CHAPTER 5

Capturing Rain

That animal which the men are catching is a snake (!).¹

In her 1889 report to the Cape of Good Hope Parliament entitled A Short Account of Further Bushman Material Collected, Lucy Lloyd wrote that it was:

 

impossible adequately to acknowledge the enormous help in the Bushman researches which has been afforded by the copies of Bushman drawings and paintings, particularly by the very large collection made by the late Mr. G. W. Stow: for which it is hoped that means of publication may eventually be found.

 

She went on to say that:

 

some very curious ideas, possessed by the Bushmen, which would probably otherwise not have come to light at all, have become known to us in the course of their endeavours to explain some of the pictures submitted to them.²

 

Chief among these ‘very curious ideas’ was the whole complex area of rain-making. San beliefs about capturing !khwa, the rain, first came to light in 1873 when Joseph Orpen listened to his San guide, Qing, talking about rock paintings in the Sehonghong rock shelter in what is now southern Lesotho. This young man lived in the area of the Sehonghong shelter and indeed guided Orpen to the paintings. Orpen’s 1874 copy of these images is now one of the most famous San rock paintings (Pl. 14, Fig. 30).

Sehonghong is a large, approximately 100-m (328-ft) long rock shelter on the southern bank of the Sehonghong river, a tributary of the Senqu river in southern Lesotho. It is named after a legendary San man of that name who, in the turbulent years of the 19th century, assumed the status of a chief. According to present-day residents living nearby, the last San people of this area, led by Soai, another San chief, were killed in this shelter. Soai is said to have taken refuge by submerging himself in a deep pool in the Senqu river, with only his nose above the surface. But to no avail: he was shot while hiding in the pool. Patricia Vinnicombe describes the event: ‘His body, adorned with bracelets of elephant ivory and a belt of beautifully worked beads, was subsequently dragged from the river and cut up for “medicine”.’³

30 Joseph Millerd Orpen’s 1874 copy of the Sehonghong rain-animal scene. Its position on his full, fold-out colour plate in the Cape Monthly Magazine is shown in Plate 14. Colours: bright red, black, white.

31 Patricia Vinnicombe’s 1960s copy of the Sehonghong rain-animal scene. This copy gives the true proportions of the images and shows the flecks scattered among them. Colours: bright red, black, white.

The paintings on which Qing commented are not clearly visible in the Sehonghong shelter today (Fig. 31). They are now very faded and take some time to locate.⁴ They are painted in an orange-red pigment similar to that used in 19th-century paintings in the region that include colonial imagery, such as horses and rifles.

Although it is not seriously misleading, Orpen’s copy is not very accurate. A tracing that Vinnicombe made of the images in the 1960s gives a much better idea of what was actually painted on the rock (Fig. 31).⁵ The imbalance in prominence between the two sub-groups of images in Orpen’s copy (the smaller painted group is the larger in his copy) is so different from that of the original rock painting that we wonder whether Orpen fashioned his final copy from two separate rough sketches, the relative sizes of which he had by that time forgotten. It seems unlikely that he could have made the error in the presence of the actual paintings, especially when he was so careful with small details, such as the human figures’ caps. Another detail that Orpen did not miss is a number of flecks scattered among the figures.⁶ Unfortunately, these were omitted for technical reasons when the copy was first published in 1874 as a ‘chromo-lithograph’.⁷ When, about 90 years later, Vinnicombe came to trace the images, fewer flecks were visible. Today, some 50 years after Vinnicombe’s work, the flecks are even more faded, though some can still be detected, especially with image-enhancing techniques.⁸

Orpen sent his copy, together with three other copies, all done on a single sheet of cardboard, to the editor of the Cape Monthly Magazine in Cape Town. As it happened, Orpen’s copies arrived in Cape Town before his accompanying article, ‘A glimpse into the mythology of the Maluti Bushmen’. Realizing the copies’ importance, the editor at once took them to Wilhelm Bleek’s residence in the suburb still known as Mowbray. There, Bleek showed them to Diä!kwain. This seems to have happened before Bleek had seen the article, so he could not have asked leading questions or put possible interpretations into his informant’s heads. In any event, the differences between Qing’s and Diä!kwain’s observations are, as we shall see, sufficient to guarantee independence.

A transcription of Diä!kwain’s explanation began on 21 July 1874. Subsequently, on 14 January 1875, Lucy Lloyd obtained from Diä!kwain further details of the ‘very curious ideas’ that so intrigued her and Wilhelm Bleek.⁹ As she discovered, rain and rain-making were a rich area of /Xam belief and ritual, and, when Dorothea Bleek came to publish parts of her father’s and her aunt’s texts in the 1930s, she was easily able to compile two substantial collations in the journal Bantu Studies (now African Studies).¹⁰ In one of these, she included a text and translation entitled ‘Leading out the rain-animal’, but she omitted to say that it was obtained in response to Orpen’s copy.¹¹

We thus have independent San explanations of the Sehonghong painting from two informants, Qing and Diä!kwain, who lived far apart and did not know one another. It is important to disentangle the accounts that these two men gave and to distinguish between the circumstances in which they were recorded. Then the key question is: Did the informants fundamentally confirm or contradict one another’s explanations?

