CHAPTER 2

Dance of Life, Dance of Death

The people know that he is the one who always dances first, because he is a great sorcerer.¹

These simple yet evocative words are among the first San comments on rock paintings that we have chosen to decipher. They take us directly to the heart of the people’s religious experience, belief and ritual. By comparison with the fascinating but enigmatic comments that we discuss in subsequent chapters, these words appear to be fairly straightforward and descriptive. They are none the less important. At the outset we therefore emphasize that the more puzzling comments to which we shall later come can be understood only in the context of the all-embracing San network of belief and ritual. Isolated, ad hoc attempts to understand what the informants were saying in their more convoluted explanations are doomed to failure and, worse, to the erroneous conclusion that they did not really know what they were talking about.

Even seemingly prosaic San explanations of rock paintings may have hidden depths. Always, we need to dig below the narrative surface of what they were saying by analysing the original texts word by word. Fortunately, in the instance with which we begin, we have not only an English translation of what the informant, a /Xam man named Diä!kwain, said but also the actual /Xam words that he used – unlike other instances in which only the translations and not the /Xam texts have been preserved. We can therefore explore nuances of meaning of which the 19th-century translators, unfamiliar as they were with the whole sweep of San thought, were unaware. They were groping their way into an unknown ‘thoughtscape’ on which we today have a wider perspective.

In 1930, Dorothea Bleek published a small portion of the first text we discuss and placed it alongside George William Stow’s copy of the relevant rock painting. This juxtaposition of Diä!kwain’s comments with a rock painting is valuable enough. But, if we go back to Lucy Lloyd’s manuscripts, we find an extended verbatim /Xam language text that continues after the published portion. All in all, the full 20 pages of verbatim text provide information about San beliefs and religious practices that extends beyond what is depicted in the specific rock painting copy that Diä!kwain was shown. Indeed, as we proceed in subsequent chapters, we shall see that San thought and religious practices were not compartmentalized. The links between San ideas and ways of speaking that we detect as we decipher their words take us directly into ancient minds.

In 1875, when Lloyd wrote down Diä!kwain’s explanations, she was compiling a text that Wilhelm Bleek and she herself struggled to understand. A century later, the situation changed. In the 1970s, Diä!kwain’s /Xam words, combined with other evidence, led to profound changes in our understanding of what the painted images meant to those who made them and originally looked at and – importantly – used them. But at the time when Lloyd asked her informants about the paintings, Westerners considered many of the images on the walls of rock shelters utterly bizarre and incomprehensible. Puzzling images were ascribed to primitive naivety, not to complexity. Even when, in the 20th century, the Kalahari San plainly performed some of the rituals in their presence, Westerners did not notice the relationship between them and what was painted in the rock shelters.

The first clues came as long ago as the 1830s. The Protestant missionaries Thomas Arbousset and François Daumas were shocked to witness a San dance in what is now Lesotho. Somewhat grudgingly, Arbousset wrote, ‘I could almost fancy that there may be mixed with it something of a religious rite, but I would not push this supposition too far.’² Indeed, he was more inclined to think of the dance as an ‘amusement’ or, satirically, as a ‘ball’:

 

This is the only amusement known to the Baroas [San]; it is only practised when they have eaten and are filled, and it is carried on in the middle of the village by the light of the moon. The movements consist of irregular jumps; it is as if one saw a herd of calves leaping, to use a native comparison. They gambol together till all be fatigued and covered with perspiration. The thousand cries which they raise, and the exertions which they make, are so violent that it is not unusual to see some one sink to the ground exhausted and covered with blood, which pours from the nostrils; it is on this account that this dance is called mokoma, or the dance of blood.

When a man falls thus out of breath in the middle of the ball, the women gather around him, and put two bits of reed across each other on his back. They carefully wipe off the perspiration with ostrich feathers, leaping backwards and forwards across his back. Soon the air revives him; he rises, and this in general terminates the strange dance.³

 

The tone of this description reflects the general colonial milieu in which Wilhelm Bleek and Lloyd worked: more than any other indigenous people the San seemed impervious to missionary endeavours. Their seemingly bloody rituals were little short of disgusting.

