Local artists re-create animal drawings made by San people thousands of years ago
THE MATOBO HILLS IN ZIMBABWE—Sketched onto the walls of a granite outcropping in the hills of southern Zimbabwe, tall, rust-red human figures gather around groups of antelopes and giraffes. The painting, along with more than 3000 others in the area, portrays animals spiritually important to the nomadic San people who created them sometime between 2000 and 13,000 years ago. This pictorial record of San culture in the Matobo Hills is one of Africa’s highest concentrations of rock art; it was named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2003.
But the paintings are under threat from vandalism as well as erosion. Now, a nonprofit group near the hills is working with local people to document and raise awareness of the rock art before it disappears. Since July, the Amagugu International Heritage Centre (AIHC), based in the village of Whitewater near the southern city of Bulawayo, has been collaborating with the U.S. embassy in Zimbabwe and the country’s national museum to record local stories about the art, identify new sites, and develop a catalog of artworks that can be analyzed by experts even if the original paintings fade. The team plans to release a final catalog and a documentary about the project in January 2025.
Preserving the art is essential to understanding the ancient societies that created it, said Ancila Nhamo, a professor of archaeology at the University of Zimbabwe working on the project. “Art is a product of the mind and the culture, which is an intangible thing,” she said. “But when you get the art, you can get into the minds of these people and really see what the world was like at that time.”
This year, Zimbabwe has undergone one of the worst droughts in living memory, with maximum temperatures 2°C to 5°C above normal. Hot, dry weather boosts the risk of wildfires and kills vegetation, increasing soil erosion and making rock art sites more prone to flooding during the rainy season, as researchers in nearby Namibia have found.
The paintings are also vulnerable to vandalism, such as graffiti, and damage from fires, which are sometimes set by locals unaware of the paintings’ importance. Unlike previous efforts led by outsiders, this project aims to inspire a sense of ownership over and responsibility for the sites among local people. “The [local residents] are the people who should play a part in preserving, documenting, and protecting this cultural heritage,” said Allington Ndlovu, a program manager at AIHC.
The people in the area today are mostly farmers of the Ndebele ethnic group, whose ancestors migrated from the north in several waves starting about 4000 years ago. The ancient Ndebele interacted with the nomadic San, whose descendants still live in some parts of Zimbabwe and in South Africa. Today, San people feel the rock art can help them understand their heritage, said Davy Ndlovu, director of the Tsoro-o-tso San Development Trust, a Zimbabwean nongovernment organization that advocates for the rights of the Indigenous group. “The cultural heritage of the San is critically endangered and there is very little awareness around the issue,” Ndlovu said. “Projects like this can assist the San to get their voices heard … and assist coming generations to understand the heritage of Zimbabwe.”
The project organizers worked with local leaders to train 35 women from seven villages in drawing and painting techniques. The local artists then replicated 35 artworks using pencils, brushes, and paint, creating a visual record now displayed in a community gallery. Fourteen of the largest and clearest rock paintings were reproduced on canvas and granite slates, to be displayed in the country’s national gallery.
Meanwhile, a joint French-Zimbabwean research project called MATOBART is working to date rock art in the Matobo Hills. The paint is made of inorganic material so it can’t be radiocarbon dated, said project leader Camille Bourdier of the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès. Instead, she and other researchers set out to date stone tools, including palettes likely used to create the paintings, and flakes of paint that fell to the ground. They hope to estimate minimum ages by directly dating the sediment around these artifacts.
Preliminary findings confirm earlier estimates made by archaeologists in the 1980s, who suggested the paintings were created starting about 13,000 years ago. More precise dating will allow researchers to more accurately interpret the art, Nhamo said. For instance, rock art in Zimbabwe mainly depicts kudu antelopes, she says, whereas similar San sites in nearby South Africa focus on another antelope, the eland. Nhamo would like to know whether San people painted different animals over time, or distinct San groups valued particular animals as markers of community identity, a way to distinguish themselves from their neighbors.
Other interpretations focus on the spiritual, rather than social, importance of the animals, said Sam Challis, who heads the Rock Art Research Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand. San people started to paint “richly embellished” eland at sites in the Drakensberg Mountains during a period of cooler climate that began around 1500 B.C.E., when the animals—previously a staple food source—were becoming more scarce, as Challis and anthropologist Brian Stewart of the University of Michigan wrote in a 2023 paper. They argue that by painting the eland, the San were attempting to harness the antelope’s spiritual powers to summon more of them to appear during a time of scarcity.
The artworks now being documented in the Matobo Hills, including scenes of antelopes, elephants, and gnus surrounded by humans walking with bows and arrows and dancing or sitting, could yield similar insights for future researchers, Bourdier said. “These [San] hunter-gatherers have been living this way for tens of thousands of years. … It has proven to be a very sustainable way of living,” she said. “Unraveling these ways of living within the world could give us some clues of the type of behaviors or relationships we could go back to.”
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