Fluidities of personhood in the idioms of the Maloti-Drakensberg, past and present, and their use in incorporating contextual ethnographies in southern African rock art research

ABSTRACT

In the Maloti-Drakensberg mountains of southern Africa, beliefs about snakes and their representations in rock art images are emblematic of hybrid histories of regional societies. The snake symbol initially represented an attempt at ‘reaching out’ as forager societies incorporated a prominent figure in the mythologies of incoming societies into their own – a figure which became a symbolic reference to cross-cultural symbiosis and admixture. Reflecting the long history of such contact, the ritual uses and ontological positions of snakes in contemporary knowledge systems of the Maloti-Drakensberg are coherent with those of earlier societies. This offers fertile ground for novel forms of interpretation. Using contextual historic and modern ethnographic material, this paper presents a relational account of regional idioms. It dwells on the language of taming and domestication that permeate these ethnographies, and the concern they show for the mitigation of ‘wild’, sometimes ‘monstrous’, consequences of spiritual power in the social world. Symbolic resolutions of these consequences are discernible in rock art images, particularly those of snakes, demonstrating the ritual brokerage of relations between human and non-human communities, with both forms of agency depicted in various states of ‘domestication’, bridging forager and farmer understandings of human–animal relations.

KEYWORDS:

• contact rock art
• relational ontologies
• animism
• folklore
• ethnoarchaeology

Acknowledgements

The authors both owe a significant intellectual debt to Dr Mark McGranaghan, whose thinking on New Animism gradually turned theirs in this direction, and whose scholarship on the Bleek and Lloyd archive greatly altered perceptions of southern African prehistory, anthropology and rock art study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Although see discussion on the tension between ‘available’ and ‘extant’ data in Skinner (2022).

2. That is, having acquired culture or idiom in contact, although without necessarily changing expressed identity; sensu C. Stewart (2010), and see Challis (2018) for definitions and discussion.

3. Resembling Wilmsen’s (Wilmsen 1989; cf. Solway and Lee 1990; Lee and Guenther 1993) premise that, in Kalahari source-contexts, modern ethnographic features are consequent to incorporation and subordination by agropastoralist societies (see McGranaghan 2015a).

4. Routinely classified as ‘hunter-gatherer’ and ‘farmer’, respectively, although these are economic signatures that may only be variably effective at describing historic occurrences (e.g. King and McGranaghan 2020; cf. Mitchell 2010b).

5. Although these were in some ways more permissive than the lowland interior (see Challis 2018, 177–178).

6. See the impact of the Little Ice Age, particularly between c1300 and c1540, into the 1700s (Whitelaw 2009, 153–155, Figure 8.7).

7. As well as other more abstract forms of interrelation (cf. Jimenez 2017, 136–139; King 2019, 48; with significant parallels in other parts of the subcontinent, e.g. Wiessner 1977, 1983; see also B. A. Stewart et al. 2020).

8. Elsewhere rendered as |kaggen; in some ways the ur-shaman of some southern African forager mythologies, representative of the primordial ‘early race’ that lived in times before, and primal-time trickster deity (e.g. Guenther 2015).

9. Where interviewees are cited directly, they are represented by an individualised code of the form 01XX or 02XX, arbitrarily assigned, to preserve anonymity. Testimonies preserved verbatim in Skinner (2021c, Appendix B); discussed in detail in Skinner (2021a, 2022).

10. See parallels in ǁkwakka (lit. ‘understanding’ in |Xam idiom) (e.g. LL.V.10.4707–4743; McGranaghan and Challis 2016, 590).

11. The name of which is itself suggestive of syncretic histories; Moorosi’s BaPhuthi were known for ‘disorderly’ conduct of the kind already described, being mobile, adaptive and acquisitive, ‘behaviour[s] more aligned with Bushmen and outlaws than chiefdoms’ (King 2019, 107).

12. This transformation occurs once the snake skins were sprinkled with ‘cannā’ (Orpen 1874, 5), which is a cognate for ʃo-ǀoa (Mitchell and Hudson 2004 as cited in McGranaghan, Challis, and Lewis-Williams 2013, 139), or plumbago (Plumbago auriculata). The change from aggressor to social agent parallels the work of the Xhosa ‘Riverman’ Mlanjeni (Mabona 2004, 301–303), who could purge ‘people of their witchcraft or ubuthi (evil substance) with his dancing, giving those thus cleansed a twig of mabophe (plumbago) to protect them from evil’ (Challis 2008, 151 citing Peires 1989, 3). The general equivalence of witchcraft to ‘evil substances’ (see |Xam and contemporary parallels later), and the overlaps and equivalences with Qing’s description, is greatly supportive of the principle that this was a coherent ideology that had spread well beyond the bounds of ‘San’ identity by the 1850s.

13. Elsewhere associated with the yellow flashes of eyes of the monstrous ‘beasts of prey’ on the edges of the firelight at night (McGranaghan 2014b, 674–675), although perhaps here referencing the ‘shining’ of scales.

Additional information

Funding

Skinner gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst and National Research Foundation (DAAD/NRF) In-Country Doctoral Scholarship [grant no. DAAD170705249096]. Challis is funded by the National Research Foundation African Origins Platform [grant no. AOP117735].