Yet, amid all this revulsion, it became clear that dancing was very important to the San. It was more than an ‘amusement’. To be sure, they enjoyed dancing, but there seemed to be more to it than mere pleasure. George Stow found unmistakeable evidence for dancing in every camp and, significantly for our enquiry, every large rock shelter, the very locations where he found rock paintings:

 

The universality of this custom was shown by the fact that, in the early days, in the centre of every village or kraal, or near every rock-shelter, and in every great cave, there was a large circular ring where either the ground or grass was beaten flat and bare, from the frequent and constant repetition of their terpsichorean exercises.⁴

 

These dance circles, or ruts in the sand, are still found in the Kalahari, where they are frequently in the centre of a camp (Pl. 3). The San return to the same spot every time they hold a dance and their circular movements help to preserve the ruts for the duration of their stay in one place.

Dances and dancers

Today we know that what appeared to Arbousset and Daumas as chaotic and ‘irregular jumps’ was in fact a structured and meaningful ritual. This more perceptive understanding begins to emerge in what Diä!kwain said when he saw Stow’s copy of a rock painting that used to be in a rock shelter near the small present-day town of Tarkastad (Fig. 7). Unfortunately, the original panel of images was destroyed in the 1970s when the rock was blasted away to widen a road. Stow’s copy is all that remains. It shows a line of six human figures in rather ungainly postures; they lack the elegance and animation of so many San rock paintings. The leading figure carries a stick.

The actual /Xam words that Diä!kwain used are preserved in Lloyd’s notebook numbered L.V.22.5755 (Fig. 8). The English translation that we now give, though prepared by Lloyd in 1875, was not published until 1930, when Dorothea Bleek included it in her selection of Stow’s copies. There are some slight differences in punctuation between Dorothea’s published transcription and the original notebook version, and the second parenthesis is in fact a note that Lloyd made on the adjacent page:

They seem to be dancing, for they stand stamping (?) with their legs. This man who stands in front (1st figure to the right of beholder) seems to be showing the people how to dance; that is why he holds a stick. He feels that he is a great man, so he holds the dancing stick, because he is the one who dances before the people, that they may dance after him. The people know that he is the one who always dances first, because he is a great sorcerer. That is why he dances first, because he wants the people who are learning sorcery to dance after him. For he is dancing, teaching sorcery to the people. That is why he dances first, for he wants the people who are learning sorcery to dance as he does. For when a sorcerer is teaching us, he first dances the ’ken dance, and those who are learning dance after him as he dances.⁵

7 George Stow’s 1867 copy of a rock painting showing a San dance. The human figures, rendered in black, are crudely done compared with most San rock paintings.

8 The page in Lucy Lloyd’s notebook that begins Diä!kwain’s explanation of George Stow’s copy of a painting showing a San dance (Fig. 7).

We begin by considering a number of /Xam words that are key to understanding not only this particular text but also San rock art in general: these words form the foundation for much of what we consider here and in later chapters.

The first is the word that Diä!kwain used to describe the man who is leading the dance: !gi:xa. Problematically, Lucy Lloyd translated it as ‘sorcerer’. (She and Dorothea Bleek spelled the word ‘sorceror’; we use the more acceptable spelling throughout.) In the 19th century, Western writers knew little about the religious specialists of other cultures. They therefore tended to transfer their own terms, such as ‘priest’ or ‘magician’, in inappropriate ways. By the middle of the 20th century, when anthropologists had studied many cultures around the world and a vast array of ethnography was available, the magical and derogatory connotations of ‘sorcerer’ were clearly unsuitable in the San context. By that time, too, the southern African San of the Kalahari Desert had become one of the most studied small-scale societies in the world, and an understanding of their religious specialists had advanced beyond anything that Bleek and Lloyd could possibly have achieved.⁶

Anthropologists of the 20th century used a number of English words to translate San words for religious specialists – though never ‘sorcerer’. These words include:

– ‘healers’ (because one of their principal tasks was, and still is, curing the sick)⁷

– ‘medicine people’ (again, because they heal people)

– ‘trancers’ or ‘trance performers’ (because they perform their spiritual tasks in an altered state of consciousness)⁸

– ‘shamans’. This Central Asian word seems appropriate because San practitioners use comparable techniques to perform a range of tasks similar to those performed by ‘classic’ Asian shamans.⁹

We need not now debate the relative merits of these terms; as the anthropologists who use them will readily admit, they are all unsatisfactory to some degree.¹⁰ To avoid the repetition of click-laden words and to take cognizance of the commonality of such practitioners across the globe, we and other writers have used the word ‘shaman’ in many publications.¹¹ We do so again now without implying an exact equivalence with religious specialists in Central Asia. We merely mean a person who, on behalf of the community, enters an altered state of consciousness to heal the sick, see into the future, control the weather, visit the supernatural realm, and so forth. At the same time, the differences between San and Asian shamans are numerous, though we believe peripheral to the core activities that they perform. For instance, in Asia there is usually only one shaman per community, whereas among the San up to half the men and a third of the women in a camp may be shamans. Some older San women also become shamans. Then, too, Asian shamans use elaborate dress and paraphernalia, but San shamans dress like anyone else, though in the dance they wear rattles on their ankles and carry fly whisks. Despite these, we believe, minor differences, we have decided to retain the use of ‘shaman’ in this book.