Speaking of the rain

Qing’s explanation of the Sehonghong images was the first San comment on a rock painting ever to be recorded. It is of particular interest for the way in which he segues from an account of rain-making (with a very puzzling identification of the animal) to a description of the trance dance and healing practices (Chapter 2). Unlike the Bleek and Lloyd material, we do not have a phonetic transcript of Qing’s remarks. In Orpen’s transcription, the following is what he said (original parentheses and emphasis underlined):

That animal which the men are catching is a snake (!). They are holding out charms to it, and catching it with a long reim – (see picture). They are all under water, and those strokes are things growing under water. They are people spoilt by the – dance, because their noses bleed. Cagn gave us the song of this dance, and told us to dance it, and people would die from it, and he would give charms to raise them again. 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 their 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. The initiated who know secret things are Qognqé; the sick person is hang cäi.¹²

Apart from Qing’s curious identification of the four-legged animal as a snake, this explanation of the images is explicit enough, but we need to examine our other source of insight into these images. This second source comprises two parts. First, it seems that Bleek and Lloyd initially obtained comments on Orpen’s copies in an informal, untranscribed discussion with Diä!kwain, and, second, in the course of a longer phonetic transcription that was intended to clarify some of the points that Diä!kwain had made in the initial conversation. Bleek published a summary of his untranscribed discussion in the ‘Remarks’ that the editor of the Cape Monthly Magazine asked him to append to Orpen’s article. Interestingly, this published summary touches on important points that do not recur in the subsequent, more formal, verbatim account. Whereas Orpen purported to give a translation of Qing’s actual words, in this summary we hear Bleek’s voice to some extent (‘Mangolong’ is present-day Sehonghong) (original parentheses):

The paintings from the cave Mangolong represent rainmaking. We see here a water thing, or water cow, which, in the lower part, is discovered by a Bushman, behind whom a Bushwoman stands. This Bushman beckons to others to come and help him. They then charm the animal, and attach a rope to its nose, – and in the upper part of the picture it is shown as led by the Bushmen, who desire to lead it over as large a tract of country as they can, in order that the rain should extend as far as possible, – their superstition being that wherever this animal goes rain will fall. The strokes indicate rain. Of the Bushmen who drag the water cow, two are men (sorcerers), of whom the chief one is nearest to the animal. In their hands are boxes made of tortoise (!khu) shell (containing charmed boochoo) from which strings, perhaps ornamented with beads, are dangling down. They are said to be of Kafir manufacture. The two men are preceded by two Bushman women, of whom one wears a cap on her head.¹³

That is Wilhelm Bleek’s short, hastily prepared summary for the Cape Monthly Magazine. Later, in his 1875 report to the Cape Colony Government, he mentioned Diä!kwain’s subsequent 68-page-long explanation. He wrote that he had, by that time, translated only the first two pages of it.¹⁴ He completed the report in February 1875, and it was published in May of that year. He died three months later on 17 August. The handwriting in the manuscript suggests that Lucy Lloyd returned to the text and, taking it up on notebook page 2,542, continued the translation, though she left a number of pages at the end untranslated.

In 1930, when Dorothea Bleek was preparing Stow’s copies for publication, she eliminated some repetition from her father’s translation of Diä!kwain’s longer comment and her aunt’s completion of it. Comparison with the manuscript shows that she did not change it in any substantial way, nor did she omit anything significant. She then placed her recension alongside Stow’s Plate 34 in Rock Paintings in South Africa, our Plate 16. Although this is not an inappropriate juxtaposition, we should remember that this account of rain-making derived initially from Diä!kwain’s response to Orpen’s, not Stow’s, copy. It is also important to notice that, in this longer account, Diä!kwain did not refer directly to any of the images in Orpen’s copy. Instead, he started by saying that he was now telling Bleek and Lloyd what his mother had taught him about rain-making. It seems that, although his long account was initially triggered by Orpen’s copy, he was giving a more general description of San rain-making, possibly without even having Orpen’s copy before him.

We give Dorothea Bleek’s 1930 version here in full with key /Xam words from the manuscript added in brackets; we have standardized the spelling of these /Xam words:¹⁵

My mother told me that people pull out the water cow [!khwa-ka xoro] and lead her over their place, that the rain may fall at their place, in order that the wild-onion leaves may sprout there. If the rain [!khwa] does not fall they will die. Therefore the medicine men [!gi:ten] shall go and kill the water cow [!khwa-ka xoro] at the place to which they go to stay near the wild-onion leaves, so that they can dig out and eat the wild onions. If the rain did not fall, they would not see the wild-onion leaves, for these are bulbs which they dig out and eat; they are the Bushman’s food. Therefore they beg the rain medicine men [!khwa-ka !gi:ten] to make rain fall for them. This is the reason why the medicine man works magic ≠xamma] for them. The water’s people [!khwa-ka !é] walk about, they charm [≠xamma; Bleek: conjure] the water, they make it rain, so that the mothers may dig and feed their children, and that the children may dig and feed themselves. They sling a thong over the water cow’s [!khwa-ka xoro] horns, they lead her out and make her walk, they kill her on the way. They cut her up so that the rain may fall where they have killed her. The rain does fall; they bring the rain by means of the water cow’s flesh. The rain falls behind them as they go home, it follows them; the people who asked for the rain really see the rain clouds.

