Hottentots and Bushmen

At the same time, the very last of the /Xam San hunters (southern Bushmen) were wandering, broken, on white man's land, or into villages to beg. The hunting ages were over.

Collectively known as the Khoi-san, for they were really specialists in economic niches from the same biological group, their origins are obscure. However their ancesters were certainly present here 10 000 years ago, and these ancesters evolved from people in the region whose remains are as old as 100 000 years.

We are probably all descended from early Khoi-san.

After the bulk of the Khoi-san had gone, there remained small family groups and individuals working for white landowners, speaking a pidgin Dutch, later to be known as Afrikaans. Today these people are generalised as "Coloureds" and are very numerous in the countryside of the Cape.

Yet still you will hear old strange-sounding names of plants, places and animals. Like "Tsitsikamma" (a region), "dwyka" (a lioness), or "ghwarrie" (a type of tree). Their knowledge of herbs and medicinal plants is great, yet largely undocumented. They are good trackers. Many of the people are still illiterate, and might well remain so for another generation.

The Khoikhoi herders left little behind, but the San hunters left their rock art. Dating from between thousands and perhaps less than a hundred years ago, this art provides a near-continuous link with the Neolithic, and recent research here may well contribute to a better understanding of prehistoric rock art in the northern hemisphere.

The first thing to understand is that it is not literal in our modern sense. Where we distinguish between reason and conjecture, primitive people saw everything in a unified vision. Myth, spirit and reality are mixed up and one. The San had a shamanistic culture, in which every individual was to a greater or lesser extent a shaman.  They lived in a spirit-animated world, daily, nightly, awake and asleep.

The rock art of the Karoo is typical. It presents us with an intimate vision of the hunters in daily trance. In trance they would follow the herds of game, see rain-animals gathering in distant skies, find springs in the dry land, and perhaps visit long lost relatives. The paintings show lines of dots emerging from an animal's head and rising into the sky - the spirit of a shaman inhabiting an animal's body. Men losing their legs and flying. Men with antelope heads. Fish with the faces of men. Hunters killing an animal from which rain pours.

When we discovered the rock art site on our land we also found a campsite. Pottery shards, fragments of flint and ostrich eggshell beads lie on the sand. Maybe one day it will be excavated, but in the mean while, we'll let it lie.