There is a place in Namibia that is well off the beaten track, and I hope to keep it that way, and so to foil Google I will refrain from naming it directly. You can see the name in the image above. It’s basically a rock shelter in a canyon where the stone above was found. The 30,000 year old image shows a therianthrope, a combination of human and other animals. It’s a mystical image that expresses our oneness with all of nature and the cosmos in pictorial form. It’s highly significant because it also happens to be the oldest figurative artwork discovered on the continent. Artworks in Africa before this were mere symbols and patterns, but this actually depicts recognizable forms. Made by the ancestors of the San people, who were once called Bushmen, it’s a treasure of international importance, more important in my opinion than the famous 17,000 year old paintings found at Lascaux in France, yet almost unknown. The above photo was taken by me when I obtained permission to photograph the stones, which had to be retrieved from storage in Windhoek for me.
I visited the unnamed place after researching its exact location in academic papers. The generally acknowledged location, as given in one of the earliest published papers, is not quite correct, and it’s a good idea to leave it like that, to discourage the hordes of tourists and vandals, by whom the world’s points of interest and tourist destinations are currently overrun.
The location was very isolated and quite beautiful, although very dry. It used to be a place with reliable summer rains and a strongly flowing creek running through it, one that eroded the canyon to its current depth over eons of time. People inhabited the place, in pulses, over many tens of thousands of years. Some of the graffiti in the canyon shows that as late as last century, people were finding refuge and sustenance there. Now, due to a long drought caused by climate change, it is dry and barren. Where antelope once roamed, it’s now deserted. Where the bees and their honeyed hives abounded, as immortalized in the canyon’s rock engravings, now there is silence. And yet our emissions keep rising, year after year, despite all the empty promises of change. Our species is trashing everything, oblivious to the consequences, which are already starting to unfold. As Natalie Merchant says below, payback — “it’s a coming”. Nature always bats last.
