Visionary Animal: Rock art from southern Africa

Visionary Animal

Renaud Ego

Visionary Animal

Rock Art from Southern Africa

Translated by Deke Dusinberre

Published in South Africa by:

Wits University Press

1 Jan Smuts Avenue

Johannesburg 2001

www.witspress.co.za

Original edition: L’animal voyant: Art rupestre d’Afrique australe.

© Actes Sud – Errance, Arles, Paris, 2015

English language translation © Deke Dusinberre 2018

First published in English in 2019

http://dx.doi.org.10.18772/12019012262

978-1-77614-226-2 (Hardback)

978-1-77614-232-3 (Web PDF)

978-1-77614-233-0 (EPUB)

978-1-77614-271-2 (Mobi)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.

This translation into English was made possible by funding from the French ministry of culture and the Centre National du Livre (CNL). This book was published with the support of the French Institute of South Africa-Research (IFAS-Recherche, Johannesburg). Under the authority of the French ministry of foreign affairs and the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research), it promotes research in the humanities and social sciences about southern Africa and within this framework supports scientific cooperation.

Project Manager: Elna Harmse

Copyeditor: Alison Lockhart

Proofreader: Judith Shier

Indexer: Marlene Burger

Cover design: Hybrid Creative

Typesetter: MPS

Typeset in 11.5 point Bembo

Contents

THE STRANGER AT THE SUMMIT

PROLOGUE: OBSERVING SILENCE

I. BEYOND MYTH AND RITUAL: MAKING VISUAL ART

Lingering ghosts

The two mirrors of anthropology

Pictures as prism

Three ways of formalizing: Dancing, recounting, painting

II. A NOMADIC MENTALITY

The scattered legend of ‘humanimality’

The trickster: An intercessor between worlds

Temporal regeneration and animal merger

Creativity, fiction, transgression

III. SPIRITS OF THE PLACE, SPIRITUAL PLACES

Mapping a mental landscape

Order and ornament

The world’s outer skin

The way of the wall

IV. A FLUID TANGLE

A weave of shifting perspectives

Sympathetic links and ‘thinking strings’

Changing bodies, changing scale

Exempting appearances

Correspondences and synaesthesias

Opening the constellation

V. ANIMALS AS PRISM (SYMBOLISM AND AESTHETICS)

Taking care

An intriguing ‘quasi-companion’

The question of symbolism

A sense of finery

Drawing by design

VI. INVESTING IN APPEARANCES

Detaching

Bringing to life

Relating appearances

Consenting

Maintaining a respectful distance

VII. GALVANIC BODIES

Rain-animals

Rain-snakes: An example of dynamic liquidation by water

Antelope-men and winged bodies

Intercession and metamorphosis: A dialectic of freakishness

Putting on a game face

VIII. THE SHIMMER OF WHOLENESS

Painting forces

The singular case of Zimbabwe’s ‘formlings’

A temporal bridge composed of paint

Eye contact

EPILOGUE: BELIEVING YOUR EYES

What is the Symbolic Effectiveness of Pictures?

LACK OF ENDING

NOTES

PORTFOLIO

Captions for Portfolio

Location of Main Areas of Paintings and Engravings

The Continuum of Pictorial Vitality

Index

Acknowledgements

Biographies

As I went through the marshes

a doe sprang out of the corn

and flashed up the hillside

leaving her fawn.

On the skyline

she moved round to watch,

she pricked a fine black blotch

on the sky.

I looked at her

and felt her watching;

I became a strange being.

Still, I had my right to be there with her.

Her nimble shadow trotting

along the sky line, she

put back her fine, level-balanced head.

And I knew her.

[…]

‘A Doe at Evening’,

D.H. Lawrence

The Stranger at the Summit

The sun was already high and we were still at the foot of Brandberg, the ‘Fire Mountain’. Behind us was the desert of Damaraland; ahead, the harsh profile of that mass of rock; all around, silence. Angula Shipahu, his son Thomas and I had just finished dividing the food and equipment between our backpacks. Basil’s jeep was just a white dot in the distance, vanishing in the waves of heat. We would see him again in a fortnight, on the other side of the Brandberg, where he would come to pick us up.

