South African rock art offers picture of harmony

CLANWILLIAM – In the caves of South Africa’s Cederberg mountains, an ancient people left a legacy of rock art that could teach modern man a valuable lesson or two about living in harmony with nature.

That is the view of John Parkington, professor of archaeology at the University of Cape Town, who has spent 40 years in the Cederberg and neighbouring areas researching rock paintings and other artefacts left by the pre-colonial hunter-gatherers who once roamed southern Africa. The Bushmen, or San, left tens of thousands of paintings in ochre and clay, most depicting humans or three or four key animal species, and some showing men with the heads of animals.Parkington believes the pictures – some painted as recently as 200 years ago, others up to 10 000 years old – reflect the way the hunter-gatherers saw nature and their place in it, and include elements of shamanism.”With the domestication of plants and animals, humans started “moving ourselves out of the ecosystem …that was the beginning of the process that took us to the position of being outsiders”, he said.”That’s why we unbelievably and inexplicably are failing to recognise the threat of global warming, because we’re outside it,” he said.”We’re going to carry on manipulating it, as apparent owners of it, until it’s too late.”Parkington says the hunter-gatherers placed themselves inside the ecosystem, rather than outside looking in.”So they see animals as other beings who know the world in a different way …and sometimes in a very valuable way, and sometimes they want to take on that knowledge.”The animal that occurs most often in Cederberg rock paintings is the eland, a large antelope that Parkington said was revered by the Bushmen as “a beautiful sentient being”.He said they developed rules for hunting, “a guiding ethos”, as a way of justifying their pursuit of eland and of behaving “sustainably and responsibly in the world …as a species that actually shares the landscape and vegetation with other beings”.The hunter-gatherers went into decline after the arrival of white settlers in the Western Cape from the 1650s and with the encroachment of black pastoralists from the north.Persecuted by armed commandos, decimated by disease and driven from their territory by farmers, most of the survivors ended up as labourers or servants.”The pre-colonial hunter-gatherers were very much caricatured under colonialism and particularly under apartheid,” Parkington said.”All (their) achievements were denied or belittled.”So one of our objectives is we want to rehabilitate pre-colonial people, we want to celebrate their achievements.”Rock art researchers learned much about hunter-gatherer culture from groups of Bushmen who continued to follow their traditional lifestyle until relatively recently in remote areas of Botswana and Namibia.Their descendants still live in the Kalahari desert.Nampa-ReutersThe Bushmen, or San, left tens of thousands of paintings in ochre and clay, most depicting humans or three or four key animal species, and some showing men with the heads of animals.Parkington believes the pictures – some painted as recently as 200 years ago, others up to 10 000 years old – reflect the way the hunter-gatherers saw nature and their place in it, and include elements of shamanism.”With the domestication of plants and animals, humans started “moving ourselves out of the ecosystem …that was the beginning of the process that took us to the position of being outsiders”, he said.”That’s why we unbelievably and inexplicably are failing to recognise the threat of global warming, because we’re outside it,” he said.”We’re going to carry on manipulating it, as apparent owners of it, until it’s too late.”Parkington says the hunter-gatherers placed themselves inside the ecosystem, rather than outside looking in.”So they see animals as other beings who know the world in a different way …and sometimes in a very valuable way, and sometimes they want to take on that knowledge.”The animal that occurs most often in Cederberg rock paintings is the eland, a large antelope that Parkington said was revered by the Bushmen as “a beautiful sentient being”.He said they developed rules for hunting, “a guiding ethos”, as a way of justifying their pursuit of eland and of behaving “sustainably and responsibly in the world …as a species that actually shares the landscape and vegetation with other beings”.The hunter-gatherers went into decline after the arrival of white settlers in the Western Cape from the 1650s and with the encroachment of black pastoralists from the north.Persecuted by armed commandos, decimated by disease and driven from their territory by farmers, most of the survivors ended up as labourers or servants.”The pre-colonial hunter-gatherers were very much caricatured under colonialism and particularly under apartheid,” Parkington said.”All (their) achievements were denied or belittled.”So one of our objectives is we want to rehabilitate pre-colonial people, we want to celebrate their achievements.”Rock art researchers learned much about hunter-gatherer culture from groups of Bushmen who continued to follow their traditional lifestyle until relatively recently in remote areas of Botswana and Namibia.Their descendants still live in the Kalahari desert.Nampa-Reuters