for over a decade. I drove for eight hours from the Western Cape and followed his map which took me along farm roads that soon became a single dirt track with alarming potholes, passing derelict farmhouses before finding his place named Skilderkrans (Afrikaans for painted cliff).
I found him on his bright red Massey-Ferguson 165, a sort of Lego-looking tractor. He wore a tattered hat and looked very happy. He showed me his mechanical project in a shed which is to restore a grey Massey-Harris TE20, one of the millions produced in Coventry and dispersed to former British colonies after the war. They were all grey and in South Africa the locals called them Vaaljapies (grey simpleton farm boys).
Walking on his farm Ben, showed me where the Bushmen had sourced hornfels, the hard black stone they used to make the tools used for everyday tasks, such as cutting meat and preparing skins. The discarded tools and waste material from their making lay on the ground looking like everyday stones to the untrained eye.
We packed a Stanley flask of tea and plenty of water before a short drive in Ben’s Nissan pickup truck to a neighbouring farm to look at paintings. We climbed a barbed wire fence and set off on foot across the thick grass to a distant basin that looked like it had been scoured by a skidding meteorite, descending into the bowl before scrambling up to the sandstone overhangs.
I was unprepared for what I was about to see. Ben parted a bush and there, at kneeling height, were surprisingly well-preserved ancient paintings of antelope, elephants and running figures. The shapes and colours were, of course, familiar from books and, indeed, my mother’s tea tray. But here, somehow surviving thousands of years, were the actual brush strokes of the artists who used feathers and sticks to transfer self-made pigments to the sandstone. Some of the images were over-painted with, for example, a human form super-imposed on an antelope.
I had always understood the paintings to be narrative, depicting hunting scenes. I had been told that they were also a form of communication between the travelling groups of Bushmen who would, at different times, occupy the same natural shelters, providing information on the game and plants available in the area.
Ben told me otherwise. He pointed to a painting of a person with thin, straight lines coming from his nose. A baboon was painted in the same way. Some of the people depicted had distorted legs, antelope-like. On a crack in the sandstone were truncated images of people and animals either entering or exiting the crack. The current thinking, Ben said, is that many of the paintings have spiritual significance. The Bushmen were known for their circular shuffle dancing and chanting. They would dance deep into the night until they were in a trance, when their noses would sometimes bleed. The straight lines in the paintings depicted the blood. The distorted limbs showed morphing from human to animals. And the images disappearing into the crack could depict transition from the ‘real’ world to the spiritual world that lay behind the rock face. The overpainting, to me, looked like an act of prehistoric vandalism. But Ben explained that the Bushman notion of ‘art’ would have been very different from ours, and that the overpainting was more likely to be an honouring of earlier images of spiritual power.
It is thought that the painters were shamans, the medicine men in the groups who sourced wild plants and administered potions to the sick. There were many shamans, and some were more talented painters than others – you could see this from some distinctly lumpy depictions of animals which contrasted with more delicate renditions.
We of course do not know for sure because nothing was ever written down or communicated. But the spiritual significance of the paintings does make sense on the evidence, and this is now the dominant theory to explain why the Bushmen were so prolific in their rock painting.
Ben and I sat and drank tea, watching swallows recently arrived from Europe darting about in search of insects and swooping into the overhangs to make their mud nests or repair those they had left the year before. The stone age ancestors of those swallows had probably witnessed the painters at work.
Ben walked me to two more nearby sites, equally impressive. He said much progress had been made in deciphering some of the indistinct paintings, using software that enhances photographs of the markings.
We drove back to Ben’s farm in silence. We spent the evening talking about techniques used to identify indistinct markings and the current theories on the motivations of the painters. I left early the next day for the long drive back. Thunderstorms were expected. Approaching the basin where we had parked in Ben’s truck, I stopped to watch swallows gathering mud from a rain-filled pothole. They flew off, heading in the direction of the caves we visited the day before, as their predecessors had done for thousands of years.
Download a short guide to Bushman rock art and find more information here