CHAPTER 4

Discovering Rain

The dark and sombre majesty of scene was increased by the heavy masses of clouds overhanging the mountain-top and occasionally emitting brilliant streams of lightning, followed by the low, hoarse growl of the passing storm.¹

The San comments that we have so far deciphered are fairly straightforward compared with those that we discuss in this and the next chapter. In cases where more than one informant gave independent explanations for a specific rock painting, we clearly enter a more complex terrain of potential disagreement and confusion. At the same time, it is not surprising that the area of San belief and ritual which elicited these multiple comments is one that has long gripped the attention of Western travellers and scholars.

In the early years of the 20th century, the Irish Presbyterian missionary Reverend Samuel Shaw Dornan (1871–1941) found himself fascinated by the Kalahari San. Like so many other Western travellers, he marvelled at the way in which they were able to live in the unforgiving environment of the desert. Among the San’s accomplishments that amazed him were the men’s hunting strategies and weapons – especially their deadly poisoned arrows – and the skill with which women were able to spot, by the merest wisp of dead leaves, a nourishing and water-providing bulb beneath the desert sand.

When it came to religion, Dornan was more sympathetic towards the San than some of his predecessors. He at least acknowledged that they held beliefs about God, life after death and even some notions of resurrection, but he was dismayed by their general vagueness concerning these matters. Understandably, given his biblical background, he was especially interested in San mythology. He found that San life depended much on the changing seasons, especially the coming of the spectacular first thunderstorms of summer, and he was therefore surprised that they did not more clearly entertain the sort of beliefs that he called ‘sidereal worship’ and that they did not ascribe to the heavenly bodies’ control of the seasons. After all, rain was supremely important to them. If the rains failed, ‘the game disappeared or migrated, and the Bushmen had to follow or starve. At such times they were very hard pushed to live, and the old and the infirm must have died off.’²

Dornan noticed that the coming of the summer rains triggered a chain reaction: ‘The first thunderstorm that heralds the rainy season is the cause of much rejoicing, because rain means grass, and grass means game and plenty of food.’³ A century earlier, another missionary, John Campbell, thought that the rainy season could be called ‘the Bushman’s harvest, for the ground being softened by the rain, they can easily pull up roots’.⁴ Dornan and Campbell were not alone in noticing a link between rain and joyful celebration. The linguist Clement M. Doke observed dances that he thought were ‘in honour of the new grass’,⁵ and the 17th-century traveller Sir John Barrow noted that the San danced for several nights at the first rain.⁶

In the southern African interior, rain usually comes in the form of localized thunderstorms, though softer, more general rains are known. The San speak of male and female rain, respectively the thunderstorm and the gentle rains. Sometimes, with clear skies above them, people see rain falling from cumulus clouds far away, and they long for the storm to move in their direction. If it does not, they may strike camp and move to the place where rain has fallen. There they await the transformation of the veld: the bushes sprout and the bulbs that have lain hidden beneath the sand for the long, dry winter send up shoots that alert San women to their presence.

Given the colonial interest in the contribution of rain to survival in harsh southern African environments, it was inevitable that, sooner or later, the Bleek family would have enquired about their /Xam informants’ beliefs concerning rain. But the way in which Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd managed to elicit some truly remarkable accounts of /Xam rain-making resulted from a series of fortunate events.

It all began with what became a widely reproduced and much discussed rock painting. The ways in which this painting has been variously interpreted illustrate the necessity of constantly moving back and forth between the three registers of our ‘Rosetta Stone’ (Preface). Researchers who remain with only one register court disaster.

First encounters

In 1835 the Scottish soldier and traveller Sir James Alexander explored a valley known as the Langkloof. It is in what is now the south-eastern part of the Western Cape Province. He wished to see ‘drawings executed by the former occupiers of the country’.⁷ Like some other early travellers, he was surprised to find that ‘these rude attempts of uncivilized artists are not utterly devoid of merit’. For the most part he aligned himself with the colonial view that the paintings were simple records of daily life. His colonial perspective is clear in what he had to say about a group of human figures (Fig. 24): imaginatively, he concluded that it depicted ‘an embassy of females suing for peace’. He added: ‘No one can deny that their reception is a gracious one, to judge by the polite attitudes of the male figures, perhaps chiefs.’⁸ Although the sex of none of the figures is shown, Alexander thought that one group depicted women, the other men; in accordance with the spirit of the times, the women were subservient, whereas the men were gracious, polite chiefs.

