Rock art in a hard place

2001-07-19 21:36

Cape Town - From a life-size engraving of a giraffe on a sandstone slab in the Sahara desert, to a delicate handprint in a Western Cape shelter, Africa boasts an extraordinary heritage of rock art.

There may be as many as two million images in South Africa alone; experts say ten million for the whole continent may be a conservative figure.

But it is a heritage under threat, and not only from the forces of nature that constantly erode these vulnerable works.

In southern Africa, says rock art fundi David Coulson, one threat is tourists, who splash soft drinks or even urinate on paintings to make them show up better in photographs.

Then there is graffiti, which is not confined only to tourists, and which can do immense damage to works that can be harmed simply by being touched.

People remove whole panels for sale to art dealers

There are also people who chip off flakes of paint for magical or medicinal purposes; others who remove whole panels for sale to unscrupulous art dealers; and developers who destroy entire sites through quarrying or road construction.

And in North Africa, says Coulson, armed bandits or insurgents even use artworks for target practice.

Coulson and colleague Alec Campbell, who is former director of Botswana's National Museum, saw much of this damage for themselves during the six years they spent researching a major new book on Africa's rock art.

To gather material for what they say is the most comprehensive illustrated survey of rock art on the continent to date, they visited 15 countries, avoiding landmines in Chad, travelling by camel in the Sahara and amassing more than 30 000 photographs.

Coulson, a Nairobi-based freelance photographer and writer, and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, said here this week he found the vandalism they encountered "incredibly upsetting".

Education is key

But he added: "This would happen less if there was more awareness of the value and importance of the art, which is one of the reasons we've done this book." He said if rural communities could appreciate the value of the art and the potential economic benefits it held for them through tourism, they would be more likely to treat it with respect.

Campbell said though some governments - including South Africa - were acting to protect their rock art, most African countries did not have money to spend on cultural heritage.

"So there are few site guards in Africa, very little recording of the art, and in many places the government simply doesn't know what it's got."

The first priority in any rock art conservation programme should be education, he said. Rock art should be included in all school curriculums.

Government employees should be made aware of the importance of rock art, so that customs officers knew it might not be shipped out of the country, police understood that it could not be damaged, and district officers and tourist guides realised visitors to sites had to be supervised.

South Africans, said Campbell, were showing a steadily growing awareness and appreciation of rock art in their own country - as demonstrated by the use of an image from a San painting on the national coat of arms - and South Africa had probably published more books on rock art than any other country.

Coulson said that until very recently many people saw the art as a sort of "ethnic side show", the "idle doodlings of primitive man".

"One of the things we hope this book will get across is the diversity of the art and that some of the greatest art could stand in any gallery of the world," he said.

Images some of earliest visual communication of mankind

Perhaps even more important than the aesthetic value of the art was the fact that it represented a massive store of information, he said. Some surviving works dated back 12 000 years or more; stone palettes with traces of colour found in Zimbabwe had a date of 40 000 years before present.

This made the images some of the earliest visual communication of mankind, said Coulson: the "earliest expression of how they saw the world".

Campbell said that though there were distinct artistic styles in different parts of Africa, the ritual and shamanistic purpose of the works provided a common thread.

"Archaeology tells you how they lived, but rock art gives you an opportunity to look into their minds," he said.

The photographs taken for the book, titled "African rock Art", now make up the bulk of an archive set up by the Trust for African Rock Art, of which Coulson is founder and chairperson.

Many of the images will also be lodged in an archive being set up by the American Getty Conservation Institute, which helped fund the project.

- SAPA