Ancient lore, modern art
ONCE upon a time, Qauqaua, a beautiful San woman, murdered her husband in revenge for his murder of her mother. Clytemnestra, who in Greek legend killed her husband Agamemnon in revenge for his killing of their daughter, would have identified with Qauqaua. The two women are probably in some sort of netherworld together or, as Carl Jung would have it, our collective unconscious.
As Qauqaua died, the story goes, her blood seeped into the earth, part of it forming an alien, huge rock in what is now northeastern Namibia, near the Botswana border, the rest forming a root, a sought-after veld food. So every time you eat that root, you eat of her blood, so to speak.
Now her legend has been written down in parallel texts of English and Naro, a San dialect of the Gantel area in Botswana, following the version given by Coek’e Qgan. It is apparently the first time a book has ever been published in a San language.
But the project goes further than that – it includes contemporary San art and has been created as a finely crafted, beautiful object, says publicist Tamar Mason. There are 11 hand-printed colour lithographs and seven linocuts created by nine different artists at the Kuru Art Project. Published by The Artist’s Press of Johannesburg, in a limited edition costing R3 420, Qauqaua is bound in goatskin tanned in the San village of D’Kar, where the artists live.
The San women Cg’ose Ntcox’o, about 40, Dada Coex’ae, about 80, and Xguka Krisjan, 34, were on hand in Johannesburg recently to help launch the book, helped by Hunter Sixpence, 28, the son of a San woman and a Zambian veterinarian assistant apppointed by the group as a publicist.
“The book shows how Bushmen lived long ago,” said Dada through Sixpence’s translation. “It helps preserve our customs and culture and teach young children how we lived then.”
The contemporary painting and craft originated at the Kuru Development Trust. In 1989 it organised a group tour to the famous Tsodile Hills site in northern west Botswana to view rock paintings there.
This resulted in the birth of the art project, which kicked off with women painting on fabric. The directors have been careful to avoid giving art lessons, instead providing facilities, materials and encouragement – and then just letting creative juices flow, says a press release.
Today the artists prefer painting with oil on canvas, and there are about 10 men and women involved. They have held exhibitions in Southern Africa, Europe, Australia and America and have been invited to design murals and a mosaic for the state hospital in Gaberone.
Why publish such a fancy book? Why not print a coffee table book and sell it through the bookshops?
“It is very hard to make the initial breakthrough in publishing,” says Mason. Now, however, they can take their publication to a commercial publisher to release it in a more widely available version.
“Besides,” says Mason of the limited edtion, “we wanted to do something beautiful and special.”
The Artist’s Press can be contacted at (011) 836-5474 for more information or to place orders copies