Drakensberg Wilderness Hiking South Africa - Mountain of the Dragons

Wednesday 26 July 2017

KAMBERG - THE HIDDEN PARADISE - DRAKENSBERG

Quathlamba

“A mass of Spears. Named thus by the Zulu warriors before the white man came. Today called the Drakensberg, Mountains of the Dragon. Evocative names, both equally applicable to South Africa’s mightiest mountain range with its spear-like peaks – reminiscent of the saw-toothed spine of a gigantic dragon.”

“Listen to the streams as they gurgle from their cradles and you will hear the story of the mountains. You will hear fascinating tales if only you listen! Lie next to a stream and listen to the song of the mountains. The smiling faces of the flowers, dancing in the wind. Venture into the remote valleys or stand on a peak at sunrise or sunset, after snow has fallen, and you will hear a song that you will never forget - the Song of the High Mountain".

DRAKENSBERG WILDERNESS PHOTOS © WILLEM PELSER

“FREEDOM IS SOMETHING THAT DIES UNLESS IT’S USED.”

HS Thompson

KAMBERG

THE HIDDEN PARADISE

DRAKENSBERG

Hidden in the farming community of the Kamberg Region will you find the access gate to the Drakensberg Reserve of Kamberg, part of the Mhkomazi Wilderness of the Drakensberg. Long considered the domain of trout fly fisherman, it hides its spectacular beauty from all eyes. Few visitors to the reserve actually wander off into the reserve. At most, two established trails will be followed; one being the Gladstone’s Nose trail and the other the guided Game Pass Shelter Cave route. This reserve has long been the sole domain of the fisherman and has been jealously guarded as such. Kamberg Reserve catered mostly for trout fishing.

The reason why the above mentioned happened was due to the fact that a research station with trout dams and a hatchery was built here years ago. A total of 7 interlinking trout dams were established with quite an intricate interlinking system. Opposite the research building a weir was built across the Mooi River. Today the research station is standing empty with only 2 dams being fished. The entire infrastructure built years ago has been allowed to go to waste. Apparently the 2 dams still being fished receive their stock from an outside supplier.

In the early 1900’s a bloodhound kennel was also built at Kamberg hosting bloodhounds which was used to hunt animals with by the then reserve rangers. Wherever the so-called need for the dogs were, they would be transported there. The dogs were used under the guise of exterminating the jackal population of the Drakensberg. The jackals were regarded as vermin and one of the biggest reasons why the eland population was dwindling by the then powers to be. Logically speaking, it is highly unlikely that a 20kg jackal will be able to bring down an 800kg eland! Jackals were not the only animals hunted. Anything else being chased by the dogs, which did not resemble an eland or antelope, was killed. Dassies became a victim too, and I would like those rangers to explain to me how a dassie becomes a predator of antelope. Baboons suffered the same fate. Fortunately the scheme eventually met its demise. The very people who called themselves rangers and who were to protect the wilderness with all of her citizens became the main destroyers of it all. For hundreds of years all the animals lived together and they all thrived. What was conveniently overlooked was the fact that it was the arrival of the white man in the wilderness with his guns and wanton destruction which caused the problem in the first place.

One day, on a hike through a number of valleys between Kamberg and Giant’s Castle I had the luck of watching a jackal trying to catch a rhebuck male. It was quite a humorous incident. Sitting on a boulder taking a break I first noticed this jackal sniffing and running around a rocky outcrop on top of a hill. It was surprising to see him running around in broad daylight in the middle of the day as they are normally nocturnal. The next moment I saw a rhebuck appearing on the opposite side of the outcrop away from the jackal. The jackal would then catch up with the smell of the rhebuck and follow him. As soon as he came close, the rhebuck would then move around the outcrop again to the other side and the jackal would follow. This carried on for about an hour, the rhebuck always keeping the outcrop between him and the jackal. Eventually the jackal gave up and ran away.

The first time I arrived at Kamberg reserve and had a look at the place, I was not impressed at all and I mentioned to Jenny at the time that I do not think that it is the place for me and my hiking. Jenny shared my thoughts on the matter. We left the same day and it would be a long time before we would be back. Make no mistake, the chalets and camp environment is nice, but walking seemed to be something that was not going to happen. How wrong I was then.