We set off, marching in single file. I was excited about returning to this magic mountain, even if it was austere, shielded by its aridity. Conversation soon lagged. Everyone concentrated on walking. After just a few hours, the climb became difficult – harder than I expected. I was out of shape, my head was spinning. In the ruthless sun, the skeletal shade of a few acacias brought no coolness. My hands began to burn as the trek became a true climb: here we had to scramble over a rock, there straddle a burnt tree trunk or cross a ravine, backs to the wall, groping for a hold. The silence became a sparkling din, the sun a molten cymbal that spun before my eyes and, clearly, the oryx steak I had eaten the previous evening – which had been suspiciously overcooked – was not going down well. Every time we reached a crest I hoped to glimpse the shelter where we would spend the night. But there was just another steep climb behind it, another slope down which alarming cascades of red rock seemed ready to fall. Thirst began to torment me. I was out of breath. It was impossible to turn back, even if the idea had occurred to me. Down below, a vast stretch of sand ran towards the Atlantic in a hazy blaze. Higher up was water – but would it be there, as Angula claimed? My thirst no longer bothered to disguise itself.

Because I was so slow, night was already approaching as we reached the shelter, and suddenly night was there, abruptly dropping like a curtain. With it came a fading of my thirst, my belly ache and my stiffness because – stretched out in the dust beneath the shelter, below the mass of a leaning stone that weighed several hundred tons – I shone my torch on the painting, the extraordinary painting that covered the lower wall just a metre above me. Painted in swirls and convolutions was a cloud, the abode of the rain. A huge snake entered this cloud, only its tail sticking out; thus fertilized, the cloud unleashed strings of rain on the earth, where graceful antelope ran and cranes raised their necks, wings spread in a mating display.

Then, in the middle of the night came the rain, suddenly, gently, barely heralded by a breath of wind. It was as if, having contemplated this painting, I had triggered its mechanism. A long, thin rain ensued. The darkness was scented with dust and the cool green fragrance of wild mint, thyme and sage.

Two days later, we began climbing again towards the high plateaus where we would stay. In the morning light, whose hue went from pink, briefly shot with blue, to a chalky white, I studied the ridge. Despite my fears, we managed to reach it in six hours. ‘Brandberg!’ I shouted. I was happy. The high Umuab Gorge stretched to one side, the Karoab Gorge to the other. We were walking slowly when Angula stopped and began to dip his hat in a puddle – but I didn’t give him time. The thrust of my hand on his back and above all the tone of my sharp, focused yell – ‘Jump!’ – made him leap forwards just as I leapt back. Motionless and powerful beneath his cover of twigs was a puff adder, just a step away. It stared at us with golden eyes set in the perfect triangle of its massive head, not aggressively coiled but stretched out, sure of its strength, with its black chevronned bands. The snake was the master of the rain, and I also realized it was the keeper of the gate. Let me be clear: at that moment I had the feeling that this adder was opening the gateway of time to us, and that, accompanied by the wonders of this augury, we would be vouchsafed a glimpse the paintings that dwelled there, in the privacy of their age-old whisper. I was entering the Brandberg.

PROLOGUE

Observing Silence

Such a long time after having written a first book on the art of the San people, I still hesitate a moment before breaking the silence, because silence is the very substance of which paintings are made. Visual artists know and experience this silence – which the act of depiction reiterates in forms that sustain it – beyond measure. Poets are likewise familiar with that muteness from which, when briefly shattered, words spring, and to which words return. That is why painters have for so long found poets to be partners in a dialogue in which they all retain a shared if strange frame of mind differentiated only by their choice of materials.¹ None of them, however, now have any further say in the matter: they have been stripped of the right to their own view ever since the establishment of special fields – art history, literature, aesthetics, sociology, anthropology – has appropriated them as simple subjects or objects of academic study. Their acts and words are no longer accorded the authority arising from their experience, itself a kind of organic knowledge. I reclaim the right to their view.

My first book on South African rock art, titled San, was published in French by Adam Biro in 2000. Nothing of the sort existed in France, and in many respects it differed from the few books and articles published in English, based as it was on the conviction that anthropological studies, which did not interrogate the art of making pictures, were necessarily incomplete, especially since those studies unwittingly embodied an extremely conventional view of the role of those pictures. What I didn’t realize, however, was that my intellectual venture, triggered by an intense passion for an ancient art to which I committed two full years, would become a lifelong affair.

It was nearly twenty years ago that I first came across paintings and carvings in South Africa and Namibia. I was totally unprepared to see them. They abruptly rose before me, like the mountains that often serve as their setting – in one of those jolts I so appreciate, it was like being suddenly hailed from afar. ‘From afar’ refers not to the alien geography of potential destinations nor the aural confusion of incredible dialects, but to an exteriority that shakes the foundations of my own language and ideas, reaching that part of me where new unknowns take root. Remoteness, I’m convinced, is an illusion. Its glamour has been marketed in every gaudy form of exoticism, that humdrum expression of boredom. Yet it also offers the opportunity to reinvent yourself when, beckoned by something unprecedented, you open up to it. Sometimes you never get over it, like Aby Warburg who never got over his discovery of Hopi culture, or Gauguin his encounter with the primordial world of the South Pacific, or Antonin Artaud his attempt ‘to make contact with Red Earth’ in Mexico (where he experienced the full blast of his madness). Yet sometimes you are merely, but permanently, changed. That was my case.

