Under a large overhang, near a 30m waterfall in a giant horseshoe, are paintings of a rain animal (a sort of distorted hippo) and a few shamans.
Alongside is a quagga, an extinct creature painted by an extinct man.
The paintings are in the Dordrecht area of the Eastern Cape. I am here because cycling through the area last year it struck me that there were a number of bushmen paintings, some no more than a short walk from the farmhouses where we are staying.
There was no time to take them in, so we’re back for a better look.
We have done little research beforehand, but this does not matter — just pitching up and asking to see Bushmen paintings opens the possibility of seemingly endless choice.
Whole valleys proliferate with paintings. One farmer has 37 sites on his farm. Another showed us pictures of three sites we chose to visit.
We can see faded paintings, some of which have had the colour enhanced. We can see defaced ones — with or without graffiti.
It might appear that the hordes have moved in and are defacing our heritage, but this is not so. The graffiti in some cases is also ancient, or if modern, can be so old (one is dated 1872), that it too is legally protected.
With few exceptions, the sites we visited are not signposted in any way and are hard to find. The farmers who showed us the sites sometimes battled to find them themselves.
Some are overgrown with bush. If you did not know they were there and did not have someone to show you, you’d probably never find them. Many are hardly visited, we being the first visitors in five years.
You might think that what I am describing applies to just a small part of the country in and near the Drakensberg, but we travelled hundreds of kilometres, from Rhodes to Pearston, over several days and the picture did not change: we continued to be spoilt for choice.
One site, which includes a splendid fish-like creature that most observers describe as a dolphin, will soon be no more. Massive blocks of the overhang have already fallen, although probably tens of thousands of years ago. Huge new cracks signal that the rest could fall soon.
Two of our party settled back for a conversation under the overhang, but all I could see were the huge cracks in the giant chunks of rock and suggested we move.
If the paintings face a threat, it is from the elements. One farmer was horrified to see how quickly an elephant had deteriorated since his last visit. Water seeps over it. Others are rubbed away by livestock, which enjoy the overhangs as warm, dry places.
The paintings gave me a feeling of helplessness. Not because they are deteriorating. I want to understand the people who made them, in cases as recently as 150 years ago.
It is not that we don’t know what they are about. David Lewis-Williams (Images of Mystery: Rock art of the Drakensberg) spent decades advancing our understanding of the paintings. If there was just one Bushman who explained the paintings to just one writer, Lewis-Williams found this account and used it to contextualise the paintings in the religious life of the Bushmen.
Not that he does not have his detractors. One farmer stands in front of a wall of painting about 20m long and says that Lewis-Williams will advance some fancy theory for what we are looking at, but to him it is no more than what you see. An eland is an eland, a steenbok is a steenbok.
I am like the woman who is a visitor to a farm where we stayed in the Barkly East district. She listened to our hosts describe whole valleys that have paintings and said “there must have been a lot of Bushmen living here”.
Or like the woman in the Cradock coffee shop who overheard us making arrangements to visit a nearby cave. She too had paintings on her farm.
“Who were they?” she wanted to know about the painters. “Where are they?”
“They”, as far as a large swathe of the country was concerned, were the |Xam (pronounced “tsam”, an informant tells me).
A map compiled by Tony Traill and published in Pippa Skotnes’s Claim to the Country shows that the |Xam were spread across much of what we came to know as the Cape before it was split into two.
The first South Africans, they dominated much of what we now call our country. They were the first people when there were no other people here.
Most academics describe what happened to the |Xam as genocide. They were living in harmony with nature, as they had been for eons and then, almost in a moment, as quick as a generation or two, they were gone.
Cradock
Sandy Stretton, who farms near Dordrecht, is a mine of information about the history of the area, which has seen conflict between settlers and the Bushmen, imperial Britain and the Xhosa, as well as Boer and Brit.
Stretton says he had a nanny when he was young who lived in a cave on the farm by choice with her Khoe husband. The woman was elderly and tiny. “She had a stone with a hole in it which she gave to me,” says Stretton. These stones, which appear in some paintings, are used with digging sticks.
Stretton tells us that during the rule of the Dutch East India company before 1800 Bushmen were legally hunted for bounty.
The next day we discuss the Bushmen with Andre Gouws, whose family has been farming in the Dordrecht area for six generations. Gouws says his forebears were probably horse thieves trying to get away from the law in the Cape.