So, about 2 years later I returned to Kamberg. One day, as I was sitting at home trying to plan a 7 day hike, I had a look at the map and I was drawn to the Kamberg and Highmoor area, with the Mooi River Valley splitting the two down the middle. I started planning a hike which would take me hallway up the Mooi River valley, turning right, up the hills, through the Highmoor area, past the dams to Aasvoelkrans Cave, down to the old ruins, up to the escarpment and back down to the Mooi River valley to Kamberg camp.

So it happened that Jenny dropped me off early one morning at Kamberg camp, coming back in 7 days to pick me up again. It is quite a walk to get from the camp to where the Mooi River flows out of the end of the Mooi River valley through undulating rolling grassland hills. Once I entered the valley and started walking up it, it was sheer paradise. I have found the hidden gems of Kamberg.

Since that day I have been back to Kamberg many times. Today I know every valley and river of this area by heart. I have done hundreds of kilometers exploring a vast area and I have never been let down. Kamberg is one of the most beautiful areas in the Drakensberg Wilderness area.

There are a huge amount of valleys and rivers, each one in competition with the other for the price as most beautiful. You will find postcard picture scenes every kilometer. Nowhere else in the reserve will you see so many waterfalls. If you are an escarpment chaser, then Kamberg is not for you. If you are an explorer of a wilderness, then you cannot get better. I cannot emphasize enough what a beautiful, untouched, and unspoilt area it is. All that is needed is a bit of effort to get into the closest valley and from there you can pick and choose as to where you want to go. It is indeed paradise.

The added bonus at Kamberg is the fact that the Bushmen seemed to have like this area too. The area has a huge amount of caves with San paintings spread over a vast area. I had the time of my life discovering these caves and spend many a happy hour taking photos of their paintings. There are also a large Bearded Vulture and Cape Vulture colony calling Kamberg home. I was fortunate enough on one hike to find the nesting places of the Cape Vulture high up the cliffs in a far way valley. At the higher elevations inside the valleys eland and rhebuck are found in numbers and other types of wildlife abounds, more so than anywhere else.

The valleys at Kamberg are really very remote and because of that reason there is no human interference or impact, leaving a pristine, wild wilderness. I just love to disappear into that wilderness for 7 days at a time, it is magical. Just me and a vast wilderness area, what more could you ask for?

Today Kamberg is one of my favorite places in the Drakensberg Wilderness to explore; and settled deep in my heart. The best way to see it and experience the magic and indescribable beauty is to put a backpack on your back, boots on your feet and to disappear into her valleys. And then always, leave only your footprints.

The End.

Safe Hiking.

References and Acknowledgements

From the book – Drakensberg Wilderness – A Solo Journey through Paradise – Willem Pelser

Photos: ©Willem Pelser

Compiled by: Willem Pelser

Wednesday 12 July 2017

DRAKENSBERG MOUNTAINS - ROCK ART

Quathlamba

DRAKENSBERG WILDERNESS PHOTOS © WILLEM PELSER

“ALL IN ALL, IT SEEMS THAT THE BEAUTY OF MOUNTAINS IS PROPORTIONAL TO THE RATE AT WHICH THEY ARE BEING DESTROYED.”

UNKNOWN

DRAKENSBERG MOUNTAINS ROCK ART

Who made the thousands of rock paintings that can be found in innumerable caves and overhangs in the Drakensberg? When where they painted, and why?

Most of us think that we know the answer to the first question at least: obviously, it was the Bushmen, or San as they are also sometimes called. In truth we know so little about these ‘first people’ that we are not even sure what to call them. They were tragically misunderstood, driven off the land they once roamed freely, enslaved and shot out to the last person before we took the time to ask them who they were – let alone what they thought about things. The tiny fragments of their history which remain are just sad tatters flapping in the wind of time.

We can tell some of these paintings must have been done between the 1840s and 1890s, since they show men on horseback, horses, cattle and sheep, and in one or two places covered wagons with teams of oxen. But what about the rest? Dating them is fraught with problems, since by taking samples you destroy the fragile and already vandalized works. Also carbon, the element most widely used for archaeological dating, is found in such minute quantities in the pigments that has not yet been successfully used. From other archaeological evidence it has been estimated that the oldest may be around 35 000 years old, maybe more. They come to us from a time that dates so far back it lies beyond anything we know of the human culture on this planet. Often, at first glance, they look quite crude. However, if you visualize the works as they were in their prime you suddenly realize that even the oldest paintings reveal an artistic ability and an understanding of human and animal physiology and behavior that has never been bettered.