Alexander ran out of ideas when he was confronted by a painting that defied a naturalistic explanation (Fig. 25). It is in a site now known as Ezeljagdspoort. Strikingly, it seems to show apparently fishtailed figures. Alexander wrote: ‘We are unable to assist the reader, even by a conjecture, in elucidating the meaning of that which he here sees represented.’⁹ Nevertheless, he turned to racist colonial lore and suggested that the painting may refer to ‘the amphibious nature attributed to the whites by the natives in the olden day’. The supposed ‘amphibious nature’ of the images took hold on the public imagination. Alexander’s copyist, Major C. Michell, concentrated on getting the ‘amphibious’ features right, but he omitted other details such as the fingers at the ends of the elongated figure’s arms and the two straight lines at this figure’s shoulder. He also misrepresented the undulating lines.

When writers who see the art as principally narrative have to deal with patently non-real images like the Ezeljagdspoort group, they frequently identify them as a ‘scene’ from a myth rather than from daily life. In this way they preserve their position, albeit in a broader sense. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, myth has remained an alluring explanation for many researchers; the position is perhaps understandable, especially for those who do not know San ethnography in any detail. But once we delve more deeply into San beliefs and rituals, we encounter more persuasive explanations. That turned out to be the case with the Ezeljagdspoort images.

24 An 1830s copy of a San rock painting that was interpreted as ‘an embassy of females suing for peace’. The copy suggests that the images were only partially preserved at that time. Colour: unknown.

25 A modern copy of the San rock painting that in the 19th century was erroneously interpreted as depicting mermaids. Colour: dark red.

Some decades after Alexander visited the site, the paintings were copied by H. C. Schunke. He submitted his copy and other copies of rock paintings to Wilhelm Bleek. In his 1875 Second Report Concerning Bushman Researches, Bleek referred to Schunke’s copy but unfortunately added an ambiguous comment that misled numerous subsequent researchers: ‘The subject of it (the watermaidens), was explained in a fine old legend to Mr D. Ballot (who kindly copied it for Mr Schunke), by a very old Bushman still surviving in those parts.’¹⁰ The old San man’s Dutch name was Afrikaander. For one, Alex Willcox, a well-known writer on San rock art, ‘The story behind the paintings … was, according to Dr Bleek, told to a Mr Ballot by an old Bushman then still living in the district’.¹¹ Later, Jeff Leeuwenburg, another rock art researcher, similarly accepted that the legend was a direct explanation of the painting.¹² Others followed.

The legend does indeed seem to fit the images. It tells of a young girl who was dragged into a dark pool by watermaidens. When the girl’s mother found what had happened to her, she collected herbs and ground them to a powder. She then scattered the powder on the surface of the water. As a result, the girl came out of the pool unharmed, though the watermaidens had licked her cheeks white because they loved her so much.¹³

Maidens and water pools feature in various San tales. In one that Diä!kwain recounted to Lucy Lloyd, young girls carried off by the rain are transformed into flowers that grow in the water.¹⁴ It is important to notice that in none of the tales about watermaidens are the beings said to have fishtails: on the contrary, they have human-like bodies and they walk on the ground. The fishtail idea derives from Western notions of mermaids.

Nevertheless there is much in Afrikaander’s tale that is consonant with San beliefs, but whether these beliefs can be related to the Ezeljagdspoort ‘fishtail’ painting is open to question. Close reading of the historical record and an account of the painting given by one of Bleek and Lloyd’s /Xam informants, casts a different light on the matter and shows how important it is to be critical of the ethno-historical record. We begin with Afrikaander’s legend.