I, too, was weary of the static dullness that Western civilization failed to disguise behind its mask of changing appearances. I was weary of hysterical enthusiasm for all those thoroughly predictable new trinkets, weary also of the banal forms adopted by art with its refinements and sophisticated conceits, its kitsch academicism and its mercantile opportunism – its tameness, in short, often even lacking conviction in the powers sustaining it.

Then came these African paintings – first one, then a second and a third. And soon dozens, once I set off in search of them. I long laid my eyes upon them, in the total privacy of their own remoteness, during many months spent in extraordinary mountain landscapes. I allowed the paintings to take me by the eye, stripping the lids from my gaze like the skin of an onion. I and my wife, the artist Florence Gillet, to whom that first book was so indebted, lived for a while in the sole presence of these pictures, slowly letting their ancient glow enlighten us. They quivered with dynamic layers of time, gently staring at us as we studied the primal yet highly refined act by which a now-vanished people put a face on something that cries out for a visage yet has nowhere been given one. That something comes ‘from afar’, and is what Rilke called ‘openness’ or what Saint John of the Cross called akataleptos (the ungraspable, unreachable). It is also the most intimate part of every culture, simultaneously promising and alarming. This native tension between physical intimacy and spirituality is specific to our body-minds. It transforms art into a dynamic thrust towards the inner remoteness we harbour in the depths of ourselves.

I subsequently undertook other long trips. And I saw other, wonderful paintings. I honed my eye, thanks to that community of African scholars who welcomed me during my visits like some strange cousin whose enthusiasm was spurred by an independence of thought that the scruples of scholarly methodology denied them. I might have republished that first book, because I remain faithful to its spirit, and I nearly kept its title, San, which means wanderers or vagabonds. I like the fact that it follows the internal drift of its meaning, recalling the spirit of a people whose few, final descendants have been harshly sedentarized and are doomed to extinction. ‘San’, that word alone – which through the coincidence of homophony is also a term of great respect in Japanese – was a fitting tribute to a culture that drew the itinerant nature of its viewpoint from a nomadic lifestyle.

I soon realized that a book cannot be emended, which would have entailed some rather dishonest plastic surgery, and despite all its drawbacks, San possessed its own truth, if only that of the somewhat naïve enthusiasm behind it. I therefore decided to write another book, to go beyond the impressionistic stage of my original intuitions, the better to reveal the supple lines of thought running throughout the paintings, bringing them to life, unchaining them from the rigidness in which the stone has locked them. I had, of course, already perceived what I called their tangle, but without pointing out how those visual skeins of life profoundly reflected what the San called their ‘thinking strings’. In this weave of visual relationships I thought I perceived a specific harmonic register, perhaps the register of all the energy circulating in the world, which the paintings sought to record as a way of preserving the wholeness of life. All those relationships seemed to converge in animals or, let’s say, in a few of those animals whose great value is demonstrated by their frequency in the frescoes of rock shelters. The animals had been subjected to a fascinated gaze, as though their singular bodies, fur and distinguishing marks were the key to some knowledge kept secret through silence – the unsettling silence of animals. Wasn’t this the very secret that humans sought to steal through apparitions, becoming a visionary animal who, possessing the new, far-seeing power to make pictures, could accede to a new, fully-fledged humanity? And wasn’t it this strange link between the visibility of the outer world and a visionary inner life that the visual arts explore?

Such questions were far removed from conventional explanations of San art. But in my view, those explanations lacked crucial sensitivity to the issue of image-making. Occasionally under cover of complex theoretical dressing, they shed a rather harsh light on the paintings, ultimately blinding them in an excessively bright beam. The prey was thus held aloft, leaving intact the shadow from which it had been pulled; but this art is shadowy or, to put it better – if still succinctly – it contains something invisible and abiding that these images were precisely designed to make visible (with a regularity that underscores the sense of urgency or perhaps impossibility): a presence, power, desire.

