‘The bees are our sheep’: the role of honey and fat in the transition to livestock keeping during the last two thousand years in southernmost Africa

Abstract

In this paper we suggest a model for how some foragers may have become stock-keepers in the past. Forager beekeepers stay in one place and cultivate a storable and exchangeable product, honey. This desired product has been used by the Okiek forager beekeepers of Kenya to obtain livestock from their pastoralist/agropastoralist neighbours. We believe that amongst foragers such as these the transition to livestock-keeping would not have been as difficult as is sometimes postulated (cf. Marshall 2000; Smith 2005, 2014). We describe parallels between sheep, bees, their products and their keeping, which are informative to the debate. The difficulty for archaeologists is that the archaeology of beekeeping is largely invisible. One exception relates to evidence of interactions between foragers and bees documented in rock-paintings in the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg Mountains, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Here, too, are paintings of sheep that we suggest are old and may represent how foragers thought of sheep during their first encounters with them.

Dans cet article, nous proposons un modèle pour la façon dont, dans le passé, certains chasseurs-cueilleurs auraient pu devenir éleveurs. Les chasseurs-cueilleurs-apiculteurs restent fixes en un endroit, et cultivent un produit stockable et échangeable, le miel. Ce produit très demandé a été utilisé par les chasseurs-cueilleurs-apiculteurs Okiek du Kenya pour obtenir des animaux de leurs voisins éleveurs et agropastoralistes. Nous maintenons que, parmi des communautés de chasseurs-cueilleurs comparables, une transition vers l'élevage n'aurait pas été si difficile qu'il a parfois été postulé (cf. Marshall 2000; Smith 2005, 2014). Nous décrivons les parallèles entre les moutons, les abeilles, leurs produits et leur élevage, qui peuvent informer ce débat. La difficulté pour les archéologues est que l'archéologie de l'apiculture est en grande partie invisible. Les informations fournies par les peintures rupestres dans les montagnes uKhahlamba-Drakensberg du KwaZulu-Natal (Afrique du Sud) constituent l'exception. Ces peintures montrent des interactions entre chasseurs-cueilleurs et abeilles. Ici aussi, on trouve des peintures de moutons que nous pensons être anciennes et qui peuvent représenter la conception qu'eurent les chasseurs-cueilleurs de ces animaux lors de leur première rencontre avec eux.

Keywords:

• Rock art
• bees
• fat-tailed sheep
• livestock-keeping
• honey
• traditional beekeeping

Acknowledgements

We should like to thank Aron Mazel for sharing his ideas and knowledge, Mathiba Mncube and Sanele Hadebe for their guidance to sites, Gavin Whitelaw for sharing knowledge of an unrecorded painted sheep and of the collections of the KwaZulu-Natal Museum, Cally Thompson for her photograph, David Pearce for easy access to the archives of the Rock Art Research Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand and Will Kriel for eland fat. This research was funded by the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust Fund, the National Research Foundation of South Africa and SPARC funding from the University of the Witwatersrand.

Notes

1. Crane's (2001: 3) survey of paintings of bees in South Africa shows that they predominate in KwaZulu-Natal, followed by the Western Cape and the Free State. The exact number and distribution of painted sheep in southern Africa is unknown. There are concentrations painted in both the Western and Eastern Cape (Anderson 1996; Manhire et al. 1986; Hollmann 1993; Hall 1986; Yates et al. 1994; Jerardino 1999), the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg Mountains of KwaZulu-Natal (Pager 1971; Vinnicombe 1976; Mazel 1981, 1982; Lander 2014), Limpopo province (Eastwood and Fish 1996; Eastwood and Eastwood 2006), the Harrismith District of the Free State (Lewis-Williams 1985) and Zimbabwe (Goodall 1946; Cooke 1965; Robinson 1986). Painted sheep are also recorded in Namibia (Viereck and Rudner 1957; Rudner and Rudner 1959; Pager 1993), Lesotho (Vinnicombe 1976) and Swaziland (Masson 2011). Manhire et al. (1986) present statistics to show that in the Drakensberg area, Ndedema (Didima) Gorge has the highest concentration of painted sheep. For the Western Cape, Manhire et al. (1986) describe eleven sites with fat-tailed sheep. A subsequent discovery by Jerardino (1999) raises this number to twelve. In the Northern Cape Province engraved fat-tailed sheep are described by Morris (1988). Current statistics for the rest of southern Africa are not documented; the most recent review remains that by Manhire et al. (1986).

2. Rudner (1982: 29) notes that the gemsbok (Oryx gazella) is also a relatively fatty antelope, but does the male gemsbok carry more fat than the female?

3. In southern Africa, among the !Kung-speaking Ju/hoãnsi San of Namibia Kinahan (1994/1995: 220) describes the acquisition from farmer neighbours in the last few centuries of specialised pottery for collecting and storing honey.

4. A similar marking of wild goods is described by Bleek (1928: 37) for the Naron (Nharo), among whom ‘a man who finds an ostrich nest with one or two eggs, sticks his arrow in the ground close by as a sign of ownership’. The product was owned, but not the ostrich that produced it.

5. The Okiek too, will kill if anyone steals from their hives. Stealing honey or hives is conceived as the most threatening event in Okiek society (Blackburn 1996: 209).

6. In 1973, Russell and Russell bartered artefacts for sugar and jam as they assembled the UEA ethnographic collection (currently being transferred to the Archaeology Collections at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg) from Nharo, Ga//na and G/wi San who were wintering on the cattle ranches on the western edge of Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve (Margo Russell, pers. comm. 2014).

7. Soft and liquid fats (like those from the hippopotamus, ostrich (Struthio camelus) and the fat-tailed sheep) are also desirable because they are more easily mixed with ochres and applied to the skin and hair than are hard fats (cf. Schapera 1930; Rudner 1982, 1983). They would have been easier to paint with too. Soft fats also taste sweeter and are more palatable: the Hadza of northern Tanzania, for example, report that wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus) fat has the undesirable qualities of being hard and sticking to one's teeth and palate (Speth 2013: 67).

8. Webley and Brink (2006/2007) describe the fat of the tail of a Namaqua Afrikaner sheep rendering to a thick white fat. Further investigation is required to understand why their observation is different to the others described for fat-tailed sheep, but perhaps the animal in question was not a pure bred individual? A recent paper by Alves et al. (2013) finds that the tail fat of the Damara sheep has a distinct chemical structure linked to a unique type of lipid metabolism. This may be the property we observed.

9. Mazel (2011) discusses the importance of sound in the Didima Gorge and suggests that there may be a connection between the acoustics of the gorge and the high concentration of paintings there, many of which are of a ritualistic nature. In considering the impact of domestic stock on foragers we have considered the impact of their noisiness. Domestic sheep make a lot of noise, particularly lambs. Bees also make a lot of noise. We wonder whether there may be a connection between the noises made by bees and sheep (and their reverberation through the gorge) and their painting.