Year: 1908
Type: article
Abstract: IT is well known that the Bushmen, now virtually extinct in Cape Colony, and far from numerous in those northern districts where they still survive, possessed a remarkable artistic gift, shown in their paintings and rock-sculptures or chippings.These, though many of the former have been impaired by lapse of time, or carelessly, if not wantonly destroyed, still exist in large numbers, in the outlying districts of the Colony-also in the Orange River Colony and in Basutoland.Reproductions of these paintings are to be found in the Grey Library at Cape Town, the museum of the Natal Society at Pietermaritzburg, and the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford: those in the last two collections being copied from the caves in the Drakensberg, Natal.With the exception of some copies published in ethnographical works (e.g.Stow's Native Races of South Africa, reviewed in the JOURNAL for July, 1906), these have constituted almost, if not quite, the sole facilities for studying these paintings enjoyed by those unable to visit them in situ.An exceptional interest, therefore, attaches to the admirable facsimiles of Bushman pictures and rock-chippings recently exhibited at the rooms of the Royal Anthropological Institute by Miss Helen Tongue and Miss Dorothea Bleek.Of the hundred drawings shown, eighty represented paintings, the remainder chippings.Readers of Stow's work above referred to will scarcely need to be reminded that the latter, from their durability, can be referred back to a higher antiquity than any extant paintings, and are therefore the more important from an anthropological, if not from an artistic point of view.Perhaps none of those copied by Miss Tongue is as old as the eland on the porphyritic rocks of the Vaal, where a chasm has been worn by the river through
Source: African Affairs
Author: A. WERNER
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4233356424