Would Winberg, with a degree in speech and drama from the University of Cape Town, try to compete with such greats as David Lewis-Williams’ Images of power: understanding San rock art? One academic even raised concern that any unqualified interpretation might tarnish the art as an emerging South African icon.
Doubts, however, were quickly squashed when the book was released. She has successfully stuck to her area of expertise. The result is a coffee-table book of natural and simplistic narration of 17 modern !Xun and Khwe San artists.
Remarkably, Winberg brings together these two completely different San tribes, whose languages are only distantly related, in one book of oral tradition. And it’s not the first time they’ve been grouped into the singular (and probably not the last).
The !Xun and Khwe were first brought together during the Namibian war in the late 1970s when the South African Defence Force recruited them as trackers and soldiers. Then, after Namibia gained independence in 1990, the collectively titled “bushmen” were rounded up and ported off to Schmidtsdrift — a temporary tent town that makes a Siberian desert look appealing.
Winberg enlisted the aide of the development-oriented !Xun and Khwe San Art and Culture project to produce My Eland’s Heart.
“I feed my soul with colour,” she says. In the stark Kimberley landscape, where the art is produced, it’s not only her soul she colours: the book’s narrations are well complemented in the vibrant colours and graphics of the artists’ creations and balanced out with some crisp
photography.
The book is by no means an in-depth explanation of the mysticism behind the art — it barely scratches the surface. Thankfully, however, she has offered to explain hidden metaphors in some of the tales, especially after one rather uncanny- sounding account of a man who marries an elephant that is subsequently hunted and eaten by his brother. The sexuality and hunting detailed by the story, explains Winberg, are linked. “This old story links hunting and sex, birth and death as part of the ongoing cycle of life,” she writes.
She has broken an outdated mould of traditional San art as something of the past. It is already a well-established style of art and is now making up a growing portion of the South African cultural scene.
My Eland’s Heart may not be a groundbreaking work, but it is easily appreciated and probably a fore-runner to many more popular San art books to come.