National Museum keeps rock art alive

Nnasaretha Kgamanyane
Correspondent | Friday June 1, 2012 00:00

These countries are South Africa, Botswana, Mozambique and Mexico, which are working on preserving the rock art for tourism purposes and posterity. Makgabeng Train Shelter at Limpopo, South Africa, showed historical events and rituals associated with rites of passage often represented in the coarsely applied, predominantly white pigment.  The rock art depicts the tradition of the Bantu speaking farmers who practised both arable and pastoral farming.

Kwa Bhaliwe Site in the Eastern Cape has drawings of springbok whereby white and brown pigments known as earth colours are used.  Eland paintings are frequently detailed to reveal the hairline brush strokes that portray the tuft of hairs on the forelock of its head, the eye, nostrils and other defined features of the animal.  Still in South Africa, there is Game Pass Shelter in Kwa-Zulu Natal at Unkhahlamba where a hill's layers are drawn or painted with as many animals as possible making a mark or pattern that reduces with the size of the hill.  The Rosseta stone is a magnificent panel of dying enland associated and transformed human beings helped crack the code to the understanding of San rock art as full of religious and shamanistic symbols.  The paintings show the life of the ancient people at the time, illustrating how they made animals part of their lives. One of the beautiful paintings is the Drieskops Enland Site where a river engraved site on a rock pavement that is the river-bed that floods seasonally, and comprises mostly geometric forms with only a few animal depictions.  The place used to be a ritual arena for the performance of rites of passage or rainmaking.  There is a symbol marked in the rock on the centre of the riverine.

Botswana's only heritage site rich with animal drawings are found in The Tsodilo Hills that are known to be ancestral hills.  These hills are centred on the history of the country are said to be a sacred place.  The dancing penises, as it is known, has paintings on the roof of a large boulder that rests on two smaller bounders to form a shelter with two entrances of contrasting views.  The hill has paintings of different animals including the impalas, rhinoceros and oxen.  A 410-metre hill forms a stand backdrop conjecture from the only high landscape bordered by vast ancient Kalahari Desert sand dunes.

Mexico, a country regarded to be the richest in rock art or hills worldwide, possesses many rock art paintings.

Some of them are at Up Montage in Sierra da San Francisco, a collage of close up images portraying anthropomorphic figures, animals, numerical forms and other features which suggest a strong symbolic focus of this rock tradition. Cueva Pintada shows animals and people half black and brown.  The drawings implicated wars among the tribes long ago.  There are drawings of people lying on the ground with spears on their bodies, some injured, some throwing spears and some holding their animals.  All these are at San Borjitas Sierre De Guadalupo.

Mozambique is another country endowed with a rich rock art heritage.  The drawings of people, their culture and lifestyles are shown in the hills across the country.  Rock art is the signature that the ancestors have left behind to share with the next generations about their lives.  They have been preserved for posterity to share with the world how the Stone Age people lived.