As a way into the somewhat arcane religious beliefs locked up in the San text we have quoted, we begin by teasing apart the /Xam word that Diä!kwain used and that Lloyd translated as ‘sorcerer’: !gi:xa. Like an Egyptian cartouche, it is an amalgam of definable elements. The first syllable of !gi:xa requires close attention because an understanding of what it signifies is fundamental to San thought and, as we shall see, rock paintings. In her posthumously published Bushman Dictionary Dorothea Bleek defined !gi: as ‘magic power, sorcery’.¹² The examples of its use that she provided are especially interesting because they show that !gi: can have both positive and negative connotations. We have added the square brackets:

[T]he sorcerers [!giten, in this instance Lloyd omitted the colon] are wont to say, they intend to take away my magic power [!gi:].

[T]hey worked sorcery [!gi:], and they killed my grandmother with sorcery [!gi:].¹³

In the first example, the ‘sorcerers’ may be dead rather than living. Certain dead ‘sorcerers’ were believed to become malevolent spirits; not all dead ‘sorcerers’ were necessarily evil. Either way, living or dead, their intention was to use their !gi: malevolently to rob the speaker of his own !gi:, which was presumably good and which he used for healing and protecting people. In the second example, !gi: is clearly used malevolently. The dictionary entry for !gi: also gives an example that refers to a specific kind of ‘sorcerer’: ‘he had been a rain sorcerer (!khwa:-ka !gi:xa)’. We return to the idea of specialist ‘rain sorcerers’ in Chapters 4 and 5.

Today, we prefer to translate !gi: as ‘supernatural potency’, rather than Bleek’s ‘magic power, sorcery’. But what are its characteristics? A reading of the /Xam texts shows that !gi: is an invisible (at least to ordinary people) essence that resides in powerful animals, things and, significantly, certain people – those known as !gi:ten. They can manipulate it for benign or evil ends. In intense concentrations it can be dangerous and should be avoided. The anthropologist Lorna Marshall likened potency to electricity: it can be beneficial, but in intense concentrations it can be dangerous. At a trance dance, the women’s sharp, rhythmic clapping activates potency. Some of that potency may come from a recently killed large animal, such as an eland (Taurotragus oryx), the antelope believed to have more potency than any other creature. In the Kalahari today, San people sometimes say that they are dancing ‘eland potency’. In fact, their shamans individually claim to possess different kinds of potency. They say that their particular potency is giraffe potency, or honey potency, or sun potency, or, the most desired kind, eland potency. There is no discernible difference between these potencies, though San shamans readily acknowledge that some of them are more powerful than others. The name of the potency refers more to its source than its quality.

In addition to dancing after an eland kill, the southern San sometimes made rock paintings (Chapters 7 and 8). They took some of the animal’s blood and mixed it into their paint. The painting itself then became a reservoir of potency to which dancing shamans could turn when they wished to increase the level of their potency.¹⁴ The paintings were not merely pictures. Rather, many were potency-filled things that played a role in subsequent rituals.

The second syllable of the /Xam word !gi:xa, namely xa, means ‘full of’.¹⁵ In another example of this suffix, !kwa:xa means ‘full of wrath’, ‘wrathful’.¹⁶ A San !gi:xa is someone who is full of potency. The man leading the dance in Figure 7 was thus a !gi:xa: filled with supernatural power.

All San linguistic groups believe in the existence of supernatural potency and special people who can control it. Though there may be minor regional emphases, the overall concept is indisputably pan-San. The Kalahari Ju/’hoansi, for instance, call potency n/om, and speak of a n/om k”au, an ‘owner’ of n/om (pl. n/om k”ausi). The Nharo, another Kalahari group, speak of a tsô.khùè, the first syllable being their word for ‘medicine’ or potency.¹⁷ Interestingly, despite considerable differences between the Kalahari Ju/’hoan and southern /Xam languages, the Ju/’hoansi use !gi:xa (g!aeha in Ju/’hoan orthography) to mean an especially powerful shaman, or n/om k”au, who routinely travels to the spirit realm and is known as a powerful healer. This is further evidence that not only the concepts but also some of the words used to denote them are spread over enormous distances.¹⁸ Although the San words differ from language to language, they all refer to the same essence and the people who have the ability to manipulate it.