Given this knowledge, it is hard to understand how anyone could wish to vandalize them – pouring water on the images, or cold drink, or rubbing them with half oranges to make the colors ‘stand out’, or shooting at them, scribbling over them with charcoal or stones, even crudely chiseling pieces off and ruining meters-long friezes. But people have done, and still do, all of these things. Some damage is done inevitably by inquisitive and naughty children. However, something that has recently come to light is that sangomas sometimes steal into the caves to take scrapings of the pigments, to be used in strong muti. The irony is that these Zulu healers understand the spiritual power of the Bushmen images better than anyone, and should behave better. Already probably less than 10 percent of the original works remain in anything like recognizable condition. How do you stop this kind of destruction? It’s hard, but we have to try, especially when we get round to answering the final question of why they were painted, and the significance of this massive outdoor gallery becomes clearer.

There has never been any doubt that the Bushmen did the cave paintings….. well that’s not strictly true. Various researchers have in the past tried to attribute them to Black, Mediterranean and even Phoenician peoples, but we can disregard all that. In fact, one of the last Bushmen known to have lived in the Drakensberg was shot (Bushmen was seen as vermin and had a price on their heads) in what a few years later became Giant’s Castle Reserve. Around his waist he wore a leather thong from which hang small antelope horns that carried the pigments used for painting. We know he would have been a shaman, for it was only they who did the paintings ….. but we’ll get to the ’why’ a bit later. At first white settlers thought the paintings were crude if curious renditions of ‘a day in the life of a Bushman’ sort of thing. Hunters and wild animals were seemingly randomly rendered and often one atop of the other, with inexplicable lines and dots and strange things that were of little interest to the viewers. The first attempts at any real understanding of the paintings (and this came from attempts to understand the cave paintings in Europe), suggested the idea of sympathetic magic – these images were an attempt to capture the ‘spirit of an animal’ to ensure a successful hunt. This theory held sway until fairly recently, along with the theory that cave paintings are just crude renditions of every day scenes.

But not everyone was convinced, and ever since the first European contact with the hunter-gatherers there were people who were convinced the paintings went to the core of the Bushmen culture. Just how right they were, was given scientific credibility only recently through the work of South African archaeologists, especially those at the University of the Witwatersrand Rock Art Unit.

The first major piece of the jigsaw was the findings of George Stow, Wilhelm Bleek and Bleek’s sister-in-law, Lucy Lloyd who made it their lifetimes’ work recording the stories of the Bushmen as told to them by the Bushmen prisoners in Cape Town’s terrible Breakwater Prison (in the present-day V&A Waterfront). Bleek and Lloyd took down some 12 000 pages of verbatim dictation. The breakthrough was when Bleek heard the interpretation of paintings as given to a Natal magistrate Joseph Orpen by a Bushmen guide Qing during the Langalibalele rebellion. When the Bleek treasure trove was rediscovered and, through a stroke of academic inspiration, compared with the cave paintings of the Drakensberg, a door on the Bushmen’s secret world suddenly opened to rigorous scientific analysis for the first time.

The road to Kamberg Reserve is a little-used dirt road, but it is well worth the taking for it will lead you to what is arguably the most important rock art site in the world – Game Pass. Not only are many of the paintings here in near pristine condition, and of exceptionally high quality, but there is one particular frieze, the study of which helped to place the central pieces of the rock art jigsaw puzzle.

It was named the Rosetta Stone by Professor David Lewis-Williams as a sort of in-joke (and with reference to the nearby settlement of Rosetta); the name refers to the more famous Rosetta Stone that unlocked the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs. The main image is of an eland in red and white, its head held low and hooves crossed, with hairs standing up along its neck, back, dewlap and belly. Standing behind is a human-like figure holding onto the eland’s tail. This figure has an antelope-like head (a therianthrope, or shaman in trance state that has taken on the power of an animal) and its feet are crossed, except that they are hooves just like the eland’s.

Looking at this image, and with Qing’s words in mind about men figures with antelope heads, a penny dropped: ‘ they were men who had died and now lived in the rivers, and were spoilt ….’. To the Bushmen, a dance-induced trance and death were one and the same experience, so this painting is like and after-death experience conveyed in the world of the living. The eland in the painting is clearly dying, and, when the full meaning of the words ‘died’, ‘river’ and ‘spoilt’ came to be understood, it became apparent that there was a spiritual link between man and beast, between the painter and the supernatural world, that went much deeper than anyone had yet realized.