The area was swept by Lord Kitchener’s troops during the South Africa Anglo-Boer War, the boers hiding with their horses under overhangs that previously were home to Bushmen.
We talk about Stretton’s nanny. Gouws says one of his workers is “this high”. He holds his arm at a right angle, indicating less than 1,52m.
The art is a fascinating glimpse into another world, another time. But as or even more remarkable than the paintings are the sites which host them.
I spend a lot of time in wild and special places, but these are so spectacular that they seem to have a spirituality about them.
The sandstone overhangs can be as much as 30m deep. Quite a few have waterfalls. One has a river running through it, the river emerging seemingly straight out of the rock at the back of the cave. But these sites are also special because people have lived here for what seems like forever.
A site in nearby Lesotho that has had its archaeology studied has been found to be home to the Bushmen and their ancestors for 160 000 years.
On day four of looking at paintings in the Cradock area, I am staring at the rock wall when I realise I am looking in the wrong place.
Our host, Peter Michau, is spending his time picking up rock fragments flaked by early men to make points for their arrows and hide scrapers. The real story is as much at our feet as on the walls.
We have a copy of Lawrence Green’s Karoo with us. Green, one of my heroes, wrote passionately and in great detail in the 1950s about the area.
He includes a number of graphic accounts about Bushmen being wiped out by commandos. We tried unsuccessfully to find some of these spots.
In Cradock we asked about a cave where Green related the last stand of a band of Bushmen. But inquiries to local experts who know the history of the area produced no results.
“We looked for that cave and have not been able to find it,” we were told.
We drive on to Graaf-Reinet, a Karoo town which is wall-to-wall monuments.
I meet Hermi Baartman, a previous curator at one of the museums. Brought up in Namibia, she can count to 20 in one of the Bushmen languages still spoken there.
I ask her if she thinks that any of the local people are the descendants of the |Xam. The answer is yes.
If shortness is a characteristic trait of the Bushmen, which it is said to be, just sitting on a Graaf-Reinet stoep drinking coffee you’ll note that short people are more than well represented.
Baartman had the idea of starting a Bushman cultural village like the one in Namibia and sent a staff member from the museum to the township to look for people to participate.
“No Bushmen here, just us coloureds,” the reply came back.
Nieu Bethesda
We drive to Nieu Bethesda, best known for Helen Martins’s Owl House. A man walks past our house carrying a log. I pose next to him for a photograph. He comes up to below my shoulder. “My father was tall but I’m short,” he tells us.
In the morning two kids are off school and are looking to make money: “Does the boer want his car washed?” they ask me.
Ian Alleman, who operates tourism businesses in the town, says he bought some kudu meat from an old woman. She used a distinctive click when saying “kudu”.
Nearby is a mountain the local coloured people pronounce with a click; the Afrikaners do not, he says.
An anthropologist, Garth Sampson, has being studying the area since the 1980s. Formerly from the Cape, Sampson is now professor of anthropology at Texas State University.
Sampson tells me on the phone that he has documented 16 000 hunter-gatherer sites in the Seekoei river valley (Richmond-Middelburg) of the Groot Karoo.
The study area, understood to be the largest of its kind in the world, covers 5 000km2 and 500 000 years of prehistory. About 60 000 potshards and 150 rock paintings or engravings have been found.
He says the most recent hunter-gatherers who lived here date back 2 000 years. There were long periods when the area was not inhabited at all because the area was “seriously dry, very nasty”. The study includes the period between 1770 and 1830, when the Bushmen were overwhelmed by trekboere (nomadic white farmers).
I awoke in the middle of the night at Nieu Bethesda. Surely if there had been a genocide in South Africa, if a whole people, the first South Africans, had been wiped out, would there not be a major memorial acknowledging the genocide?
Should there not at least be some acknowledgement to the country’s once dominant language, |Xam?
Most historical accounts see the demise of the |Xam as genocide. Green’s work has numerous cases where trapped Bushmen died glorious deaths rather than succumb to colonial rule.
Such was the onslaught against these people, some academics say, that in the end the |Xam gave up their language as a defence mechanism. With their language went their culture and art.
But Sampson sees what happened as more a case of assimilation than annihilation.