Nor need we doubt that the concept of potency and specialists who learn to control it is ancient: all the various San linguistic groups who made southern African rock art would certainly have embraced the general idea, if with minor regional and temporal emphases. Whether they expressed the concept in their rock art is another question altogether. Mere assertion will not do. As we shall see, all interpretations of rock art images must be supported by pointing to precise elements in the art and relating those images to the testimonies of the San themselves.

In his response to Stow’s copy, Diä!kwain qualified !gi:xa by adding an epithet: !kerri. It means ‘old’, ‘big’, ‘grown-up’, ‘great’, as numerous other contexts of its use confirm.¹⁹ In Diä!kwain’s view the dance was thus being led by a !gi:xa !kerri, a special ‘sorcerer’, not just anyone.

Learning ‘sorcery’

Exactly what sort of dance did the rock painter depict? What is the !gi:xa !kerri doing? Is this a dance merely for pleasure or is it more significant? Diä!kwain explained:

For he is dancing, teaching sorcery to the people.… For when a sorcerer is teaching us, he first dances the ’ken dance, and those who are learning dance after him as he dances.

In the Kalahari today that is still exactly what happens. Young men wishing to become shamans dance behind a powerful older shaman.²⁰ They absorb potency from him and so learn to enter the altered state of consciousness we call trance – !kia (!aia) in the Ju/’hoansi language. An equivalent /Xam word does not seem to have been recorded. When a San shaman enters trance, he trembles violently and falls to the ground, sometimes cataleptic. His !gi: is said to ‘boil’ up his spine; climactically, his spirit is believed to leave his body via a ‘hole’ in the top of his head and go on out-of-body travel. Megan Biesele describes the transformation that a trancer experiences: ‘Men who go into trance become able to contact the gods and the ancestors, who are suddenly visible to them beyond the circle of firelight.’²¹

When this happens, people say that the shaman has ‘died’. The Nharo, for instance, use the word //ó (also //óa) to mean both ‘to die’ and ‘to enter trance’.²² In trance, a San shaman’s spirit is believed to leave his body and to travel to the spirit world, just as it does in death. The only difference is that a shaman’s spirit returns to his body. Everyone present agrees that the dance is performed to secure the life of the community and of individuals who may be ill, but in it the shamans ‘die’ to achieve this renewal of life.

In Lloyd’s translation of Diä!kwain’s statement we read that the dance depicted is a ’ken dance. In the manuscript, we see that the actual /Xam word that he used was //ke:n. In the version published alongside Stow’s copy Dorothea Bleek substituted an apostrophe for the lateral click, probably because she felt that readers would find the click too difficult to pronounce. What does //ke:n mean? The /Xam people from whom Bleek and Lloyd obtained so much information used three words with closely related, if not identical, meanings: !gi: (which we have already discussed), //ke:n and /ko:öde. In the Bushman Dictionary, Bleek translated //ke:n as ‘magic, sorcery’ and /ko:öde as ‘magic things, magic doings, magic power’.²³

Are the three words synonyms? This is a difficult question. The only way we can answer it is to examine the contexts in which /Xam people used the words. We give two examples. In a passage that deals with the death of a /Xam shaman, Diä!kwain said that ‘our mothers’ had taught them about this potency. He continued:

He takes the magic power [/ko:öde], he shoots it back to the place where people are. For the people are those whom he wants to take away with his sorcery [//ke:n], for the thought of them while he was among men … a sorcerer is a being who when he dies, wishes to fall heavily taking his sorcery [!gi:].²⁴

Here, it seems that the three words were interchangeable. In another context, Diä!kwain used two of the words when he was speaking about locusts, a desired food that was drawn into the web of mystical things. He said that shamans control the appearance of locusts. They:

charm them with magical doings [//ke:n-ka didi] … locusts only go about because of magical doings [/ko:öde].²⁵

In this sentence, //k:en and /ko:öde appear to be synonyms. Even though in some instances the phonetic /Xam language transcriptions of the informants’ comments cannot now be traced (if indeed they ever existed), we can be sure that they used one of the three words we have discussed: !gi:, //k:en and /ko:öde.