The value of all these comments by Qing and Diä!kwain cannot be overestimated. Together, they establish another clear link between San beliefs, rituals and rock paintings. But there are some curious contradictions and misunderstandings that need to be cleared up.

Contradictions?

The most striking anomaly is Qing’s identification of the rain-animal in Orpen’s Sehonghong copy as a snake. Orpen’s insertion of a parenthetical exclamation mark suggests that he challenged Qing about this apparent misidentification but that the San man remained adamant. Is this the whole story of what happened? Various explanations for Qing’s (apparent) insistence are possible.¹⁶

First, a number of creatures, such as snakes, tortoises, fish, swallows and frogs, were said to be the ‘rain’s things’.¹⁷ The identification of the creature as a snake might therefore have arisen through some confusion created by the difficulties of translation with which Orpen had to contend. At the beginning of his article, he admitted that he may have failed to understand Qing ‘accurately when speaking through different translators’.¹⁸ More than one translator and possibly more than two languages were involved: Qing’s San language, the interpreter’s SeSotho and Orpen’s own English. During the back-and-forth discussion that must have taken place either Qing himself or one of the interpreters might have substituted prominent SeSotho beliefs about a large serpent dwelling in rivers and pools. There are in fact numerous paintings of large serpents that may well depict widely held southern African beliefs about subaquatic snakes; some of them may be rain-snakes rather than rain-animals.¹⁹ We should, however, not overestimate the potentially debilitating effect of multiple interpreters. Qing spoke his own San language but in this conversation he was probably speaking SePhuti, which is partly SeSotho, the interpreter’s language. Orpen himself could probably speak some SeSotho.

32 A scene showing the capture of a rain-snake found near the Sehonghong shelter. Human figures bleed from the nose, clap, bend forward, lie prone and drag the rain-snake by a rope that appears to be attached to its nose. They are surrounded by flecks. Colours: bright red.

The next two explanations are not necessarily mutually exclusive. One of us (SC) tends to favour the first; the other (DLW) leans towards the second.

The first is that Qing was using his word for snake in a generic rather than a specific sense. For him, all rain creatures, be they quadrupeds or serpents, were called ‘snakes’. The folklorist Sigrid Schmidt emphasizes the blending of rain-snakes and rain-animals: the rain could take on different forms.²⁰

The second allows that it is not clear whether Orpen wrote down Qing’s comments about the ‘snake’ while they were in the actual shelter or – as seems more likely – whether he did so later when, as he put it, they were ‘happy and at ease smoking over camp-fires’.²¹ Indeed, Orpen admits that he wrote down some of Qing’s ‘fragmentary stories … then and since’²² (emphasis added). He may therefore have noted down Qing’s remark about the men catching a ‘snake’ sometime after having been in the Sehonghong shelter.

Given this rather disjointed sequence of events, it seems likely that Orpen misremembered the location of Qing’s statement about the snake. Close by, on the other side of the Senqu river, is a site that contains a painting of a snake with what appears to be a thong attached to its nose (Fig. 32).²³ Two human figures are holding the thong and apparently pulling on it. As in the Sehonghong shelter, there are flecks painted around the figures. The action depicted – a creature being apprehended by people holding a thong and surrounded by flecks – is identical to the one in the Sehonghong shelter. In addition, the ‘snake’ shelter painting has women clapping and men bleeding from the nose. These clear indications of the trance dance explain why Qing led from the snake-catching element directly into a description of a trance dance and explicitly mentioned nasal bleeding.

This nearby painting leads us to argue that Qing and Orpen were talking at cross purposes. Sitting around the campfire, Qing was thinking of the snake being drawn along and the people clapping and bleeding from the nose, while Orpen was thinking of the quadruped being similarly controlled in the Sehonghong shelter, where these are no clapping and bleeding figures. At the time, the Senqu river was in flood,²⁴ so it seems unlikely that Orpen was able to visit the snake shelter. But Qing could very well have pointed across the river to the shelter, which is easily visible from the south bank where Orpen’s party was. Qing guided Orpen to a number of painted rock shelters, so it is likely that he would have pointed to and described the rain-snake painting, even if they could not cross the river to reach it. Some researchers have concluded that Qing’s identification of the ‘snake’ shows that his testimony is thoroughly untrustworthy. However, the discovery of a nearby painting depicting the capture of a rain-snake surrounded by clapping and bleeding figures confirms that he did know what he was talking about.

Orpen’s account requires further decipherment. Having given a number of the myths that Qing recounted and that constitute the bulk of his article, Orpen turns to the rock paintings that he copied and gives Qing’s comments on them. Orpen introduces this new section about the ‘snake’ with the following words:

The men with rhebok’s heads, Haqwé and Canaté, and the tailed men, Qweqweté, live mostly under water; they tame elands and snakes. The animal which the men are catching …

The fairly extensive remarks that Qing gave about ‘catching [the] snake (!)’ immediately follow, without any break.

The fundamental issue here is whether Qing’s sentence about the men with rhebok heads refers to specific images that Orpen copied or to a general class of rock art images. One way of looking at the problem starts by recalling that, near the beginning of the article, Orpen says that he ‘commenced by asking him what the pictures of men with rhebok’s heads meant’.²⁵ Qing replied: ‘They were men who had died and now lived in rivers, and were spoilt at the same time as the elands and by the dances of which you have seen paintings’ (original italics). This comment requires explanation before we address Qing’s later remark about Haqwé and Canaté.

