“I AM intrigued by the link between Egyptian mythology and the rock art we are seeing in the Matobo Hills.”
The above quote is attributable to me. It came as a dream a few nights ago.
In the dream, I was addressing some white man who did not identify himself. In any case, his identity is not important. The context and content of the dream is. I had boldly told the Amagugu Research Team who were embarking on exploratory visits to the cave paintings in Ward 17 within Matobo Hills.
I knew that dreams are denigrated, despised, trashed and demonised in Western scholarship and academies. Fortunately, I do not share in that epistemological discourse. I have experienced on several occasions what dreams will reveal, in terms of the past, present and future.
Given my experiences, I knew that after entering some of these caves, some members of the team were going to dream about their experiences. I knew well some of them would interpret what they saw, just as I did. Of course, all this is nonsense to some people. Africa, ever compliant and unquestioning, whimpers like some lonely puppy in the frigid Arctic Ocean.
Little did I know that I would be among those to dream about what we were experiencing, some real rude awakening. I could not help thinking that the researchers who visited these cave sites ahead of us had not seen what we were seeing. Was knowledge and information being withheld from some of us? The question is why? From what we observed there are possibly several reasons for doing that.
The Matobo cultural landscape was declared a World Heritage Site (WHS) because of its rich cultural heritage created more than thousands of years ago. Some of us contributed to the dossier that was prepared and presented to Unesco consideration.
The integrated nature of African ideas and civilizations was not to be revealed, perhaps. Only the northern part of the African continent was to be associated with ancient civilisations and not, in particular, with the despised San people in southern Africa, let alone in the Matobo Hills.
All these new revelations are courtesy of the US Ambassador’s Preservation Fund which we applied to with a view to preserving San rock art that faces a myriad of threats from both natural and cultural factors. We had not bargained for what we ended up seeing.
Were the San living within the Matobo Hills connected in terms of their ideas to the Egyptian ideas of about 5 000 BC? Yet this is what I have been hammering all these years. The ancients shared common ideologies, thoughts, worldviews, beliefs and perceptions.
Before we proceed let us hazard another possible reason for withholding information from Africans. The same happened when some South African Afrikaners who, in collusion with the University of Pretoria, hid the civilisation that existed at the site between the Limpopo and Shashe. They just would not countenance some black civilisation that far in the Dark Continent.
From what we have seen, the San people were accurate and passionate artists in documenting what they observed happening around them. One does not need to be a “whizmadala” to clearly read the messages in some of their artworks. What one may choose is not to accurately interpret what they see expertly depicted in the caves.
In the book that we shall write in relation to our findings, we are going to detail how we progressively arrived at the interpretations and conclusions. I remember well when, in one cave, I saw what I thought was an exotic tree or plant. The tree was bigger than the mountains seemingly behind it. I would remember too when one of the team members said how can a tree be bigger than mountains? Another artist did have an answer to the unexpected spectacle.
The mountains were far away, probably in a foreign land. The tree was nearby, within the Matobo Hills. In a situation like that, there was a likelihood that the nearby tree dwarfed the mountains in distant lands. I had not reckoned with what awaited us. In one cave where there were some clay grain bins, we saw an unusually elongated man who sported some dreadlocks as his hairstyle.
It seemed to us, without prior knowledge that the man was holding some strings and down below him he was holding little humans by means of the strings held in his hand, and so we thought. We are of course free to pontificate, to theorise, to hypothesise, to postulate, and imagine from some lofty African pedestal of knowledge and traditions.
Sometimes where knowledge is scant, we quickly rush to embrace shamanism or spirituality. Where a people’s culture is not sufficiently known, the challenge to interpret their visual art or indeed any art genre within the repertoire of their cultures becomes a mammoth task.
This is where some of us seek to wear our cultural lenses and plod along in the name of interpreting a people’s culture when, in fact, we know next to nothing about that particular culture. We are not different either. What we do not know we attach spirituality or shamanism to it.
Our gaining of knowledge was incremental. The next cave, for the first time, yielded clues that were beyond doubt. There were four stick figures in the familiar San colour. Their necks were connected and tied together to make a single file. We still needed more evidence. This time we observed that there were some kind of four stick figures that tied them together by means of unidentified shackles on their necks.
The marching file was longer this time. On both sides of the long single file were men who held guns. On the ground, were women sitting down with some of them holding their arms above their heads in typical African style? Africans do know that this is a posture that is expressive of fear, timidity, desperation, dejectedness and terror.
