Game Pass Shelter, South Africa

Game Pass shelter is one of the most well-known rock art sites in South Africa. Situated in the foothills of the Drakensberg mountains, a sandstone recess atop a steep slope contains rock paintings made by people from the San|Bushman¹ communities who historically lived as hunter-gatherers throughout southern Africa. The Drakensberg mountains in particular are known for their wealth of rock paintings, often showing detailed and brightly coloured images of people, animals and part-human, part-animal figures known as ‘therianthropes’, with this site a prime example. One of the panels of paintings here is particularly important in the history of rock art research, as in the 1970s it helped to inspire a new kind of approach to the understanding of the meanings and symbolism of San|Bushman paintings and engravings.

The most prominent painting panel at Game Pass shows a series of carefully depicted eland antelope in delicately shaded red, brown and white pigment, largely super imposing a group of ambiguous anthropomorphic figures wrapped in what appear to be bell-shaped karosses (traditional skin cloaks). Several small human figures appear to be running above them. These are some of the best-preserved rock paintings in the Drakensberg, with the largest animals around 30 cm long. To the left of this panel are two smaller sets of images, one with two further eland, some further human-like figures and a human figure with a bow; the other a small panel, for which the site is most renowned. An image around 50 cm long shows an eland with its face turned towards the viewer, depicted as if stumbling forwards, with its hind legs crossed. Grasping the eland’s tail is a therianthrope figure with hooves for feet. Like the eland, this figure has its legs crossed and is depicted with small lines like raised hairs bristling from its body. To the right are three further therianthrope figures.

The rock paintings from this site were first brought to public attention in a 1915 issue of Scientific American, and it has been frequently published on and discussed through the 20th century. While studying a reproduction of the image with the stumbling eland in the early 1970s, researcher David Lewis-Williams began to consider that the figure holding the eland’s tail might not be a simple illustration of a man wearing a skin suit, or performing an act of bravura, as had been suggested by previous researchers, but might be “idiomatic and metaphorical, rather than illustrative” (Lewis-Williams 1981:91).

This idea was partly inspired by the testimony of Qing, a San|Bushman man who, in 1873, had guided the Colonial Administrator Joseph Millerd Orpen to rock art sites in the mountains of Lesotho, with which the Drakensberg forms a natural eastern border with South Africa and which also contains many rock paintings. Qing’s explanations of the paintings, some of which Orpen copied, included a reference to antelope-headed human figures having “died and gone to live in rivers, who were spoilt at the same time as the elands and… by the dances of which you have seen paintings”. This, along with testimony and practices recorded from other South African San|Bushman people at the time, as well as those living elsewhere in south-western Africa in the 20th century, suggested to Lewis-Williams that these and other images in San|Bushman rock art may be a reference to the activities of spiritual leaders or ‘shamans’, people who, in San|Bushman communities, are believed to have the power to interact with spirits and the spirit world in ways which may affect the physical world.

Lewis-Williams and other proponents of this ‘shamanistic’ approach to interpreting San|Bushman rock art have proposed that much of its imagery is in fact related to the shaman’s experience during the ‘trance dance’ ritual found in all San|Bushman socie-ties. During this activity the shaman enters a hallucinatory state in which spiritual ‘tasks’ such as healing the sick may be undertaken on behalf of the community. On entering the trance state the shaman experiences trembling, sweating, stumbling and other symptoms similar to those of a dying antelope hit by a poisoned arrow. Lewis Williams noted that among some San|Bushman people this process is referred to as ‘dying’ or being ‘spoilt’ and considered that the similarities between the eland and the therianthrope figure in this image represent this conceived equivalence.

Despite the historical presence of other large game animals in the Drakensberg, the eland is the most commonly depicted animal in rock art of the region. Patricia Vinnicombe, noting this and the focus on other particular subjects in the imagery at the expense of others, proposed in her pioneering 1976 study of the rock art of the Southern Drakensberg People of the Eland that the paintings are “not a realistic reflection of the daily pursuits or environment of the Bushmen” (Vinnicombe 1976:347). Vinnicombe recalled that when, in the 1930s, an old Sotho man named Mapote, who had San|Bushman half-siblings and had used to paint with them, was requested to demonstrate, he had said that since the San|Bushmen had been “of the eland”, he should first depict an eland. Based on this and recountings of a myth about the creation and death of the first eland from Qing and other contemporary Southern San|Bushman people, Vinnicombe concluded that the eland, although regularly hunted by the Drakensberg San|Bushmen, had been a particularly sacred or powerful animal to them and that “Through the act of painting and re-painting the eland… the mental conflict involved in destroying a creature that was prized and loved by their deity…was…ritually symbolised and resolved” (Vinnicombe, 1976:350).

Building on the idea of the spiritual significance of the eland, the approach proposed by Lewis-Williams offered an alternative interpretation by inferring from ethnography that eland were believed to have spiritual ‘potency’. As part of a complex system of beliefs involving conceptions of power and potency in relation to animals and rites, this potency could be released upon death, with trancing shamans believed to be able to harness it, feeling themselves taking on the attributes of the animal. Thus therianthrope figures like those depicted here may be interpreted as representing hallucinatory experiences of shamans in trance, where they may feel that they are assuming the forms of other animals. It has been argued that other motifs such as geometric forms known as ‘entoptics’ represent the abstract patterns created by neural networks and ‘seen’ during the early stages of entering an altered state of consciousness and that the paintings themselves may have been created as reservoirs of spiritual potency.

The shamanistic approach to interpreting San|Bushman rock art images, for which the Game Pass panel is sometimes referred to as the ‘Rosetta Stone’, gained popularity in the 1980s and has since become the dominant interpretative framework for researchers. Debate continues about the extent and nature of its applicability in all of San|Bushman rock art, and the extent to which myth and ritual not associated with the trance dance may also inform the art. Work that connects San|Bushman cosmology and practice with images from sites like Game Pass continue to provide interesting insights into these enigmatic images.

Game Pass Shelter and many other rock art sites are situated within the Maloti-Drakensberg Park, which was inscribed as a UNESCO Transboundary World Heritage Site in 2000. The site is open to the public and accessible via a trail from the Kamberg Rock Art Centre.

¹ San|Bushmen is a collective term used to describe the many different hunter-gatherer-fisher groups living in southern Africa who have related languages and cultural traditions. Both ‘San’ and ‘Bushmen’ are considered offensive terms by some members of these groups, although others have positively adopted them.