Researchers have debated whether Qing’s remark about dying and living in rivers is a single statement or an abbreviation of a myth.²⁶ The point is, however, not germane to understanding the essence of what he said. What is important is that dying, being under water and spoiling are three San ways of talking about being in the spirit realm, that is, in an altered state of consciousness. When a shaman falls down in deep trance, people say that he has died. In that state, a sense of weightlessness, affected vision, inhibited movement and sounds in the ears all come together to suggest the experience of being under water. This reading of Qing’s words is confirmed beyond dispute by his statement that they were ‘spoilt at the same time as the elands and by the dances’. He said quite explicitly that it was the trance dance that effected the ‘spoiling’.

The key, if puzzling, word here is ‘spoilt’. Researchers have suggested various readings. The answer is, however, to be found in the Kalahari. The Ju/’hoansi still use their word for ‘spoil’ (kxwia) to mean ‘to fall in deep trance’.²⁷ And, as if that were not clear enough, Qing added that they were spoilt ‘by the dances of which you have seen paintings’.

Thereafter, Orpen gives a series of myths, largely about /Kaggen (Cagn in his orthography). We return to some of them in Chapters 7 and 8. For the present, we note that, after giving the myths, Orpen reverts to rock paintings by again referring to ‘men with rhebok’s heads’. His first question to Qing about these paintings seems to have been about a class of images rather than specific images. Perhaps it was a general question that Orpen posed one evening as they were sitting around a campfire.

It appears to us that Orpen’s second use of the phrase was also general: he was asking about therianthropic images in general. Our evidence for this conclusion is that Qing referred to two personages by name (Haqwé and Canaté) and to ‘the tailed men’ (Fig. 33). The copy that has only two human figures is the one Orpen labelled ‘From cave at source of Kraai River, District Woodhouse’. The ‘tailed men’ are five in number and come from what Orpen calls the ‘upper cave at Mangolong in the Maluti’ (today ‘Mangolong’ is known as Sehonghong or Pitsaneng). The first point to notice is that the Kraai river is nowhere near the section of the Senqu and its tributaries that Orpen visited with Qing. Orpen must have made this copy on another journey without Qing, or, more probably, on his rather circuitous return journey after his failure to arrest Langalibalele, the chief whom he was trying to apprehend. Second, the phrase ‘upper cave at Mangalong’ is ambiguous. It is not clear whether he meant a cave farther upstream in the same valley as Sehonghong or whether he meant higher up the slope. The set of five tailed figures has not been re-found.

33 J. M. Orpen’s copy of the ‘tailed men’ that he found in a site he called ‘upper cave at Mangolong in the Maluti’. The site has not been rediscovered. Colours: black, white.

There are two clues as to what Qing meant, at least in general terms. First, he said that all of the painted men – Haqwé, Canaté, the five ‘tailed men’ and Qweqweté – ‘live mostly under water’. This repeats Orpen’s version of Qing’s remark from the beginning of the article (‘now lived in rivers’). Importantly, all the therianthropic figures about which he was talking lived, not always but rather ‘mostly’, in the subaquatic and subterranean spirit realm that shamans visit in their altered states of consciousness.

Second, Qing went on to say that these men with rhebok’s heads ‘tame eland and snakes’. They were not just ‘ordinary’ spirit beings, perhaps ordinary spirits of the dead. They had special powers. But in exactly what sense did they ‘tame’ eland and snakes? We suggest that ‘tame’ is Orpen’s translation of a San word that Qing used, one that may also be given as ‘control’ or ‘possess’. It is probable that Qing said that these men possessed rhebok rather than eland potency, which enabled them to control game and the rain.²⁸ In the /Xam language the word we translate as ‘possess’ was /ki. This suggestion is confirmed by a comment that Diä!kwain made on the Sehonghong rain-animal painting. Referring to the people who are leading the creature as !gi:ten, he explained:

For these are sorcerers [!gi:ten] who have [/ki] things whose bodies they own [/ki]. These things enable them to appear to see. So it happens that when these things have seen anything which the sorcerer does not know, he perceives by his magic [/xutten/xutten] what is happening.²⁹

They possessed (/ki) eland and rain-snakes, a concept that Orpen understood as ‘taming’.

The names Haqwé, Canaté and Qweqweté remain mysterious. It should, however, be noted that none of the Sehonghong rain-animal scene figures has an antelope head. Rather, two of them are wearing the sort of eared cap that one of Wilhelm Bleek’s informants said are worn by shamans of the game (Fig. 14).³⁰

Qing’s citing of two names, Haqwé and Canaté, has suggested to some researchers that they were mythological personages who featured in tales now lost.³¹ That restricted explanation is untenable. We must remember that mythology comprises narratives that took place in the distant past, whereas rain-making is not a myth but rather a ritual that is also repeatedly performed in the present. Qing made it clear that these personages were involved in rituals, not myths.