Bleek and Lloyd’s ‘sorcery’, then, is the manipulation of supernatural potency for a variety of ends, some good, some malign. Whichever word people used, potency was an invisible essence that permeated the San world and that people struggled to control.

We can now enquire more closely about what Diä!kwain called the //ke:n dance. He used the phrase ‘!kõä //ke:n’, that is, ‘dances //ke:n’; the word !kõä means ‘to dance, tread or step’.²⁶ In the Kalahari, we can still observe potency being activated by ‘stamping’ dance steps. There is, however, much more to the dance than ‘stamping’.

The ‘dance of blood’

We do not have to rely entirely on Diä!kwain’s comments on Stow’s copy. In the same general region of southern Africa that Arbousset and Daumas visited, but nearly 30 years later, the young San man named Qing told Joseph Orpen about this dance. Qing’s description makes an interesting comparison with what the two missionaries saw and what Diä!kwain independently said. Like Diä!kwain, Qing was not just describing a social custom; he, too, was responding to rock paintings. Indeed, it is important to notice that both Diä!kwain and Qing linked the rock paintings on which they were asked to comment to the dance.

For the present, we need note that Qing described some key features of the dance and then went on to give one of the reasons why the people perform it:

It is a circular dance of men and women, following each other, and it is danced all night. Some fall down; some become as if mad and sick; blood runs from the noses of others whose charms are weak, and they eat charm medicine, in which there is burnt snake powder. When a man is sick, this dance is danced round him, and the dancers put both hands under his arm-pits, and press their hands on him, and when he coughs the initiated put out their hands and receive what has injured him – secret things.²⁷

In sum, Qing said that the design and intentions of the dance were that:

– It was circular.

– It healed people by laying hands on them.

– Dancers fell down in what we call a trance.

– The noses of the dancers bled.

In the Kalahari today medicine dances are still circular (Pl. 3; Figs 9a, 9c). Although Diä!kwain did not mention a circular form, we wonder whether the line of dancers in Stow’s copy, and indeed in many other rock paintings of people in a long line, was a way of depicting a circular dance without using perspective. In a Kalahari dance and in Qing’s account people dance one behind the other and this pattern could be represented by a line of painted figures. Qing spoke of men and women following one another. For the most part, Kalahari women sit around a central fire as the men, shamans and ordinary men as well, circle around them in groups of half a dozen or so; only a few women sometimes join the line of dancing men for a short while before returning to their places.

9a Ju’/hoan San trance, or healing, dance photographed in the Kalahari Desert in the 1950s. The leading man carries a stick while another man carries a fly whisk and is being restrained.

9b A San man in trance.-

9c Another example of a Ju’/hoan San trance, or healing, dance photographed in the Kalahari Desert in the 1950s (see Fig. 9a). Both this photograph and Figure 9a show the dance rut in the sand and the leading man carrying a stick.

In the Kalahari, a central fire is considered essential to a dance. Its heat activates potency and contributes to the ‘boiling’ of potency up the spines of the shamans as they enter trance. Around the fire, the tight circle of seated women provides the clapping of the complex rhythms of ‘medicine songs’. Like the central fire itself, the songs, too, contain potency and are named after the ‘strong’ things we have mentioned – eland, honey, sun, gemsbok, giraffe and so forth.²⁸ The men, up to half of whom may be shamans, dance in a circle, now clockwise, now anticlockwise: it is their pounding steps that make the rut in the sand.

Overall, the Kalahari San dance is a nest of concentric circles. Around the fire, the seated women are in a circle. Around them, the men dance in a circle. And beyond them spirits of the dead lurk in the encircling darkness where the firelight does not reach. In the centre are activated potency and healing, beyond, in the darkness, are malevolent spirits of the dead who seek to shoot ‘arrows of sickness’ into people.

When they begin to enter trance, Kalahari San shamans take the sweat from their armpits and rub it on people, just as, speaking of San in the south-eastern mountains, Qing himself described. Everyone is cured: the San believe that physical, mental and social ills may be in a person without that person being aware of it. Through their fluttering hands, they draw the sickness out of those whom they are curing and into their own bodies. Finally, with a shriek, the shamans expel the sickness from their bodies via a supposed ‘hole’ at the nape of the neck. Only shamans can see the sickness flying back to the spirit realm whence it came.²⁹ It is reasonable to conclude that paintings showing sickness being expelled (Pl. 12, Fig. 10), and other things that only shamans can see, were probably painted by shamans themselves who were depicting their own religious experiences. The paintings showed ordinary people what they could not themselves see, and presented novice shamans with what they could expect to see.