Fortunately, the pieces of lined blue writing paper on which Ballot recorded the legend have been preserved in the Jagger Library, University of Cape Town. The title and opening paragraph are crucial:

 

A story told to me by an old Bushman who appears to be between 70 or 80 years of age. On asking old Afrikaander: ‘Do you believe in Watermeide?’ he lit his pipe, took off his hat, sat on the ground, and then commenced: …

 

Immediately, one can see that Afrikaander was responding to Ballot’s question about watermaidens, not to the painting itself. Ballot asked him a leading question based on his own misinterpretation of the forked-tailed figures and then linked the old San man’s answer to the painting. Indeed, there is no evidence that the man had seen the painting in reality or even in the form of a copy. Certainly, he did not refer to any of the details of the painting, the curious elongated central figure or even the famous ‘fishtails’. Nor did he refer to the actions being performed by the people, although these obviously call for explanation. Indeed, the legend cannot be said to be an explanation of the rock painting. Perhaps realizing that the man had not seen the painting, Bleek subsequently wrote in his report that what he took to be ‘the subject of it’ was explained by the legend (emphasis added).

There is therefore no compelling reason to link the old San man’s watermaiden legend to the Ezeljagdspoort painting. A quite different and more persuasive explanation was, however, soon to emerge.

/Han≠kasso and Lloyd

Three years after Bleek’s death in 1875, Lucy Lloyd showed a copy of the Ezeljagdspoort painting to the /Xam San man /Han≠kasso. It was the year before he returned to his /Xam homeland. He gave a complex explanation that, unlike Afrikaander’s, refers to specific features of the images and unashamedly admits puzzlement at certain points. /Han≠kasso’s statement is clearly a valuable document, even though he admits to a degree of ignorance. Like the comments we discussed in the previous chapter, his explanation again refers to ‘sorcery’. The parentheses are Lloyd’s:

I think that the rain’s navel is that which goes (along here). I think that these people, they address the rain that the rain’s navel may not kill them, that the rain’s navel may be favourable towards them. That the rain’s navel may not kill them. That the rain’s navel may keep favourable towards them. This man he has hold of a thing which resembles a stick. I think that they are rain’s people. I do not know them, for I behold that they are people. For they have their arms: they resemble people. They feel that they are sorcerers, the rain’s sorcerers they are: for this man is holding a thing which resembles /khoe (a curved stick used in making a Bushman house). I do not know whether it is a /khoe, for I see the thing resembles a /khoe. These people (i.e. those on the lower side of the line in the picture) I do not know whether the rain’s navel divides them from the other people. People (they) are, sorcerers, rain’s sorcerers. They make the rain to fall and the rain’s clouds come out on account of them. Hence the rain falls, … and the place becomes green on account of it. This thing (i.e. what we should have called the right arm of the rain figure), it is the one which resembles a caterpillar, the rain’s caterpillar.¹⁵

The first point to notice is that /Han≠kasso was not particularly interested in the ichthyoid tails of the figures, even though, in view of the Ballot legend, it is highly probable that Lloyd directed his attention to their fishlike appearance. Indeed, his observation ‘I behold that they are people. For, they have their arms’ may have been given in response to an unrecorded question about the ‘fishtails’ that Lloyd put to him. Nor did /Han≠kasso find the curious depiction of what he took to be the legs of the figures unusual; he was more inclined to identify the figures as human beings because of their arms. His repeated insistence that ‘they resemble people’ may have been prompted by further questions that Lloyd put to him. Importantly, he mentioned neither fishtails nor watermaidens nor half-fish, half-human creatures.

Instead /Han≠kasso said that the painting had something to do with weather control and that the figures were ‘rain’s sorcerers’. As we briefly saw in Chapter 2, there were different kinds of !gi:ten, Lloyd’s ‘sorcerers’. One of these types comprised !khwa-ka !gi:ten, who were believed to be able to make rain and to protect people from violent thunderstorms.¹⁶ In the /Xam language !khwa means both water and rain. The principal manner in which !khwa-ka !gi:ten made rain is the topic of our next chapter. Here we try to decipher some of the details of /Han≠kasso’s statement about the enigmatic Ezeljagdspoort images.

