Our precious, but tear-stained land

This past weekend we drove up the N7, about 34 km past Clan William and the Pakhuis Pass to do the Sevilla Rock Art Trail. Driving along we experienced the Western Cape blossoming as is traditional during this time of the year - green, with colourful flowers, canola fields in full bloom set against its intriguing, magnificent mountain ranges. 

Natural flower garden in the Cape

Wupperthal and its mountains. All these plots are divided as vegetable gardens and the community is hard at work

At the Sevilla Trail a new world opened to us – a 5 km scramble, allowing us into the world of the San or Bushmen (sometimes incorrectly referred to as the Hottentot). There are nine sites on the trail where we could view the rock art – which really are stories told by the San. 

San rock art thousands of years old show a hunter with his bow and arrows

Storytelling was part of their culture and there are some sites left in our country (Western Cape and Drakensberg) where this can be explored, although many have been destroyed over time. These people had no written language other than their drawings, which makes it precious beyond words. 

Rupert Isaacson confirmed in The Healing Land that the San were the first people in the Cape and he explains their way of life:

What was certain was that for thirty thousand years, perhaps longer, they had populated the whole sub-continent, pursuing a lifestyle that include hunting, gathering, painting, dancing, but not, it seemed, war.

Beautiful rocks above the caves where we viewed the art

The story becomes sad, for as the white farmers expanded into the Cape, they took what they wanted and in the process became directly responsible for the extinction of the San.  Cruel means were used to starve, torture, beat and kill these little people. They were free and roamed the countryside; they attached no value to property or material things and regarded the land as belonging to all. But different cultures have different values, and the whites settling into the Cape Colony started putting fences down on land they claimed as their property and that included animals that once belonged to ‘all’. The San didn’t understand or agree with this. Survival to them and their families meant access to food and water.  

Alan Mountain wrote in The First People of the Cape:

As colonists fanned out beyond the settlement’s boundaries and into the territories of the San, contact and conflict with the indigenous people of the Cape became inevitable. Those San who lived in the caves of the surrounding mountains must have watched in horror as the new arrivals began to invade their ancestral hunting grounds.

This piece of art shows two Sans carrying a kill, which is food for the family

But it has been argued that the dispossession of land started well before 1652 as rock paintings in the Drakensberg show conflict between the San, the Khoikhoi and the Nguni. 

Beautiful little flowers all over the Cape

What I found most disturbing on this trip is the destructive nature of people who have no respect for history or regard for anyone else. A number of these rock painting sites are in danger of being closed to the public as they have been defaced, graffiti written over paintings or among the art; we were told that a group of people had a braai in a cave which has rock art, which had in fact led to the closure of that specific trail. 

The question that comes to mind is, what are we as so-called 'developed' people doing to our world?