10 A San rock painting (with inset tracing) showing a man who has fallen to his knees in a trance dance. He has hoofs in place of feet. He bleeds from the nose, and sickness, invisible to ordinary people, can be seen leaving the back of his neck. Uniquely, he holds what appears to be a head or skull. Colours: dark red, white.

One of Qing’s most striking statements concerns what was, for the San, a powerful substance: ‘[B]lood runs from the noses of others whose charms are weak.’ Decades earlier, Arbousset and Daumas also referred to the importance of blood; they wrote: ‘[I]t is on this account that this dance is called mokoma, or the dance of blood.’³⁰ Many readers have wrongly concluded that mokoma means ‘dance of blood’. It seems that the missionaries, too, may have misunderstood the SeSotho word mokoma. (SeSotho is the language spoken by the Basotho Bantu-speaking people; mokoma is not a San word.) It does not mean blood. In modern orthography mokôma, or mokômê, means ‘great physician or doctor’.³¹ The dance may have been popularly known as ‘the dance of blood’, but the Basotho recognized that it was a healing dance. Their word mokoma shows not only that the dance featured specialist healers but also that the Basotho people themselves held San healers in high regard.

What then was the function of blood in the dance? The southern San believed that blood kept sickness at bay. A shaman therefore smeared his nasal blood on the people whom he was healing. A /Xam shaman said, ‘[H]e (the sorcerer) thinks, that other magic things may again come to kill the man, therefore he anoints the man with the blood of his nose.’³²

In the continuation of his account of Stow’s copy (the Lloyd notebook pages that Dorothea Bleek omitted), Diä!kwain gave more information about a ‘sorcerer’s’ blood:

When a sorcerer is teaching us, when his nose bleeds, he sneezes the blood from his nose into his hand, he makes us smell the blood from his nose, for he wishes its scent to enter our gorge (?), that our gorge may feel as if it were rising, because the blood of his nose is making it rise. And when the blood has made our gorge rise, our gorge feels cool, as if water which is cold were in it. For however hot a place may be, the blood from a sorcerer’s nose feels like cold water, because he is a sorcerer he is cold.³³

Here, it is clear that potency was believed to reside in a ‘sorcerer’s’ blood. The novice obtains potency from his mentor via his blood. Mention of a person’s ‘gorge’ is interesting. The Ju/’hoansi speak of the gebesi, the stomach and diaphragm that contract painfully when shamans enter trance – a function of their ‘boiling’ potency. This causes them to bend their torsos over at right angles to their legs. When one of us (David Lewis-Williams) was in the Kalahari with the anthropologist Megan Biesele in 1974, a Ju/’hoansi man explained this point. He adopted the bending-forward posture and, in addition, held his arms in a backward position. He said that this position is adopted ‘when n/om is going into your body, when you are asking God for n/om’.³⁴ The position is important, though not sustained for long. Significantly, there are many rock paintings of men in just this posture (Figs 11a, 11b). It depicts the transitional moment when a shaman crosses over into the spirit realm.

As we have pointed out, the present-day Ju/’hoansi experience a rising sensation starting in the stomach or lower spine at the onset of trance. A century earlier, Diä!kwain gave his own understanding of this sensation. He told Lloyd that it seemed as if a shaman’s ‘vertebral artery would break’, and that when a shaman was experiencing out-of-body travel his ‘vertebral artery has risen up’.³⁵ Here we again run into the problem of translating San words into English. Lloyd’s translation of the /Xam word !khãũä as ‘vertebral artery’ was probably an error arising from her lack of familiarity with San trance rituals and experiences. In trying to explain the word to Lloyd, Diä!kwain probably ran his hand up and down his spine, and, possibly, spoke about his blood heating up. Used as a verb (as many /Xam nouns can be), the word !khãũä means ‘to boil’.³⁶ It was probably the southern San’s metaphor to describe the rising sensation experienced in the region of the spine as a shaman goes into trance. The identical ‘boiling’ metaphor is still used by the Ju/’hoansi. Small wonder, then, that Richard Katz entitled his book about Ju/’hoan healing Boiling Energy.³⁷

11a San dancers in the arms-back posture adopted when asking God for supernatural potency. Colours: dark red, white.

11b This tracing shows a part-antelope, part-human figure in the same posture as dancers in Figure 11a.

