Southern Africa has a rich heritage of rock art in the form of engravings and paintings. In the Northern Cape rock engravings predominate.

The art is sophisticated in its detail and depth of meaning. Engravings are usually in the open on hills or rocky outcrops. Paintings are found in caves and shelters in more mountainous areas. In a few places both paintings and engravings were made. Style and content vary from region to region and through time. However, many similarities link most of the art as part of a single broad San tradition.

Different rock art techniques were used: Pecked engravings were made by chipping or chiselling the outer crust of the rock with a hard stone. Hairline or fineline engravings were incised with a sharp stone tool. Some of the oldest engravings were made by this method. Scraped or scratched engravings were made by scraping off the outer crust of the rock to produce silhouette images of animals and people.  Rock paintings in the Northern Cape are mostly designs painted with the finger.  Pigments were obtained from minerals: various shades of reds and yellows from ochre; black from manganese and occasionally from charcoal; and white from white clay. Paint was made by mixing these with gypsum, plant saps and fibre, eggwhite, and possibly water. Blood was also used… in one documented case blood from the eland antelope was preferred.

Dated rock art includes engraved stones excavated at Wonderwerk Cave, up to 10 000years old. Painted stones from Apollo 11 Shelter in Namibia are associated with dates of about 27 000 years ago. Finds at a few sites indicate that some form of art can be traced back further into Middle Stone Age times, for example the 77 000 years old engraved ochre at Blombos Cave. In the last 2000 years some engravings were made by Iron Age farmers, others by Khoikhoi, and some rock engravings in the Northern Cape were made by Griqua and Trekboer frontiersmen, and by soldiers during the Anglo-Boer War.

Animal images are a major symbolic element in San art, and they feature, albeit differently, in stories as well. In the art, large game animals predominate, and the eland is evidently a central motif and symbol. Human figures are less common in engravings than in paintings; and men are shown more often than women. Group compositions include dances. But the intent is not narrative. Some images are concerned with transformation, for example depicting humans with animal heads or feet. These particular engravings and paintings, known as therianthropes, most clearly relate to the religious beliefs and ritual trance dances of hunter-gatherers. Complex geometric images, referred to as entoptics, appear to have been inspired by visual experiences during trance. Other geometric images are thought by some to belong to a distinct Khoikhoi tradition – an argument developed since this display was created. The huge site of Driekopseiland, which is dominated by such geometric imagery, has been suggested to relate to coming-of-age rites of young women.

Detailed knowledge of San beliefs and customs, recorded in the last 150 years, suggests that San rock art may be linked with ritual specialists called medicine people or shamans, and that engravings and paintings were symbols and metaphors for religious beliefs, depicted on rocks so that others could share and draw spiritual inspiration from them. “The paintings represent rain-making,” remarked a San man named Qing, in conversation with J.M. Orpen in Lesotho, in the 1870s. Qing said, “We see here a water thing, or water cow…wherever this animal goes, rain will fall.” In the 1870s Dr Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd learnt the language of San hunter-gatherers from the Northern Cape’s Karoo region, who called themselves |Xam. Bleek and Lloyd wrote down |Xam folklore and oral history. These writings – a collection of some 12 thousand pages – provide an “insider’s view” of |Xam society, then on the brink of collapse. The stories are now central to an understanding of San religion and rock art. In the trance dance –  an important healing ritual – women sang and clapped “medicine songs” around a central fire, while men danced around them. The dance increased in intensity. A shaman would feel supernatural potency “boil” inside him or herself. As a !Kung shaman explained, “In your back you feel a pointed something, and it works its way up. The base of your spine is tingling, tingling, tingling…”

Entering a trance state – which was the spiritual realm – the shaman drew out sickness and “harm’s things” from individuals in the group. Rain-making and out-of-body travel were other ritual skills of shamans. The visions experienced during trance would have been the inspiration behind the imagery in rock art. God, the source of all potency, was a trickster-deity called |Kaggen. |Kaggen’s favourite animal was the eland. “Elands are there. Giraffes are there. Gemsboks are there. Kudus are there. They are God’s possessions.”

To the San the universe was layered, where spiritual realms existed above and below the level of everyday life. Rock art showing snakes and other animals emerging from cracks in a rock or cave wall suggest that the rock itself was an interface between this world and the world of spirits and spirit animals. Rock art was made at special places in the landscape, powerful places which may have been regarded as ‘entrances’ into the spirit world.