A more easily explained discrepancy is between Qing’s statement that the flecks among the images ‘are things growing under water’ and Diä!kwain’s view that ‘The strokes indicate rain.’ As will soon become apparent, the two men were thinking of different stages in a rain-making sequence. Qing thought that the painting depicted something happening in a pool or river and therefore interpreted the strokes as some sort of aquatic plants. Diä!kwain, on the other hand, imagined a later phase in the ritual when the people are leading the animal across the country, the rain falling as they go.

These problems aside, Bleek seems to have been baffled by what Diä!kwain was telling him. He was, after all, standing on the threshold of unsuspected expanses of the San supernatural realm. What could all this about attaching a rope to a ‘water cow’ possibly mean? Perhaps he broke off writing down his translation on the second page so that he and Lloyd could discuss the meaning of what they were hearing. Be that as it may, at the point where he suspended his translation he entered a note saying that the events that Diä!kwain was describing appeared to him not to be ‘literal’: ‘the sense is apparently the reverse’³² – though he did not know exactly what ‘the reverse’ was.

To understand ‘the reverse’, we list four principal points on which Qing and Diä!kwain agreed. They are:

1 The images depicted a rain-making activity, though Qing does not explicitly mention rain-making.

2 This activity was taking place at least partially under water.

3 The people were attaching a rope (reim: leather thong) to the creature, a ‘rain-animal’.

4 The activity was being performed by ‘sorcerers’.

In his longer response, the one that Dorothea Bleek placed next to Stow’s copy, Diä!kwain explained that people led the rain-animal over the veld and killed it so that its ‘flesh’ would become precipitation. As they returned home the rain seemed to follow them to where they wanted it to fall: it was as if they had led the rain (the storm cloud) by means of a rope.

With these points established, we can now look more closely at the actual words that the informants used and at other details that fill out our understanding of this activity.

Mercurial !khwa

We begin by recalling that the /Xam word !khwa could mean both ‘rain’ and ‘water’ (Chapter 4). Whether it was falling from the sky or standing in a pool was a secondary consideration. In both contexts, !khwa had what Lucy Lloyd translated as ‘magic power’. We know this because she was told that a girl at puberty ‘has the rain’s magic power’. The /Xam word that the informant used here was /koö-dde.³³ As we have seen (Chapter 2), this word is one of three that denote the supernatural potency that San shamans harness. A link between power and puberty was suggested in another way. Girls experiencing their first menstruation were called ‘new maidens’, !kwi /a //ka:n. The word meaning ‘new’, //ka:n, could also be applied to recently fallen rain (in the /Xam language the adjective follows the noun that it qualifies). Its use in a variety of contexts shows that //ka:n has the connotation of ‘especially potent’. In sum, we conclude that !khwa was imbued with potency.

More complexity awaits the researcher. !Khwa had three manifestations. It could be perceived as precipitation; it could be a creature (the rain-animal); and it could be a being who, in a myth about the Early Race, courts and abducts a young girl.³⁴ In some contexts it is difficult to be sure whether the informant is talking about precipitation or about a ‘rain-animal’ or about the rather indistinct mythological personage. This elusiveness is characteristic of San thought: it is Westerners who desire precision and, if they achieve it, they do so at the expense of some of the power of San thought.

Let us now look in more detail at one of !khwa’s manifestations, the one that most clearly establishes a connection between beliefs and rock paintings (Pls 16–19; Figs 34a, 34b; see Fig. 31). The /Xam word that denotes a rain-animal is !khwa:-ka xoro. Like the other /Xam phrases we have analysed, we can break this compound noun down into its constituent parts. The second syllable (-ka) forms the possessive case. Xoro means a large animal and may be used to refer to an ox. In the rock art, a rain-animal is usually a chunky quadruped of no recognizable species, though, understandably, some resemble hippopotami. The eland, too, can be a rain-animal. In a /Xam myth, hunters of the Early Race who had killed an eland placed its meat on a fire only to find that it immediately turned into ‘rain’ and evaporated. Unwittingly, they had killed the rain, which, in revenge, then turned them into frogs.³⁵

Like the rain itself, a rain-animal may be male or female – a thunderstorm (a rain-bull) or a gentle rain (a rain-cow). A she-rain could be ‘milked’, its milk becoming rain.³⁶ An angry thunderstorm could be difficult to control. Part of Diä!kwain’s long account of rain-making deals with an occasion on which the thong that had been attached to a rain-animal broke; the creature escaped and the rain-makers had to return to camp without success.³⁷ A taut rope to a rain-animal made a ringing sound reminiscent of a musical bow as people tried to ‘lead out’ the creature. A rain-maker told how he used to feel the pleasant vibrations of the rope when he lay asleep, but no longer because the rain-maker !Nuin-/kúïten had died: ‘For things continue to be unpleasant to me; I do not hear the ringing sound (in the sky) which I used to hear.’³⁸

34a One of two variations on rain-animals (see also Fig. 34b). This painting shows a man holding out what appears to be a fly whisk to the creature’s nose. See Plate 19 for the full scene. Colours: see Plate 19.

34b One of two variations on rain-animals (see also Fig. 34a). This photograph shows a large rain-animal issuing forth from a crack in the rock face. Colours: white, dark red.

