High and mighty: a San expression of excess potency control in the high-altitude hunting grounds of southern Africa

ABSTRACT

One of the largest and weirdest anthropomorphic painted figures in the southern African subcontinent (re)discovered in 2015 also happens to be painted at an almost unprecedented altitude. Located in an anomalous uplifting of cave sandstone the painted shelter perches at 2387m in the Highlands of Lesotho. Extremely inhospitable in winter months when snow, wind and altitude can take temperatures below -20°C, it is postulated that this was a summer stopping place for the San hunter-gatherers who followed the migrating herds of eland antelope to these rich grazing grounds. A superabundance of meat and fat translates, in the San idiom, into a superfluity of !gi or spiritual potency. The place, having potency, is therefore both powerful and dangerous. Such circumstances would call for those who have the ability to influence and utilise the supernatural – individuals with ‘hunting magic’ – to fulfil their social responsibility to harness such power for the benefit of all. Both desirable and undesirable outcomes might transpire. With bulging stomach (evoking associations of gluttony and poor resource distribution), tusks, and three legs with clawed toes, the figure in question may represent just such an instance of the strong ritual specialist struggling to control excess potency in an attempt to broker relationships with the other-than-human.

KEYWORDS:

• Altitude
• potency
• San hunter-gatherer
• non-human persons
• hunting magic

Acknowledgments

Mark McGranaghan, who arrived at the Institute in 2012 as a postdoc, armed with a self-compiled folder he named the ‘New Animisms Reader’. He applied the findings of his transcription of the Lloyd-Bleek archive to the many sites we discovered during the Matatiele Archaeology and Rock Art (MARA) survey and he gradually turned my thinking in this direction. Alice Mullen, who volunteered to marshal the data for the UNESCO World Heritage Site survey at Sehlabathebe in 2015, and whose own thinking on the subject matter relating to the images in this rock shelter – on which we agree and differ – helped shape mine.

James Pugin whose MSc work in the same survey helped locate likely areas in the sandstone and whose photography has illustrated this and many publications to come. The conveners of the conference Rock Art Worldings: Chronologies, Materialities and Ontologies in Kalmar, Sweden: Joakim Goldhahn, Ingrid Fuglestvedt and Antti Lahelma for encouraging me to bring a delegation of rock art scholars from South Africa and for inviting me to contribute to this volume.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The ‘idiom’ here is intended to convey the mode of expression – verbal and artistic – used and understood by the Indigenes.

2. The unusual punctuation of San names reflects typographically the click language of the San: | Dental click || Lateral click ! Alveolar-palatal click (written as ‘Q’ in African farmer languages) ≠ Alveolar click X guttural sound as in the Scottish loch.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sam Challis

Sam Challis is Senior Researcher at the Rock Art Research Institute in Witswatersrand. He specialises in the rock art of interaction between southern African hunter-gatherers, pastoralists and farmers, and between these and Europeans. He runs a multi-disciplinary research programme in the former apartheid-era homeland of the Eastern Cape and works closely with local communities, training some to become archaeologists.

Email: [email protected]