In the first remark that Lloyd recorded, probably a response to a question from her, /Han≠kasso identified what we see as a greatly attenuated human figure as ‘the rain’s navel’, saying ‘that which goes (along here)’. His use of ‘goes’ and Lloyd’s parenthesis suggest he was actually pointing to the long, curving line; he did not use the words ‘man’ or ‘person’ (‘people’) as he did when he referred to the other figures in the group. Furthermore, at the end of his statement he said, ‘This thing (i.e. what we should have called the right arm of the rain figure), it is the one which resembles a caterpillar, the rain’s caterpillar’ (Lloyd’s parenthesis). A few manuscript pages later /Han≠kasso explained more about the ‘rain’s caterpillar’. Again, the parenthesis is Lloyd’s:

The rain’s //kerri-ssi-!kau (caterpillar) are large. They dwell in the water; they are those which are large. They do not have hair on their backs. They are going into the water … they run out of the water…. Their back’s things, they are red. The Bushmen do not eat them; for they are poisonous. If they bite a Bushman, the Bushman dies on account of it.¹⁷

If /Han≠kasso thought that an arm of the elongated figure was a caterpillar, he apparently did not perceive the image as in any way human. When he used the phrase ‘the rain’s navel’, he was thus referring to only the line, without realizing it was an attenuated human figure. If the figures are indeed shamans of the rain, as /Han≠kasso claimed, the attenuation of the principal figure is explicable. Attenuation and rising up are sensations experienced by people in certain altered states. As we saw in the last chapter, a Kalahari San shaman said that the light he experienced in trance ‘brings about very special kinds of things. I become so tall that I see people as small, as if they are standing far below me. It’s like I am flying over them.’¹⁸ Again and again, the painted images, San ethnography and neuropsychology complement one another in highly persuasive ways.

Still, it could be argued that the linear form of the elongated image suggests that ‘umbilical cord’ may be a better if not exact phrase. Lloyd, however, gives all the few recorded uses of the /Xam word !Λhain as ‘navel’. ‘The rain’s navel’ is in fact one of a set of anatomical metaphors that included ‘the rain’s legs’, ‘the rain’s hair’, ‘the rain’s breath’ and ‘the rain’s blood’, all of which we discuss in later chapters. !Λhain, however, poses its own intriguing problems. We need to examine as many uses of the /Xam word as possible. In doing so, we find an association between the human navel and the work of rain !gi:ten. In a statement given independently of the Ezeljagdspoort painting, Diä!kwain said that people do three things when they wish to protect their camp from an ‘angry’ thunderstorm that could blow down their fragile huts.

First, Diä!kwain told Lloyd that they stand in front of their dwellings, facing in the direction from which storms come, and ‘strike their (?navels) with their fists’ and ‘press their hand in their ?navel’ (Lloyd’s parenthesis).¹⁹ Lloyd placed a question mark before ‘navel’ here, but the manuscript shows it is the same /Xam word that /Han≠kasso used. Almost certainly, Diä!kwain would have assisted with the translation by a gesture; the word must have something to do with the general area of the stomach. But Lloyd’s question mark suggests that ‘navel’ is not an exact equivalent of the /Xam word. If the word meant no more than ‘navel’, it would have been easy enough for Diä!kwain to indicate this by pointing. One possible explanation is that !Λhain meant the stomach and diaphragm, not just the navel itself, because this is the part of the body where a shaman’s potency starts to ‘boil’ when he enters trance.²⁰ As the ‘boiling’ increases, the stomach muscles contract painfully and the man bends forward (Fig. 26). It is therefore significant that the large, central figure in the Ezeljagdspoort painting that appears to be holding a short stick is bending forward (Fig. 25). Numerous rock paintings of trance dances depict this posture.²¹ The striking of the !Λhain and the pressing of a hand into the stomach may thus have been a ritual dramatization of some of the physical effects of trance: whether they themselves were shamans of the rain or not, people performed these actions to invoke the power of trance experiences as they tried to control a dangerous storm. Although no figures in the Ezeljagdspoort painting are shown striking their stomachs, that ritual may have relevance to the general theme of the painting as proposed by Diä!kwain.

Second, Diä!kwain said that the shamans of the rain ‘snap their fingers at the rain’ while they are facing the threatening storm and pressing ‘their hand in their ?navel’.²² Snapping fingers, or simply pointing (Pl. 6), was a way of shooting potency into a person or animal.²³ Finger-snapping was therefore related to the striking of the navel in that both gestures were implicated in ritual protection from violent storms.

26 A San rock painting depicting a trance dance. The dancers bend forward as their stomach muscles contract. They are surrounded by flecks of supernatural potency that can be seen only by shamans. Four of the dancers bleed from the nose. Colours: dark red, white, black.