Capturing rain-animals in the art

The Bleek family informants identified a number of rain-animals in Stow’s copies. Rain-animals are a prominent feature in the art of the region where he worked; it is now part of the eastern Free State, the Eastern Cape and southern Lesotho. Speaking of Orpen’s Sehonghong copy, Diä!kwain told Bleek and Lloyd: ‘Of the Bushmen who drag the water cow, two are men (sorcerers), of whom the chief one is nearest to the animal’ (original parenthesis).³⁹ In his longer account he used the word !khwa-ka !gi:ten. In Chapter 2 we found that the second word, the one that Lloyd translated as ‘sorcerer’, means a shaman filled with !gi:, potency. In Chapter 1 we saw that there were specialist shamans: some were ‘shamans of the rain’.

Qing enlarged on this idea. He said that the people leading the rain-animal were ‘spoilt by the — dance, because their noses bleed’. In fact, none of Orpen’s copies shows people bleeding from the nose; as we have seen, Qing was probably referring to the rain-snake painting (Fig. 32), which is accompanied by bleeding and clapping people. With these words about blood, Qing quite naturally segued to the trance dance itself. He described the dancers following one another, becoming frenzied in trance, bleeding from the nose and healing the sick. Evidently, rain-making and healing could both be accomplished at trance dances, though some !khwa-ka !gi:ten made rain in other circumstances, such as dreams.⁴⁰

/Xam informants repeatedly confirmed the connection that Qing made between rain-making and ‘sorcery’. To describe the ‘leading out’ of a rain-animal, Diä!kwain used the word ≠xamma. At first Lloyd translated it as ‘work magic’ and ‘conjure’.⁴¹ Elsewhere she gave it simply as ‘fetch’ or ‘seek’.⁴² In another account, Diä!kwain used the word //kãï in connection with capturing a rain-animal; Lloyd translated it as ‘lead out’⁴³ and, perhaps with the advice of the informant, added a gloss: ‘To lead out by magic’.⁴⁴

There is an interesting painted detail in the Sehonghong rain-animal scene on which Diä!kwain commented. It is one of the ‘things of sorcery’ (Chapter 3). He told Bleek that the objects the people were carrying were tortoise-shell containers (Fig. 16): ‘In their hands are boxes made of tortoise (!khu) shell (containing charmed boochoo) from which strings, perhaps ornamented with beads, are dangling down’ (original parentheses).⁴⁵ Although Qing did not specifically mention tortoise-shell containers, he did speak of ‘charms’ being held out to the rain-animal: he had the same general understanding of what was depicted. As Diä!kwain made clear, at least some of these ‘charms’ were the aromatic herbs known as buchu (here given as ‘boochoo’), though Qing mentions ‘burnt snake powder’. After all, in his understanding, the men are catching a rain-snake.

Buchu as a ‘charm’ takes us back again to the nexus of girls at puberty and !khwa.⁴⁶ Because a young girl could easily anger !khwa, she resorted to the use of buchu:

When a young girl approaches the water and it is raining gently, she grinds buchu. Then as she approaches the pond, she scoops out the buchu and strews it on the water. When she has strewn the water with buchu, she comes and darkens the parts of the water which float on top with red haematite because the rain loves buchu very much, for buchu is what it smells.⁴⁷

This passage helps us to understand why, on an occasion when a rain-bull escaped, the rain-makers were told, ‘You should have put buchu on the things; you should have given the men who crept up with you buchu, so that they smelt of buchu.’⁴⁸

Buchu calms the rain, but it has other uses as well. Qing went on to describe the use of buchu in the trance dance. Men in the throes of violent trance (‘their noses bleed … people would die from it’) were, he said, given ‘charms’. The ‘charms’ calmed them and helped ‘to raise them again’. Diä!kwain similarly explained that buchu should be given to a man in deep trance to prevent him from turning into a lion.⁴⁹ He also said that, when a shaman had ‘snored’ (sniffed) a ‘lion’ out of an ailing person, he was given buchu to smell because it induced sneezing and he would be able to sneeze out the sickness, probably itself in the form of a ‘lion’.⁵⁰ As we have seen (Chapter 2), deep trance is spoken of as death and is the key feature of the dance, its ultimate purpose. This is why Qing said that Cagn had told the people to dance the trance dance, that they would ‘die from it’ and that ‘he would give charms to raise them again’.

Second thoughts: further insights

Diä!kwain gave Lucy Lloyd another explanation of the Sehonghong painting (Fig. 30) as late as 20 February 1876. In it, he enlarged on his earlier explanation of the things carried by the people leading the rain-animal and added information that increases our understanding of ‘sorcerers’ and how other people regarded them. Dorothea Bleek published his further explanation with adjustments to Lloyd’s translation of it. Unfortunately, she omitted an important point that Lloyd added as a note.

The following is Dorothea’s 1935 recension of Lloyd’s translation with key /Xam words added from the manuscript. Diä!kwain begins by insisting that the people leading the rain-animal are ‘sorcerers’:

The thing (held by the first man on the right) is like the thing which people take when they are practising sorcery, for they mean to let other people, who are dying of sorcery, smell it, those (learners) who are not strong enough yet. This will help them to practise sorcery [di //ke:n], for these things are in the things with which they strengthen their senses [/xutten-/xutten].