There were no further questions. Stick figures that carried bows and arrows were missing completely from the visual board. The movements did not constitute dancing either. It was terror all around. Human beings with guns shepherded the beleaguered beings to some unknown destination. The exotic trees, which we saw held by some people in other paintings, may have been planted along routes as an indicator of the direction to the Indian Ocean.
What we were witnessing was an enslaving scene within the Matobo Hills. This was not something that we had bargained for. Not all of us in the team had read about the enslaving of Africans in the Matobo Hills. We were aware of the enslaving or capture of Africans who were driven to the coast. Here I saw the weakness in painting everything the same colour. Differences were captured through magnitude and not colour.
Were those that carried guns black or what? San visual artistic traditions would not be of much assistance to us. Bows, arrows, skin bags and other artefacts were painted with the same brush, literally. From knowledge gleaned elsewhere, the agents of either the Arabs or Portuguese may have ventured deep inland while their masters remained in coastal or riverine areas such as along the Zambezi River.
The Chikunda were one such group that pried on the Tonga and Ila, particularly along the Zambezi River. I will not believe that we were the first people to see these rock paintings. Someone somewhere must have hidden that information from the general view and knowledge.
Such an activity paints a negative picture of those who wish to portray themselves as civilised and certainly better than the indigenous inhabitants of the African continent. Followers of this column may begin to wonder whether there is relevance to the themes of the articles that we started just over twenty months ago.
Our thrust and focus are on what we have termed Ancient African Science. The term was chosen to engage in intellectual dances within a known field against some familiar African cultural and ideological parameters. As we push on relentlessly, we are slowly getting to a point where we see commonalities among the ancients. Africa was documented in numerous ways without recourse to Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mesopotamian cuneiform.
By the way, are the two places not directly on the African continent or are, by proximity, under the influences of African ideas, thought, cosmologies, and ideologies? The figures that we saw are portrayed in ancient Egypt (between 5 000 and 3 000 BC) as representation of the God Anubis whose role was to assist the soul to exit the worldly realm during its journey to the afterlife.
Similarly, a dead Pharaoh’s body was guided in its journey to the afterlife. It has been argued that God Anubis became the most prized religious export that over time was embraced by both the Greeks and the Romans. Little did we know that the spiritual idea also existed in the caves on which the San artistes painted images thousands of years ago in southern Africa and probably elsewhere on the African continent.
However, more important is the idea or ideas that are represented by God Anubis who is portrayed as having a human body and the head of a jackal. We may not readily get to know what, in the San language, they called the idea represented by what the Egyptians called Aset and later adopted in the Greek language as Anubis. From the image, we may hazard and guess that God Anubis in Egypt expressed the same spiritual ideas as in the Matobo Hills.
Essentially, the underpinning idea is the Duality of Being. Egyptians believed a human being had two essential components, a material body that is physical and the eternal soul that, at death, was assisted by God Anubis in the journey to the afterlife.
Priests who were involved in embalming wore facemasks depicting God Anubis. Coffins also depicted God Anubis who was portrayed holding an Ankh, itself a portrayal of eternity or continuing life after death in the afterlife. We are persuaded to argue that the San equally embraced similar spiritual ideas. That may suggest that their art went beyond art to serve some functional and utilitarian purposes beyond art itself.
Here I am in the same league with Africa’s iconic writer Chinua Achebe who asserted that in Africa, “Art for art’s sake is like deodorised dog shit.” As long as we view art from a Eurocentric perspective, we are not going to meaningfully and sustainably interpret African culture, more so its expressions, one of which is visual art.
The tendency has been to give more emphasis to Egypt, sometimes to the total exclusion of the rest of the African continent. Kush, and Nubia which were parts of present-day Sudan and Ethiopia have enjoyed better coverage. Pyramids seem to be traceable to Sudan before their construction spread northward to Kemet (Egypt).
A question may be posed. Did the idea of God Anubis originate further to the south of Egypt and spread north to Greece, Italy, and other areas under the influence of the Roman Empire? Did it all start in Egypt and spread to the south?
Carbon dating may assist in this regard. However, some of us may remain sceptical concerning the release of results of the carbon dating process lest there be revelations that southern Africa was, after all, the cradle of humanity.
Graves are another aspect of culture that expresses spirituality. This will await the definitive discovery of graves of the San people in the Matobo Hills. The task of authenticating may not be as laborious after God Anubis has been found and the Duality of Being is ascertained by the identical image of God Anubis who, in Egypt, worked closely with the Goddess Isis and also with God Osiris, the God who sat in judgment of souls arriving in the realm of the afterlife.