Third, Diä!kwain said that people apostrophized the rain when they wished to disperse a thunderstorm: ‘Thou shall falling turn back … for thou dost not a little lighten, for it seems as if thou are very angry’.²⁴ This is similar to what /Han≠kasso said when he commented on the figures in the Ezeljagdspoort painting: ‘they address the rain that the rain’s navel may not kill them, that the rain’s navel may be favourable towards them’.²⁵ Intriguingly, rock art researcher Jeremy Hollmann goes further and suggests that the Ezeljagdspoort imagery itself may have had a prophylactic function in that it too ‘apostrophized’, or ‘addressed’, the rain.²⁶

All in all, it seems that the ‘navel’ was associated in ways that we do not fully understand, with supernatural potency and the activities of shamans of the rain. Given such /Xam phrases as ‘the rain’s legs’ (columns of falling rain beneath a thundercloud), and the rain’s ‘breath’ (mist), we wonder whether !Λhain in this context meant ‘umbilical cord’ and was perhaps a San way of speaking about a tornado, a long funnel reaching down from a cloud. It may be that the figures in the painting are ‘shepherding’ the rain in this form to keep it from harming people and their dwellings. Either way, it is clear that, even if he noticed them, /Han≠kasso did not think that the human attributes of the line in Figure 25 (its head, arms and fingers) warranted comment.

The most controversial feature of the painting – the forked tails – remains unexplained. The image of a mermaid is so strong in Western thought that researchers have found it difficult to think beyond it. What we believe to be the real answer to the Ezeljagdspoort puzzle lies not in mermaids but in the sort of ‘sorcery’ that we encountered in Chapters 2 and 3.

Generalities and particulars

Why was /Han≠kasso unable to explain the painted ‘forked tails’? In what ways, or in what particulars, is his testimony to be trusted? To answer those questions we recall that there were, and still are, fundamental beliefs and associated rituals that, with local variations, are pan-San. The ethnographies from widely separated San groups have much in common.²⁷ Wilhelm Bleek himself commented that the information he and Lucy Lloyd were collecting from their Cape /Xam informants had many parallels with what Qing had told Joseph Orpen in the south-eastern mountains.²⁸ As we have seen, the principal mythological figure /Kaggen (Cagn), the San trickster-deity, appears in both regions, though the tales themselves are not common to both.

Rain-making beliefs and rituals, too, were common to both regions. Yet, the specific ways in which those beliefs and rituals were expressed in the rock art of the two regions varied. So it is with the forked-tailed figures. They are concentrated in a comparatively small area in the south-eastern Cape (Fig. 27): as far as we know, they are not found in the region where /Han≠kasso lived or, for that matter, where Qing lived. This tension between widely held beliefs and their localized expressions of them explains why, though he had the necessary pan-San background knowledge, /Han≠kasso was unfamiliar with painted ‘forked-tailed’ figures.

A key point here is that neither he nor the Bleek family, nor indeed Alexander, Schunke or Ballot, knew that the Ezeljagdspoort figures represented a theme that is repeated at many rock shelters in the south-eastern Cape. This broader sweep of evidence was brought to light by Hollmann, who surveyed the region in which the figures are found: there are far more of them and they are more complex than the few known from Ezeljagdspoort had led us to expect.²⁹ In the same way that we examine multiple contexts in which puzzling San words are used, so when we collate many examples of ‘forked-tailed’ figures from a range of sites do we begin to see similarities that answer at least some of our questions about them.³⁰

Many of these figures have their arms in a swept-back position that suggest wings (Fig. 28a). Then, too, their orientations suggest swooping flight, a point we take up in the next section. One of the forked-tailed figures at another site is wearing an eared cap (Fig. 28c). As we saw in Chapter 2, shamans who were believed to control the movements of game wore caps sewn with antelope ears standing up. Indeed, shamans are often depicted wearing them. Trance dances do not have just one function. At a single dance various aims are achieved: shamans try to ward off ‘arrows of sickness’, draw sickness out of people, go on out-of-body journeys and make rain.

