Quathlamba
“A
mass of Spears. Named thus by the Zulu warriors before the white man came.
Today called the Drakensberg, Mountains of the Dragon, a name given by the
Voortrekkers. 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.”
Panorama April 1966
This blog is all about the Drakensberg Mountains and its Wilderness area, South Africa. I have lost my heart and soul to this area and every single time I hike these mountains, I stand in awe all over again at this magnificent beauty.
"How often in the course of our travels through Kwazulu-Natal do we stop and gaze at the beauty of a distant range of mountains? The Drakensberg stands as a monument to one of the greatest cataclysms the Earth has experienced. As you approach the mountains, you realize why early Zulus called it "Quathlamba", meaning “Barrier of Up-pointed Spears". A cradle of rivers. 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". (DA Dodds)
Hiking adventures, hiking gear reviews, day walks, accommodation, books, articles and photos, all related to these magnificent mountains will feature here.
Should you want to accompany me on a hike or need some information or advice, please make contact with me. I hope you enjoy the articles.
Please visit the archive for some more interesting stories, photos and reviews.
Photos please make contact with the author, Willem Pelser.
“ALL
IN ALL, IT SEEMS THAT THE BEAUTY OF MOUNTAINS IS PROPORTIONAL TO THE RATE AT
WHICH THEY ARE BEING DESTROYED.”
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 Bantu, 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 mediaeval 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.
The
End.
Willem Pelser
Acknowledgements
Extract from
the book “Best walks of the Drakensberg” –
David Bristow
All Photos –
Willem
Pelser
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