For these are not people who are like ordinary Bushmen. For they are sorcerers [!gi:ten], and if we who are not like them go to them, though we always walk behind their backs, it seems as if something bewitches [//ke:n te] us, for these sorcerers [!gi:ten] bewitch [//ke:n te] us. We die without feeling ill.

For these are sorcerers who have things whose bodies they own. These things enable them to appear to see. So it happens that when these things have seen anything which the sorcerer does not know, he perceives by his magic [/xutten/xutten] what is happening.⁵¹

Lloyd’s omitted note says explicitly that the ‘thing’ held by the man leading the rain-animal (Lloyd’s parenthesis indicates which image is meant) is a tortoise shell ‘in which buchu is’.⁵² As we have seen, tortoise-shell containers of buchu are important ‘things of sorcery’.

Today, the Kalahari Ju/’hoansi still use tortoise shells to produce medicine smoke in trance rituals (Fig. 16). They say that the tortoise shell contains, among other special substances such as buchu, the urine of a mystical giraffe, one of the principal animals whose potency they activate and harness in the trance dance. They drop a glowing piece of wood from the dance fire into the shell to cause its contents to smoulder. They then waft the smoke over a man to prepare him for hunting. They say that both the tortoise, in the sense of a mystical creature, and the medicine box made from its shell, ‘sends you to the animals’.⁵³ Again we have an instance of ‘sorcery’ being linked to hunting.

One of Diä!kwain’s /Xam phrases gives us further insight into how the San thought of ‘sorcery’. The phrase that Lloyd translated as ‘bewitch’ is //ke:n te. The first word is one of the three words for supernatural potency that we have already encountered. The second word, te, means ‘to fly, spring, get up, throw’.⁵⁴ Thus, sorcerers could harm other people by ‘throwing’ potency at them.

Diä!kwain’s explanation also introduces another concept related to the ‘deeds of sorcery’: /xutten/xutten. This word is a reduplicative plural and, literally, means ‘arteries’. At first Lloyd translated the phrase at the end of the first paragraph in which it appears as ‘with which they work magic’.⁵⁵ She then deleted this and rephrased the words as ‘with which they strengthen their senses’. What are ‘their senses’? In /Xam thought, the !gi: that enabled people to be !gi:ten was, at least partially, in their arteries. For instance, Diä!kwain elsewhere spoke of the !kháuä, a word that Lloyd translated as ‘vertebral artery’, though there is really no such anatomical feature.⁵⁶ He said that, when a man returns from an out-of-body journey, he is given buchu to smell because his !kháuä ‘has risen up’.⁵⁷ In addition, people would sing in order to make his ‘vertebral artery lie down’; the songs would be ‘medicine songs’ that contained and activated !gi:. If they did not do these things, he could suffer an internal haemorrhage and turn into a lion⁵⁸ (see Chapter 6 for more on lions). If there is no ‘vertebral artery’, what did Diä!kwain mean?

One way of understanding these beliefs about !kháuä is to note that the word can be used as a verb to mean ‘to boil’.⁵⁹ As we have seen, boiling was probably a /Xam metaphor for the rising sensation that a person in trance experiences moving up the spine. The ‘boiling’ metaphor is still used by the Ju/’hoansi to describe this component of trance experience.⁶⁰

The last paragraph of Diä!kwain’s ‘second thoughts’ may actually refer to the three figures with antelope heads who are bending forward and, in Orpen’s copy, are to the left of the rain-animal group (see Pl. 14). Below these figures, Orpen wrote, ‘From the cave of Medikane in the Maluti’. Diä!kwain was now speaking of another shamanic accomplishment: knowing what is happening far away. San shamans obtained such knowledge by turning into a various creatures. These are the ‘things whose bodies they own’. The word that Lloyd translated as ‘things’ is t∫wen. It means not only ‘things’ but also ‘game animals’⁶¹ and was frequently so used. (The word translated ‘thing’ in the first line of the explanation is tsa.) The phrase fits the Medikane therianthropic figures better than it does the rain-animal group. Apart from antelope, other creatures into which San shamans transformed themselves in order to ascertain what is happening afar include jackals⁶² and birds.⁶³

Diä!kwain’s second comment on Orpen’s copies brought to light new ideas. He was not alone. Researchers today find that returning to complex panels of San images seems always to lead to new insights. The art seems inexhaustible.

Another use of ‘threads of light’

Both Qing and Diä!kwain mention a thong, or rope, being used to lead the rain-animal. At first, this may seem to be an ordinary material object, like the tortoise shells of which Diä!kwain spoke. But there is another possibility. As we saw in Chapter 3, people in trance worldwide see bright, sinuous and sometimes bifurcating filaments, or lines, that are one of the non-real visual percepts known as entoptic phenomena. These are the ‘threads of light’ that San shamans say they climb or along which they float on their way to God’s house in the sky.⁶⁴ But in the 1920s Viktor Lebzelter found that the Kalahari Ju/’hoansi also climbed these ‘threads of light’ and what was almost certainly buchu for another specific purpose – to seek rain:

 

Finally the great captain in the sky hears the lamentation. The magician goes outside the camp and sees a thin cord being let down from the sky. He climbs a certain way up this, but the great captain comes down to meet him half-way. As soon as the magician sees the great captain, he throws a powder up to him; whereupon the great captain lifts him up high and takes him into his house. There the magician prays to him: ‘Lord, help us, the children are dying, we thirst and hunger.’ So long does he pray and plead that at last the captain says: ‘It is well, I shall send water, that the children may have water and veldkos.’ Then he again accompanies the magician half-way down the cord. As soon as the latter has reached the ground, he releases his hold upon the cord, which is at once drawn up again. The rain follows immediately.⁶⁵

 

35 A shaman wearing an eared cap holds a ‘thread of light’ that leads to an eland’s nose and hoofs. Both the man and the eland stand on the line. Colours: dark red, white.