As his survey progressed, Hollmann discovered further diagnostic features of forked-tailed figures. He found instances of them bleeding from the nose at two sites, while other figures in the distinctive clapping posture are sometimes associated with forked-tailed figures. These are two indications of the trance dance (Fig. 28b).³¹ As Hollmann points out, the nasal bleeding and clapping of some forked-tailed figures link them and, by implication, the Ezeljagdspoort painting, to the experiences that San !gi:ten have when they enter an altered state of consciousness (Chapters 2 and 3). The nasal blood that Hollmann found depicted is especially strong evidence to confirm /Han≠kasso’s view that the Ezeljagdspoort images depict shamans – whatever else he may have had to guess about them. Indeed, any initial doubt we may have felt regarding /Han≠kasso’s competence to identify the Ezeljagdspoort figures as shamans is assuaged by Hollmann’s new evidence: it confirms an association with ‘sorcery’.

27 Map of southern Africa. The grey shading shows the area in which depictions of forked-tailed figures (‘swift-people’) are found.

28 (a) Two depictions of forked-tailed figures (‘swift-people’). Their arms are in the backward position adopted by trance dancers. (b) A ‘swift-person’ in the clapping posture. (c) A ‘swift-person’ wearing the eared cap that was associated with shamans of the game (Fig. 14). Colours: yellow, red, white.

To follow up the linkage between the ‘forked-tailed’ images and shamans, we need to examine neuropsychological research into certain experiences generated by altered states of consciousness. Then we need to consider some of the other paintings that Hollmann found in the region of Ezeljagdspoort and, moreover, a range of San beliefs about birds.

Taking flight

Neuropsychological research and ethnographic evidence both show that flight is a common, indeed worldwide, way of describing the sensations of weightlessness, dissociation from one’s body, journeys to distant places and changes in perspective that include looking down on one’s surroundings.³² Today neurological research is being done on just what electrochemical events in the brain cause this sensation, but there is no dispute that flight is a common, perhaps the most common, experience that people have in deeply altered states. Certainly, San shamans all over southern Africa spoke and still speak about flying. One of the oldest statements came from Diä!kwain. Speaking about a shaman, he told Lloyd:

At some other time, when we are liable to forget him, he turns into a little bird, he comes to see us where we live and flies about our heads. Sometimes he sits on our heads, he sits peeping at us to see if we are still as we were when we left him…. As he flies away he chirps, just as a little bird does when it flies away.³³

Diä!kwain did not say what species he meant by ‘little bird’. But in another statement he was more specific and said that the swallow was the ‘rain’s thing’.³⁴ The word that Lloyd translated as ‘swallow’ was !kwerri-/nan. Again, we need to analyse the San word. The second part of it is obscure, but the first part means ‘to thunder’ or ‘to strike with lightning’. In /Xam thought, it was the rain (!khwa) that was said to strike (!kwerriten).³⁵ Another word for ‘swallow’ was /kabbi-ta-!khwa;³⁶ ta forms the possessive case and explicitly links the bird to !khwa, rain. Thus whatever /kabbi and /nan may have meant, both of the words translated as ‘swallow’ point to a close association between those birds and rain. Diä!kwain clearly expressed this association when he said that swallows ‘come when the rain clouds are in the sky’.³⁷ Such beliefs were not restricted to the 19th-century southern San. Still today in the northern Kalahari Desert, the Ju/’hoan San call swallows glace’mhsi, ‘children of the rain’.³⁸

The association goes further. Diä!kwain said that people should not throw stones (a sign of disrespect) at swallows because ‘the swallow is with the things which the sorcerers take out [/ki, which means “to possess”, as a shaman possesses potency], which they send about. Those are the things which the swallow resembles.’³⁹ A man who did not heed this injunction was said to have fallen unconscious because ‘the swallow had entered into him’.⁴⁰ For the San, a shaman could embody a swallow. The relevance of these beliefs to the Ezeljagdspoort painting becomes inescapable when we recall that /Han≠kasso explicitly identified the figures with forked tails as ‘the rain’s sorcerers’ and added that they ‘make the rain to fall and the rain’s clouds come out on account of them’.⁴¹

The close links between rain-making shamans, swallows and clouds should be seen together with statements about shamans turning into birds. Each contributing in its own way, the ethnographic, neuropsychological and painted data combine to suggest very strongly that the Ezeljagdspoort images in Figure 25 depict not fish-people, as has been widely supposed, but rather rain-making shamans in the form of birds.