Caps and respect

These ideas about San shamans and what they experience when they enter trance are complex enough, but Diä!kwain enlarged on them when he commented on another painting. It is in a site in the Eastern Cape Province (Fig. 12). We have checked Stow’s copy, which he made on two sheets of cartridge paper, against what remains of the original. Although almost everything else in the shelter has been badly damaged, Stow’s copy can be seen to be reasonably accurate in most regards. As he copied it, the panel comprises a scatter of 31 images. Many of them appear to have antelope heads. Some are women. Lloyd’s phonetic transcription of Diä!kwain’s comments shows that the published English version is reliable.³⁸ Although he explicitly refers to the //ke:n dance, he speaks of rather puzzling pieces of clothing and concepts: ‘caps’, ‘rings’ and ‘respect’:

12 Half of George Stow’s copy of a rock painting of people who ‘mean to tread the ’ken’. Some wear antelope head caps. The bodies of others fuse with antelope heads. Colours: dark red, black, yellow ochre.

The things which the people here have put on are caps which they have made for themselves of young gemsboks’ heads. They have cut the horns out: they mean to tread the ’ken with them. At the time when they do the ’ken they wear such caps. The rings which they have put on are the ’ken’s rings. They do this when they mean to try us, they put on this dress because they want to see whether we shall laugh at them. That is why they put on such things, for they intend to observe us, to see if we are people who laugh at a person who is different. That is why they do this; they have dressed themselves up oddly for us, for they wish to see if we know manners. And if we do not laugh at them, they talk to our people about it. They say ‘Do you know that the children whom we see do not mock us? It seems as if they knew manners, for they show respect to us. We had just put on things about which we thought that they would laugh at us.’³⁹

The key point to notice here is that Diä!kwain again identified the group as a //ke:n dance, even though they are not shown dancing in a line or circle: ‘They mean to tread the ’ken’ (!kõä //ke:n). It is possible that various choreographies were followed.⁴⁰ Significantly, Diä!kwain says nothing about hunting disguises, a common explanation that researchers have advanced for human figures that seem to have antelope heads. This painting is one of the exceptional instances in which the figures are clearly wearing some sort of headdress. Most comparable paintings show the antelope head blending in a non-realistic way with the human body (Fig. 13).

The making of caps with antelope ears or small horns was a practice adopted by /Xam shamans (Fig. 14). People believed that a springbok would follow a shaman wearing such a cap and lead the whole herd into the hunters’ ambush.⁴¹ It is not clear whether this supernatural hunting practice is explicitly illustrated in the painting that we are discussing. The large number of figures apparently wearing horned caps seems to count against this interpretation. On the other hand, Diä!kwain indisputably related the wearing of the antelope caps to the //ke:n, or trance, dance. It therefore seems likely that, in this painting, the wearing of antelope caps referred in some way to harnessing antelope potency and guiding antelope herds, not to hunting disguises.

The ‘rings’ to which Diä!kwain referred may have been merely decorative, though they were clearly considered important and he called them the //ke:n’s rings. In an additional note,⁴² he explained that they were made from an edible root called //gwi.

More puzzling is Diä!kwain’s claim that the dancers want to see whether the people will laugh at them. What could he have meant? Today, there is often much laughter at a San trance dance, particularly in its early stages. Children sometimes weave in and out of the dancers, mimicking them. No one seems to care. We suspect that what Diä!kwain had in mind here was not this sort of relaxed behaviour but rather an outright rejection, or ridiculing, of the shamans’ abilities. Indeed, some /Xam shamans complained that they did not receive the respect that was their due. For instance, Diä!kwain said that shamans who specialized in making rain (Chapters 4 and 5) complained that people soon forgot that in times of drought they had been begging the rain shamans to help them: ‘That is why the medicine men will not always make rain fall for them.’⁴³

Respect and respectful behaviour were valued by the San, but they did not express respect in a way that Westerners would find appropriate. Being a shaman was no joking matter: on the contrary, it was a dangerous business. In a continuation of the passage about the ‘great sorcerer’ leading the line of dancers, Diä!kwain explained:

A man who is a sorcerer takes care of himself, because he is a sorcerer…. For other sorcerers will kill him, if he does not take care of himself, when he meets them…. As he is lying asleep, they come upon him sleeping there…. That is why we sometimes hear a sorcerer shivering at night; when other sorcerers come to him, then he shivers because the others want to see whether his veins are still alive.⁴⁴

These threatening ‘sorcerers’ may be either dead shamans or shamans on out-of-body travel from another camp. In San thought, evil and sickness come from outside the immediate community. The protective shivering (!khauken) of which Diä!kwain spoke is the trembling that a /Xam person experienced when in trance.⁴⁵ It is a central component of San trance experience. In the statement about the shaman who lies asleep, he trembles (that is, enters trance while he is asleep) to protect himself. For the San, sleep and trance are not clearly distinguished from one another. Both states take a person into the spirit realm.

