The impact of contact and colonisation on indigenous worldviews, rock art, and the history of SA...

The impact of contact and colonization on indigenous worldviews, rock art, and the history of Southern Africa – ‘the disconnect’

Public lecture by Dr Sam Challis, the Director of the Rock Art Research Institute at Wits.

Rock art in Southern Africa testifies to successive interactions among hunter-gatherers, incoming African herders, African farmers, and, later, European settlers. New subject matter, however, is not simply incorporated into the pre-existing tradition. Images that depict novel motifs are made differently from the “traditional corpus,” usually rougher in appearance (in both paintings and engravings), more dynamic, or made with vivid and chalky paints.

The drop in pigment quality is likely owing to the disruption and ultimate decimation of indigenous groups and the subsequent breakdown in trade and social communications – “the Disconnect”. The changes owe more, it seems, to the increasingly mixed membership of the art-producing people and the mixing of their cosmologies, albeit with specific cultural survivals.

Precolonial contact images speak to a multitude of interactions that can inform the archaeological record, and colonial-era rock art constitutes a major component of the historical archive that offers a reverse gaze from an indigenous perspective. 

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