The elusive quagga
He points to the British policy of requiring farmers to feed neighbouring Bushmen as an example of “killing by kindness”. Quagga were shot to feed Bushmen in surrounding areas, creating a “halo effect”.
There was also some incentive for farmers to recruit Bushmen to work on their farms. Bushmen, not surprisingly, were excellent herdsmen who knew all about livestock.
Some were even entrusted with whole flocks, which they’d take to graze in what is now the Free State, returning a year later.
The late 1800s were times of dramatic change. Bushmen had known conflict with pastoral people since the Khoe arrived about 2 000 years ago. Colonists appropriated land and water holes. The abundant herds of quagga and any number of other animals were seen as competition for livestock and were shot in vast numbers.
Legislation was passed in 1886 by the Cape authorities to protect the quagga, but it was too late. The last known quagga, and the only one photographed, died in an Amsterdam zoo in 1883.
Change came quickly. The annual springbok migrations across the Karoo, which had seen these animals migrate in their hundreds of thousands, as is still the case in the Serengeti, were brought to an end in as short a period as 17 years after fences were constructed.
Extinction is normally forever, but this has not deterred a group of enthusiasts led by Cape Town taxidermist Reinaud Rau. Beginning in 1987, Rau pursued a simple vision: to give the quagga back to the Karoo.
Fortunately there are quagga remains in the museums of the world. He had the DNA of 100-year-old pelts analysed. This showed that the quagga is a sub-species of zebra but with identical DNA.
Next, with little funding but sheer force of vision, Rau managed to get the most quagga-like zebras from across Southern Africa brought to the Cape, where volunteers made land available so that they could be bred selectively.
Three generations later Rau pronounced Henry to be “very near to perfection” as a quagga. Rau is now dead, but the programme continues with the latest product of the project, Harley, which was born on a Wellington farm in May 2008.
Where did all the |Xam go?
If there is a national amnesia about the |Xam and what happened to them, it appears that their descendants are party to the amnesia.
Sampson says there is a worldwide trend for so-called “fourth-world” people to reassert their cultural identity. “The Australian aborigines are a well-publicised example and the Khoekhoen have started this in the southern and western Cape. Short people in the Karoo are lagging behind the world trend.”
He says he’ll “bet my booties” that if DNA analysis is done it will find that the present population of the local coloured people have little other blood than what they got from their hunter-gatherer forebears.
This is particularly the case in the Hanover-Colesberg area. “There’s no mystery about Bushman survival up there. You can track Bushmen in these dorpies right into the 20th century. The Bushmen did not die out, just the name died out.”
His studies in part call for understanding what veldkos the people ate. When he asks adults for this information he is told they don’t get their food from the bush.
The same request to children, though, sees them rush into the veld to show what can be eaten.
It will take another generation, says Sampson, before these |Xam descendants, whose past stretches the furthest into humankind’s beginnings, start embracing their ancestry.
But even if they do, what then? Their language is dead, their art, or at least how to make it, is gone.
But maybe not so. Just as the |Xam were giving up their language and making their last paintings, it was being written down. In the 1870s linguists Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Loyd started painstakingly to record |Xam.
The pair managed to get Bushmen prisoners in Cape Town freed to participate, over time creating an archive of 13 000 pages.
The archive remained tucked away at the University of Cape Town for decades until it came to be rediscovered by academics in the 1970s and 1980s.
Pippa Skotnes’s recently published Claim to the Country: the Archive of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd includes an excellent selection of photographs, poetry, mythology and other material, including a DVD of the archive.
The book and DVD are a glimpse into another world. You can learn, for instance, about the time when people were animals.
There is also the time when the term zebra was unknown. There was only the quagga. Some (what we call a zebra today) had stripes all over them, others (the quagga) just on their necks and heads.
San or |Xam?
Perhaps because Bushman has a derogatory connotation, many writers prefer to use San. A linguist tells me that the Khoe, pastoralists who moved into the Cape down the western side of the country, called themselves Khoekhoen, men of men, and their hunter-gatherer neighbours San, men without cattle.
I have only met real-life hunter-gatherers once, in Botswana. We asked them how they described themselves and were told that they are Bushmen. San was not part of their vocabulary.
I checked the digital archive that comes with Skotnes’s book for the word San and did not find it. I asked her how the |Xam would refer to themselves. “The |Xam”, she said, “called themselves |Xam!”