Art may illustrate relationship between Bushman-San and Bokoni people
IN THE hidden kloofs tucked away in the Komati river gorge the search is on to explain the mysterious rock engravings that dot the hills of Mpumalanga.
The search is for art, which some believe was left by a people who have since disappeared, and were once revered for their farming prowess.
It is in the heavy, wooded rocky overhangs in the valley, close to Machadodorp where the art can be found, and it was here that a team of archaeologists recently hacked their way through the dense bush to conduct a rock art survey.
But the art, the team discovered, were the more common fine brush images of eland and other antelope – the work of the Bushman-San.
There were none of the rock engravings often found on the hilltops that lie close to the remains of the stone circled settlements of the Bokoni, who are believed to have created this art.
But even though none of these engravings popped up, the San art does, says Wits university archaeologist Alex Schoeman, help explain the possible relationship the hunter-gatherers had with the Bokoni whose settlements and farms once lay close to the Komati river.
It is a relationship built, she believes, possibly on the BushmanSan providing rain-making divination services and hunting skills in exchange for the Bokoni’s agricultural produce.
“We want to understand the nature of the interaction and get a big scale view of the economy as a whole,” says Schoeman, who co-authored Forgotten World: The stone-walled settlements of the Mpumalanga escarpment published by Wits University Press in 2014.
Little is known of the Bokoni who, academics only recently learnt, were skilled farmers who used advanced farming methods to survive some of the worst droughts in southern African history.
The Bokoni are one of a few societies in subsaharan Africa to have developed terraced farming – where steps are cut into the side of a hill, which helps retain water and holds the soil.
Schoeman believes the Bokoni developed the farming method as a response to reduced rainfall, which began to dwindle in the 1700s.
What was also unique about the Bokoni were the roads they constructed that linked their homesteads, and were probably used to keep their cattle out of their gardens.
The Bokoni were eventually defeated by the Bapedi around the 1830s and were scattered and absorbed by other communities or subjudicated by the boers.
To Schoeman the pictographs appear to mirror the Bokoni settlement patterns, showing their homesteads and even the roads that connected them.
However, the art does not appear to map the settlements. Other academics don’t believe that the art has a symbolic meaning, and was rather the chiselled doodlings of bored herd boys.
For Schoeman the reason for the Bokoni rock art could have been for male initiation purposes. One pictograph has an image of what appears to be a lizard, which in Limpopo among other farming communities is considered to be linked to initiation. But to find