But were they, specifically, swallows? Working from a number of perspectives, Hollmann, who (as noted) has intensively investigated the region where these paintings are found, has persuasively argued that they depict swift-people rather than swallow-people. Swallows (Hirundinidae) are, for many people, indistinguishable from swifts (Apodidae), and may have been so for Bleek and Lloyd. Both species have forked tails, though their wing shapes differ: swift wings are slender and scimitar-like, whereas swallow wings are somewhat wider.⁴² To support his conclusion, Hollmann cites two types of swift behaviour that recall San people at a trance dance. First, swifts wheel around in the sky and utter loud screaming sounds. Ornithologists call this behaviour ‘circusing’ or ‘screaming party/display’;⁴³ it frequently takes place before migratory flights. This behaviour recalls the frenzied dancing and screaming that takes place at a San trance dance. Secondly, swifts flap their wings so that they meet above and below the bird’s body and thus make a clapping sound.

29 Six forked-tailed figures (‘swift-people’) depicted as if they are emerging from a crack in the rock face. Colours: yellow, red.

Another feature of swift behaviour is that certain kinds of swifts commonly take over the igloo-shaped mud nests that swallows construct on the walls of rock shelters. Swifts’ own nests are usually made in rock crevices or attached to the angle between the back wall of a rock shelter and a rock overhang. When the birds arrive at the nests they do so at high speed and appear to crash into the rock face. Strikingly, rock paintings of forked-tailed figures often appear to exit from or enter into inequalities in the rock face (Fig. 29).⁴⁴ As we have seen, the San thought of the rock face as a ‘veil’ between this world and the spirit world. The rock was as important as the images themselves.

All in all, we can go beneath the surface of /Han≠kasso’s puzzling explanation of the Ezeljagdspoort painting. Despite his professed ignorance on a number of points, we can be sure that the images have to do with events and beings in the spirit realm, that they express San beliefs about birds (in particular swallows and swifts), and that these birds, together with /Han≠kasso’s remarks, link the painted groups to rain-control.

A step forward

The most important point that we have established in this chapter is that none of the three registers of our ‘Rosetta Stone’ can be taken in isolation and at face value. None is a direct, straightforward expression of San ideas that we can ‘read’ with ease. All three registers have to be interrelated and deciphered. Summing up and taking our three San registers in turn, we can say:

– San rock paintings, the most enigmatic of the registers, cannot be unproblematically understood by modern Westerners. If we take them at face value, we read our own Western concepts into them. We end up unquestioningly accepting that the San believed in fishtailed mermaids and that they painted them at Ezeljagdspoort. Specific paintings have to be seen in the context of all the art in a given region. Researchers must therefore be familiar with the art at first hand: they need to examine large numbers of rock shelters to see how the images are placed on the rock face, how they relate one to another and in what ways many are subtle variations on common themes.

– San language statements given in response to copies of rock paintings must be similarly contextualized. Not only must the actual San words be minutely examined; they must also be seen in as many contexts as possible so that nuances of meaning can be extracted from them. Further, no informant is omniscient. (This is, of course, true of any religious context: no priest knows everything about Christianity, though some know a lot more than others.) San statements about beliefs and rituals must therefore be seen in context every bit as much as San rock art images. It is by moving back and forth between many statements that we are able to discern continuities and differences and thus construct flexible understandings of San beliefs to fit local circumstances.

– Lastly, and most obviously, English (or other Western) language translations of San texts must be carefully scrutinized. Ideally, they should be compared with the original San language texts. Where that is not possible, English language translations of specific but now lost San statements must be seen in the light of translations of texts for which we do have the original language versions.

It has become clear that the three registers of our ‘Rosetta Stone’ are parallel texts: they are not three stages in a developing sequence of understanding. We must move back and forth between them. As we do so, we need to bring in other sources of information. These include knowledge of animal behaviour that the San would have known intimately and neuropsychology that tells us what human beings experience when they engage in activities such as the trance dance. Explanations of San rock art that favour broad, rather abstract interpretations without thoroughly exploring all three registers should be treated with suspicion. Those explanations have no safeguards against thoroughgoing Western biases and hidden assumptions about what art is and what it does.

These principles of interpretation set us up to tackle an extension of the San beliefs that we have discussed in this chapter. That extension is a category of rock art images that points to a conceptualization and painted manifestation of San beliefs about natural phenomena. We now move away from the south-eastern Cape and its images of flight to examine another type of image altogether.