Some of these paintings and carvings, discovered at an early date, were viewed with contempt or amusement by the first travellers, as though dealing with children’s drawings. Sometimes, although more rarely, these forerunners paid closer attention and displayed a real desire to understand. They were intrigued amateurs, usually men whom chance alone had induced to dwell upon these frescoes, as Sir John Barrow did in 1798, sent by the British Crown to the frontier of Cape Colony in order to find a solution to the bloody conflicts damaging the colonists’ relationship with the San, which soon enough ended in the latter’s quasi-extermination. Later, around 1870, the geologist George W. Stow was one of the first people to make copies of the paintings. This was a time when pioneering scholars were still inventing their field; worth mentioning here is the crucial role played by German philologist Wilhelm Bleek, who learned the San language between 1870 and 1875 and assembled, in conjunction with his sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd, an irreplaceable corpus of tales and myths from the members of the /Xam ethnic group of San originally from a region a few hundred miles north of Cape Town.² Equally important, given its cultural links to the paintings in the Drakensberg, is the account of a young San man originally from Lesotho, named Qing, as told to Chief Magistrate Joseph Orpen.³ Handled carefully, these texts provide several stimulating clues to an understanding of the visual art. (Thus I, in turn, will invoke comments made by Qing and by Bleek’s informants – Diä!kwain, //Kabbo and /Han≠kass’o.)⁴ Subsequently, new paintings were regularly discovered in South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe and elsewhere, making southern Africa one of the world’s richest regions in rock art. Little by little they came under study, notably from the 1970s onwards by South African scholars led by Patricia Vinnicombe, Harald Pager and David Lewis-Williams, who then inspired a younger generation. In contrast, few French scholars have shown any interest, which explains why this art remains little known in France.⁵

Just getting to the paintings is sometimes still an ‘adventure’. I do not like that word, now trivialized by an era that associates it only with the hackneyed values of sporting exploits. Rather, it should be understood in the sense of a slow advent, because the paintings were so many signposts along an investigative trail that had to combine a penchant for archives with a taste for long hikes into the wilderness (from which I often returned empty-handed). But hiking – a spatial form of meditation – was also a time for acquiring the shifting vision that I soon understood would fully participate in bringing the pictures alive. Just as the hand that paints, sees, so the body that walks, perceives; and even at rest, our eyes remain mobile, constructing a collage-like backdrop for the mind, combining zones of sharpness with deliberately blurry passages, thereby devising a constantly shifting, shimmering effect that no photograph or even the cinema can produce.

So while a desire to understand San art is not entirely vain, it is important to begin by accepting the bewilderment of its apparent disorder, never forgetting – even after that bewilderment has somewhat abated – the complex backdrop in which motifs, having become clearer, remain refracted visions. This art is still a mass of emphatic darkness, dazzled by flashes of its own brilliance; it is a windy place full of murmurings, with inklings of clarity here and there. But what are these pictures actually doing? What is the culturally primordial consequence of their visual emergence? We cannot rely solely on ethnographic sources in order to understand their power, we must welcome them into our own gaze, we must let their ways of seeing, imagining and believing open our eyes, paving a mute path towards them. Intact in these images is the power to ignore explanations and to maintain – beyond our currently (and perhaps permanently) spotty knowledge – a crucial silence that reveals the limits of our own ways of seeing and thinking. It is high time, to paraphrase Theodor Adorno, ‘to break the spell of our own concepts’.

Yet many archaeologists and anthropologists continue to view these paintings as straightforward illustrations of spiritual content dear to the minds of their makers. From this perspective, the images are still considered to be a passive, secondary expression of knowledge to which they merely impart a visual appearance. But why would one ‘depict’ the world or ‘illustrate’ a culture if both were not in question, if they did not need to be exposed as such to the visual labour of representation? A painting or a narrative is never the place where already constituted knowledge is simply bequeathed to us, but is rather a place where knowledge reshapes itself, and perhaps thereby recasts its foundations into one of those imaginative fictions required of all mental work.

This book therefore represents a protest against the violence done to images by a well-established iconological tradition that claims to subject the visible to the legible and to subordinate the vitality of figures to the reassuring order of texts.⁶ Backed by this conviction, the book also proposes to show the works just as they deliver themselves to the eye. In this respect, Visionary Animal is also a photographic essay. I am aware of the limits of this ambition, given that reproductions deprive the eye of the real space in which these paintings unfold with an entirely different sensorial intensity. I am also familiar with the bias inherent in adopting a given angle or problematic compositional framing for frescoes that are far too large or damaged to be reconstituted in all their scope and complexity; but at least these photos offer access to a few dimensions of this art, beginning with its visually factual character. These are truly artful works, which means their effectiveness stems from the way they are visually elaborated. Their bodily formulation is the locus of their recognized power and the mirror of the action entrusted to them.

The humbleness of this photographic offering is clearly more polemical than I feign to assert. It is an attitude that postulates that images cannot be interrogated primarily from