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Not all South African rock art is old; some date back to colonial times – and were created by runaway slaves. It tells a remarkable story.
With the founding of the Cape Colony in 1652, European settlers were prohibited from enslaving indigenous Khoe, San, and African farmers. They had to look elsewhere for labor. Thus, the slaves captured and sold as property were reluctant migrants to Cape Town, transported – at great expense – from European colonies such as Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, the East Indies (now Indonesia), India. and Sri Lanka.
Much cheaper was the illegal trade in native slaves that developed in the border areas of the colony. The Khoe-San were forced into bondage when settlers took both land and livestock. Along with the immigrant slaves, they constituted the labor force of the colonial project.
Desertion was their most common form of rebellion. The fleeing slaves escaped to the border regions and mounted fierce resistance to the colonial advance of the 1700s through the mid-1800s. In most cases, the fugitives associated with groups of rogue hybrids (mixed outlaws), themselves descendants of Africans speaking San, Khoe and IsiNtu (hunter-gatherers, herders and farmers). Louis van Mauritius (a) led a rebellion of 300 slaves in 1808 and ‘Portrait of Júli, a faithful [Khoe-San]'(b) by William Burchell, 1822. Courtesy of Barry Jackson and the National Heritage Project Company / University of the Witwatersrand Library
Thus, we find recorded examples of groups of mixed bandits hiding in shelters under mountain rock, at a striking distance from colonial farms. Using guerrilla warfare, they attacked cattle and guns. In their refuge, they made rock art, images within their own belief systems that relate to escape and retaliation.
These sites can be reliably dated, as they include rock art images of horses and guns. In our most recent study of rock art in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, we see that this art also provides us with the perspective of the looters. Our fieldwork allows us to see something of slave and indigenous resistance outside the texts of colonial history.
The paintings
These mountainous regions are home to numerous rock shelters with paintings from the traditional body of “San rock art” (antelope and dances) which have become world famous. But due to nearly 2,000 years of contact with the new African shepherds and farmers, the art of hunter-gatherers has changed in appearance, if not in the essence of its meaning. However, the “disconnection” was most glaring during colonization. Artists’ societies have been deeply affected, disrupted and decimated. Where any art continued was that of mixed outlaws, often referred to simply as “Bushmen,” but who were in fact a composite of many cultural backgrounds. In the colonial border regions, paintings with (a) horses and guns and (b) ostriches and baboons. Courtesy of Sam Challis and Brent Sinclair-Thomson
The paintings themselves are also mixed – some painted with a brush, others with a finger – but are united by subjects relating to spiritual beliefs regarding escape and protective power. Some designs, including baboons and ostriches, continued to be used, but now appear alongside designs such as horses and guns. This suggests a certain continuity in the recognition of these animals, mystical or otherwise, as a subject relevant to people’s changing circumstances.
Despite these changes, groups of bandits, as mixed as they are, cling to, or even put forward, certain specific traditional beliefs.
Ritual specialists
The location of a mixed gang of outlaws in the Mankazana River Valley in what is now Eastern Cape comes from the archives of 1820 settler, poet and abolitionist Thomas Pringle. During our fieldwork in this area, we found cave paintings of horses, armed riders, and cattle raids that can be reliably dated to approximately the time Pringle was writing.
The fact that various groups of bandits painted depictions of cattle raids suggests that the raids were a fundamental concern for these groups. If we have learned anything from the last five decades of research into rock art in southern Africa, it is that the images are not mere representations of what artists have seen around them. Rather, these are what ritualists see when they travel the spirit world.
In the case of bandit groups, the ritual specialist often played the role of war doctor, who provided traditional medicine to provide protection in dangerous situations, including cattle raids and escape from bondage. The horses painted with the fingers and with the fine lines testify to the mixed nature of the groups of bandits, note the baboons under the black horse. Courtesy of Sam Challis and Brent Sinclair-Thomson
It is telling that these images also feature motifs relating to protection during raids as evidenced by the appearance of certain animals, notably baboons and ostriches.
Baboons are associated with protection throughout the Khoe-San and African peasant society. The | Xam San of the 1800s claimed that the baboon chewed a stick of so- / oa, a root medicine that would alert the user (animal or human) of approaching danger and keep them safe. Among the Xhosa, there is a related belief in Mabophe – probably the same root medicine. As so- / oh, mabophe was provided by ritual specialists for those who wished to exert a supernatural influence on projectile weapons, including turning ‘bullets into water’.
Protective animals
Many of these images are painted with a fine line, unshaded technique. But there are also images painted on the finger with a black or bright orange pigment, which have a distinct inflection of the speaker Khoe. In technique, they strongly resemble the art of the Korana raiders, north of the settlement, who were known to host runaway slaves.
Further into the hinterland, as if to mark the retreat of bandit groups as the colonial border extended, we discovered rock shelters in Stormberg and Zuurberg which have even more characteristics. of an indigenous resistance idiom. In one are images of people with horses and guns, as well as baboons and ostriches.
Read more: Ancient San rock art mural in South Africa reveals new meaning
The ostrich was recognized by the Khoe-San groups as particularly apt to escape danger. He could outrun most predators and jump over hunter nets. Khoe-San tied, and still does, the tendons of ostrich legs to their own legs to combat fatigue. Ostrich eggshell was recognized as a drug that could be crushed and consumed as a fortifying tonic. In bandit art, images of ritual specialists transforming into ostriches or baboons attest that they tapped into the powers of protective animals to secure their own escape from former kidnappers or as a result of cattle raids. .
The sight of the bandit
Although they were never officially recognized as slaves, the Khoe-San were uprooted from their lands and ways of life by European settlers and forced into bondage. This puts them in contact with immigrant slaves, alongside whom they often escape. In defiance, they attacked their former captors and other settlers and in rocky hiding places they painted their concerns.
The rock art of bandit groups is linked to the belief in the ability to invoke the protection of the supernatural. Baboons and ostriches, painted with images of cattle and people on horseback with guns, were hailed for their associated powers regarding evasion and protection during raids. For these runaway slaves, rock art was one of the many crucial ritual observances performed to prevent the likelihood of ever returning to a life of oppression.
Sam Challis receives funding from the NRF African Origins Platform and is a member of the Bradshaw Foundation Rock Art Network
Brent Sinclair-Thomson receives funding from the National Research Foundation African Origins Platform.
By Sam Challis, Principal Investigator, University of the Witwatersrand And
Brent Sinclair-Thomson, support staff, University of the Witwatersrand
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