36 A highly complex scene of rain-animals, fish, cattle and shamans. They are integrated with ‘threads of light’ that surround and emerge from the smaller, central rain-animal. A shaman with an antelope head holds the ‘thread of light’ to control the rain. In the 19th century the San made rain for cattle-herding, Bantu-speaking farmers. Colours: shades of red, white, black.

As we have seen, these threads are frequently painted in the south-eastern mountains and surrounding areas, where they are usually red and fringed with small white dots. In some paintings the dot-fringed lines connect with animals, often the heads of eland (Fig. 35). If we bear in mind what Lebzelter found and the /Xam belief that the rain could take the form of an eland, it may be that these painted eland are the rain, and the lines, though not fringed with white dots, are being used by people to capture it. It therefore seems likely that the ‘ropes’ depicted in the Sehonghong painting and elsewhere,⁶⁶ apparently attached to the nose of a rain-animal, derive from the entoptic form. The association of ‘threads of light’ with rain-animals is especially clear in a highly complex scene that brings together two rain-animals, fish, cattle and an antelope-headed shaman who holds a section of the multiple lines (Fig. 36). The whole experience of capturing and leading a rain-animal thus included hallucinations of rain-animals and also the hard-wired geometric percepts.

Stow’s copies of rain-animals

We have now considered the accounts that San people gave in response to Orpen’s copy of a rain-making scene showing shamans of the rain capturing a rain-animal in the spirit world. The informants’ statements that Dorothea Bleek set next to Stow’s copies of rain-animals are much shorter and often more enigmatic.

As we have pointed out, Dorothea placed Diä!kwain’s longer account next to a copy made by Stow (Pl. 16). When, 50 years before, Lucy Lloyd showed this copy to an informant, he offered a short comment that she paraphrased:

She-rain with rainbow over her. (She-rains said to have rainbows over them.)

We now know what he meant by a ‘she-rain’, but his mention of a rainbow requires some explanation. The /Xam believed the rainbow to be /Kaggen’s dwelling in the sky. Though no informant said so explicitly, it was the place to which at least some ‘threads of light’ led. Bleek and Lloyd’s informant /Han≠kasso explained: ‘The Rainbow is yellow in that part which lies above; the piece which seems red lies below. For the Mantis, who is also yellow, lies above, and Kwammang-a lies below…. Men call it Kwammang-a….Then people say: “The rainbow stands yonder and the rain will break.”’⁶⁷ /Kwammang-a (the name has an initial click) was /Kaggen’s son-in-law.

In response to Stow’s copy shown in Plate 17, the /Xam informant said:

The rain with white quartz which has hail.

This is one of those statements that seem to allude – all too elliptically – to complex beliefs. To uncover some of those beliefs we turn to information that Lorna Marshall obtained from the Kalahari Ju/’hoansi. They spoke of ‘lightning teeth’ and ‘rain teeth’, which, Marshall found, was fulgurite, the crystalline substance that is produced by the fusion of sand or rock caused by lightning.⁶⁸ They use it by placing it in their rain-making horn. This horn, which Marshall calls ‘a vestige of rainmaking … from the distant past’, contained other rain ‘medicine’ – certain roots and the heartwood of the /ana tree to provide redness and water. The idea of the rain having teeth is an extension of the concept of a rain-animal: as we have seen, this ‘creature’ was said to have legs (columns of rain falling from a thunderstorm), breath (mist) and hair (wisps of cloud below a thunderstorm).

The mention of quartz is particularly interesting because, worldwide, quartz is believed to have supernatural properties and is associated with altered states of consciousness.⁶⁹ Shamans perceive in quartz the light that they experience inwardly. Speaking of this light, a San shaman said, ‘The light knocks me out.’⁷⁰ In a child burial in the Oakhurst cave on the southern Cape coast a large, broken quartz crystal was wedged in the left eye socket.⁷¹ Though the evidence is slight, it seems that quartz was associated in some unspecified way with rain-making and with ‘seeing’. That hailstones are similar in appearance to quartz is clear.

But we can go further. The informant said that white quartz ‘has’ hail. Here again it seems that the informant was referring to the notion of /ki, ‘to have’, ‘to possess’, or ‘to control’. As we have seen, shamans were said to /ki certain animals in that they could derive potency from them or control their movements. Does the statement we are now examining suggest that quartz itself had comparable powers over hail and thunderstorms? Further, did shamans who owned quartz crystals thereby possess power over hail and rain? We can only speculate.

We can now see that the rain had many manifestations, and many things – animals, objects and girls at puberty – were associated with it. Once we are able to recognize a category of belief and the images used to signify it, we can start to decipher a range of rock paintings and iron out mistakes made in past interpretations. As we see in the next chapter, even major errors can lead to insights.