ABSTRACT
There remains among researchers, and indeed all who admire San rock paintings, a persistent feeling that the images must have something to do with myth. This chapter needs to set aside Western expectations and values and examine elements of the art in the light of specifically San beliefs and practices. Only then can begin to discern parallels between San mythology and image-making and begin to form some idea of what the art meant to the San. In contrast to the apparent realism of these antelope paintings, there are others that seem to fall into a different conceptual category. Marion asked Mapote, a seventy-four-year-old Basotho man living in southern Lesotho, to demonstrate the practice of painting. The use of eland blood in the making of paintings was confirmed in the 1980s by an old woman of mixed San descent whose father had been a painter in the southern Drakensberg.
