ABSTRACT

It was later hunter-gatherers who produced Africa’s first art. Subsequently, both they and early farmers were responsible for large numbers of paintings and engravings, that have survived on rock surfaces in many parts of the continent. However, it is the rock art of the Sahara and that of southern Africa that have been most intensively studied, because they are potentially the most informative. Both provide documents of forgotten lives but they are documents that are both difficult to date and to read. The southern African art not only started first but was practised for a longer time, so that some of the last of the people whose artists were responsible for it could be asked about its meaning. In the case of the Saharan art (Chapter 6) this was not possible, making its interpretation more difficult, but even the rock art of southern Africa has been the subject of much discussion regarding its purpose. At one time some archaeologists assumed that the paintings and engravings were merely done for pleasure, others suggesting that they represented hunting magic, depiction of an animal enabling the hunter subsequently to kill it. More recently it has been argued that this art actually expresses complex ideas of fundamental importance to the society that produced it. For that society it was a means of communication and a source of power. Just as modern people put ideas on paper, the later hunter-gatherers of southern Africa put them on stone.