ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with one such instance. Speaking as a Basotho man who had known the San all his life and had, as a child, learned to paint with them in their rock shelters, Mapote said that he would paint an eland, as the Bushmen of that part of the country were of the eland. In sum, ethnographic and linguistic evidence shows that Mapote may have been using a common San idiomof an animal that was used to speak of shamans who were associated with, or possessed, and were trans-formed into eland. In toto, the act of painting an eland probably proclaimed the Maloti San as, complexly, people of the eland people united by the supreme potency of the eland antelope. Working with the Nharo San at Ghanzi, he found that the collective activity of the trance dance became a suitable vehicle for cultural revitalization in a period of land-loss and suffering as other peoples occupied their land and destroyed their livelihood.
