Book Review - Brill Online Books and Journals

2 downloads 0 Views 198KB Size Report
Nov 12, 2016 - This volume follows Siyakha Mguni's journey to uncover the meanings and motivation behind one of southern Africa's most enigmatic rock art ...
Book Review

Termites of the Gods: San Cosmology in Southern African Rock Art. By Siyakha Mguni. Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 2015, 202 pp. ISBN 987-1-86814-776-2. US$ 39.95 (Paperback).

This volume follows Siyakha Mguni’s journey to uncover the meanings and motivation behind one of southern Africa’s most enigmatic rock art images: the so-called ‘formling’. The ‘formling’ is a distinctive image category, found predominantly in Zimbabwe, and that comprises sets of segmented cloud-like shapes, sometimes associated with trees, sometimes associated with mushrooms, and often found among images of people and animals. This image category has defied attempts at coherent interpretation for more than a century. Termites of the Gods seeks to change this. The text begins with a moving introduction that describes Mguni’s initiation into rock art and archaeology. In a fascinating new insight, we learn that his great-grandfather privately revealed that his mother had been ‘a Bushman’. This personal revelation casts the book in an entirely different light when compared to other volumes on southern African rock art. Gone is the sense that we are reading about ‘prehistory’, or things long forgotten. Suddenly, there is an ancestral connection to this past, a realisation that the makers of this rock art have direct connections to living communities. This information brought to my mind Zimbabweans who still openly assert their Khoe-San descent, some who live in Plumtree, which is close to the Matopo Hills, the focus area of Mguni’s book; others live further north, in Tsholotsho District. They still speak a KhoeSan language, Tshwao, and, since 2013, their language has been recognised as one of the official languages of Zimbabwe. Curiously, given Mguni’s acknowledgment of his own Khoe-San ancestry, there is no discussion of these groups in Termites of the Gods. The main chapters then focus on the crux of the issue this book seeks to answer: What is the subject and meaning of the formling? Mguni talks us through the minute details of the formling, including their distribution and their association with other more DOI 10.3213/2191-5784-10295 © Africa Magna Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. Received 17 Oct 2016 Published online 12 Nov 2016

recognisable subjects. Furthermore, he considers past attempts at their interpretations. This is followed with an overview of San cosmology and current approaches to understanding southern African rock art. The approach chosen for this book is an ethnographic one, drawing upon San beliefs, predominantly from the Kalahari, to explain fine details in the art. The final three chapters use this approach to present a holistic interpretative reading of the formlings. The images are explained in terms of termite symbolism and potency and mediation with the spirit-world. The formling is read as an embodiment of the ultimate source of potency: God’s house. Readers will recognize that some of these ideas are not new. Mguni published aspects of the matter in a series of journal articles about a decade ago (e.g., Mguni 2004, 2006, 2009), but his ideas are usefully brought together and significantly expanded in this volume. His ideas are more compelling when woven into this single, coherent text. There is also very important material included in this volume from his doctorateworthy Masters thesis that has not been published previously. Such material includes new interpretations of the symbolism of trees — prominent characters of Zimbabwean rock art — and are interwoven cleverly with Mguni’s formling interpretations. He creates convincing explanations for why formlings are so often juxtaposed with images of trees. For those seeking contextual social archaeological interpretations, this book may prove challenging. Termites of the Gods builds a shamelessly general explanation for formling symbolism that is not located in space or time. Mguni avoids discussing whether recent Kalahari and South African San ethnographies have interpretative relevance to ancient art in Zimbabwe. He does so by focussing on minute details in the art and then by seeking to convince us that recent San ethnographies hold such detailed explanations, and for such a

Journal of African Archaeology Vol. 14 (2), 2016, pp. 229–230

229

Book Review

range of associated features in the art, that they must be relevant. Once or twice this wrestling between an extended ethnographic reach and interpretative plausibility is overstretched. For example, a strange animal that straddles and integrates with a formling (pp. 124–128) is interpreted using South African/Xam ethnography as a rain animal. While this cannot be refuted, it is a distinctive trait of Northern San-speaking groups that they do not objectify the rain in animal form. This is a Southern San tradition. This makes it unlikely that the Zimbabwean painters had the concept of ‘rain-animal’. As a result, this mythical animal probably needs an alternative explanation. Such over-reach in no way undermines the central tenets of Mguni’s book concerning formlings, but it does remind us of the need to stay focused on the local and the particular, even when one is building general interpretative models. Overall, Mguni’s interpretations are strong and compelling. It is the mark of a great rock art researcher to be able to take a complex panel of rock art and to talk through why many different component images were each juxtaposed for a common symbolic purpose. Mguni does this masterfully, and at a series of Matopo rock art sites. I would challenge anyone to read this book and not forever be convinced that the shape of formlings is derived from that of termite mounds and, therefore, that their symbolism was always, and in all places, redolent with understandings of termite potency. To my mind, these interpretations do not stand in opposition to a more nuanced contextual reading of the paintings. Indeed, they seem likely to be foundational to such a reading. I suspect a more contextual reading will be the next horizon for Mguni’s Matopo research. With a general symbolic framework now in place, and as our direct dating techniques for rock paintings become ever more sophisticated, a time is coming when Mguni’s new understanding of formlings can be placed into the kind of complex and changing social contexts that Nick Walker established for the Matopo Hills (Walker 1995). Walker saw the formlings as a feature typical of larger, well-occupied living sites (Walker 1996: 32) and sought to place formlings within a history of art production. He identified a great upsurge in Matopo art productivity about 9800 years ago, at a time when big game hunting declined (Walker 1994: 126).

230

His evidence for this is the massive presence of ochre in archaeological layers from this time. This flourishing of art ended about 7600 years ago (ibid.). Walker sees this period as a time of “high population when social relationships were especially under stress” (ibid.: 129). Whilst he stopped short of publishing on this, he argued in a number of conference papers in the 1990s that the majority of formlings were painted during this period. Direct dating of the art will allow us to test this in the future. We will then be able to explore why this image, and the symbolism Mguni has so adeptly identified, became a central feature of Matopo rock art at this distant point in time. In this way, it should be possible to address Walker’s concern about treating this art in an ahistorical framework. Benjamin Smith University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia References Mguni, S. 2004. Cultured representation understanding ‘Formlings’, an enigmatic motif in the rock-art of Zimbabwe. Journal of Social Archaeology 4 (2), 181–199. https:/ doi.org/10.1177/1469605304041074 Mguni, S. 2006. King’s monuments: identifying ‘Formlings’ in Southern African San Rock paintings. Antiquity 80, 583–598. https:/doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X00094059 Mguni, S. 2009. Natural and supernatural convergences. Current Anthropology 50 (1), 139–148. https:/doi.org/10.1086/593034 Walker, N.J. 1994. Painting and ceremonial activity in the Later Stone Age of the Matopos, Zimbabwe. In: Dowson, T.A. & Lewis-Williams, J.D. (eds), Contested Images: Diversity in Southern African Rock art Research. Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg, pp. 119–130. Walker, N.J. 1995. Late Pleistocene and Holocene Huntergatherers of the Matopos. Studies in African Archaeology 10. Societas Archaeologica Upsaliensis, Uppsala. Walker, N.J. 1996. The Painted Hills: Rock Art of the Matopos. Mambo Press, Gweru. Walker, N.J. 2012. The rock art of the Matobo Hills, Zimbabwe. Adoranten 2012, 38–59.

Journal of African Archaeology Vol. 14 (2), 2016