The truth that emerged here and everywhere else was that these paintings were painted by Bushman shamans after participating in a hallucinatory trance dance. They are reflections of what the trance had revealed to the shaman, who in turn conveyed the vision for his people to share and unwittingly to the world thereafter. The paintings have thus been called ‘images of power’. In this contact we need to re-evaluate these caves as holy places, as the churches of the Bushmen who until modern times were thought, in the words of a missionary and historian respectively, to have ‘no religion’ no laws ……. A soul debased and completely bound down and clogged by his animal nature’ and ‘ it was for the world’s good that they should make way for a higher race’. Even our great ‘holist’ Jan Smuts considered the Bushmen to be no more than ‘mentally stunted desert animals’.

Of course any artistically acute person looking at the images would have grasped something intrinsically sophisticated in them: they are incredibly fine renderings of humans and animals, often in motion, that could have been done only by true artists. That alone should have alerted arrogant critics to something a little deeper going on, but, alas, all that is past and now the best we can do is protect them. Luckily this is possible in the Drakensberg with a unified park under strong conservation authority. Unfortunately, it also means that the majority of caves with paintings in them is no longer accessible to the public. Only some can be visited and then only with a local accredited guide.

The best such site, and the easiest to walk to, is Game Pass Shelter. The bonus here is that Kamberg reserve has a spanking new interpretive center where for a very modest sum you can watch a 20-minute video on the Bushmen and their art, as well as take a guided tour to the cave. And it’s always such a pleasure to stay at the EKZNW rest camps such as Kamberg, especially if you like throwing flies into the trout-filled dams, or just going walkabout in the Berg.

It is way beyond the scope of this article to get into a deep interpretation of the art, but the keys to it can be gained by considering just a few almost universal, archetypal images. The most important ones to get a handle on are scenes indicating dying, which for the Bushman is synonymous with going into a trance. Once ‘dead’ (also variously conveyed as ‘going underwater’ or ‘flying’) the shaman assumes the character of the animal, which will often also be depicted as dying. The most common symbol for this dying is lines of blood streaming from the nose. Animals, mainly eland – the greatest of all creatures in Bushman mythology – man-animal therioanthropes, and even such creatures as snakes (in Giant’s Castle main caves) with bleeding noses are to be seen in most panels (although sometimes you have to look carefully to make out the marks). Water scenes, including fish, denote ‘going underwater’ and are not to be taken literally.

In their book Images of Power David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson make the point that rock art images should be understood as metaphors: just as a Bushman would be puzzled by our saying ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’ so should we be viewing their painted language. Another symbol of dying is flying, and in the Drakensberg there are a number of strange antelope-like creatures with long, trailing wings. These are antelope spirits flying in a trance state. There are two fairly good examples in Junction Cave.

The next symbols to be discussed are lines or patterns of dots, which initially were considered graffiti, but mostly just confused people. But they too have ‘power’. Firstly, areas of dot patterns are called entopic phenomena and they are widely found in Aboriginal art in Australia. Their meaning was discovered through the research (if you can call it that) of Timothy Leary in the USA when he experimented with LSD and other drugs in the 1960s. These dot patterns are strongly associated with hallucinatory states, and this is the crux of the Bushman trance: it was a hallucinatory state in which the senses were both heightened and mixed, very similar to an LSD experience.

Lines and lines of dots that seem to connect unrelated things are ‘power lines’. There are many battle scenes to be found, most famously those in Battle Cave in the Injasuthi Valley. Close analysis reveals that the fight does not take place in the physical realm, but in the supernatural, and the lines of potency coming from an arrow tip, pointed finger or wherever (call them magic spells if you like) are what the battle is about.

In fact all scenes which appear to depict everyday scenes need to be studied carefully to grasp their true meaning,. For example in Junction Cave above the Didima/Mhlawazini confluence there is a well-argued painting that appears to show a group of Bushmen crossing a bridge. But the women on the left clapping suggests it’s a painting of a trance dance, as does the figure that seems to have fallen off the bridge. He’s also clapping – a shaman that’s fallen into a trance. There are often symbols to be found in these scenes that are clues to their true nature, such as fly-whisks and other ‘ scepters’ which were used only in rituals such as trance dances. Unfortunately, they are now hard to see on the faded, flaking cave walls and so often escape the viewer’s attention.

In areas where guides are available, the paintings are there for any hiker to visit and they represent one of the greatest collections of religious art in the world. They are our very own medieval cathedrals, and, if you wouldn’t miss a visit to Chartres or Rheims on a trip through the French countryside, why should you miss this?

Don’t destroy – Preserve.