13 An antelope-headed figure bleeds from the nose. He is wearing an antelope skin kaross painted in white and has an extra finger. Colours: dark red, white.

14 A bowman wearing a cap with antelope ears. He has sectioned arrows thrust between his back and his kaross. A quiver slung over his shoulder holds the arrows in place. Colours: dark red, yellow ochre, white.

Fragments of the dance

So far we have discussed rock paintings of trance dances that are fairly complete. We therefore need to emphasize a key point that modern Westerners easily overlook when they try to decipher a complex rock art panel of many images, all apparently jumbled together (Pls 5, 20, 21, 25). San rock art is not a faithful, photographic, representation of daily life. To be sure, there are depictions of many items that everyone encounters in daily life, such as bows and arrows and animals. But these items are often arranged next to one another in unrealistic juxtapositions. Sometimes, one finds depictions of bows, bags and fly whisks quite separate from human beings, or small depictions of people next to large paintings of eland. Clearly, the whole panorama of images in an extensive panel was not intended to be a realistic ‘set piece’. We have explained how some images were reservoirs of potency rather than simply ‘pictures’.

Now, we point out one of the non-realistic ways in which painters referred to the trance dance. We call it synecdoche – a part stands for a whole.⁴⁶ Often, painters depicted only single human figures in recognizable dancing postures. Although the trance dance was central to San religion, depictions of complete dances are fairly rare. Instead, painters deployed what we call ‘fragments of the dance’. These include:

– human figures bending forward at the waist as their potency boils and their gebesi contracts (Fig. 15a, c)

– blood falling from the nose of a figure (Fig. 15b)

– figures in an arms-back dancing posture in which shamans ask god for more potency (Fig. 15c)

– clapping figures that activate potency (Fig. 15d)

– fly whisks that people use only in the dance (Fig. 15a, e)

– dance rattles (Fig. 15c)

Sometimes only one of these fragments, say, a person bleeding from the nose, may be part of a group of people. Its presence clearly implicates the whole group: they are all, though perhaps in different ways, implicated in what the dance means to the San. Similarly, a fragment of the dance, say a single woman clapping, positioned in the midst of a number of depictions of eland, is appropriate in a conceptual rather than a realistic way. In this example, the fragment links people to animals in the context of the dance: the clapping woman can be seen as activating the potency of eland. Westerners tend to seek clear, unambiguous, comprehensive depictions of the dance and, as a result, are often misled into thinking that the dance rarely occurs in San rock art. But this rock art is more subtle and allusive than that. By synecdoche, beliefs and experiences associated with the dance and its trans-cosmological implications permeate the art.

15 Fragments of the dance. (a) The bending forward posture and fly whisks. (b) Bleeding from the nose. (c) The bending forward posture and dancing rattles. (d) Women in the clapping posture. (e) An unrealistic cluster of fly whisks. Colours: dark red, bright red, black, white.

From this perspective, the line of dancing figures on which Diä!kwain commented and that we discussed at the beginning of this chapter is itself a fragment of the dance (Fig. 7). There are no clapping women or other participants, but Diä!kwain nevertheless knew that it was a depiction of a dance. Because novices are taught how to enter the spirit realm at a normal trance dance (at least in the Kalahari today), we conclude that the painter extracted a fragment from the larger ritual (in which all people, men, women, children, participate) in order to highlight one particular component – the role of male shamans. Whether Diä!kwain was right or not to go further and single out the teaching of novices, what he and other San people had to say about the trance dance clearly establishes its overall importance in San thought.

We have still only scratched the surface of San experience, belief and ritual. The more obscure explanations for rock paintings that San people offered take us deeper into what are for many Westerners mysterious realms. As we have begun to show, the keys to those realms lie in deciphering ancient San words and rock paintings. The words are not unproblematic explanations that we can read like an English-language text. Rather, the words and the rock paintings must be seen in tandem: they illuminate one another. As the next chapters show, the ‘things and deeds of sorcery’ are indeed multiple and complex.