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Text by DALE PETERSON
Photographs by KARL AMMANN
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But the /Xam worked to control their fickle and often hostile environment through shamanism, which is even more of an essential theme for the art. All-night dances brought some of the men, carrying sticks and wearing rattles made of dried seed pods or pebble-filled springbok ears, into a trance state. The dancers, trembling, sweating, bleeding from their noses, became charged with a potent energy that seemed to boil out from within. Through succumbing to this energy they experienced their own death, leaving their physical bodies in order to manipulate the occult forces of the world beyond. They became shamans, in other words, and they used their newly acquired powers to work on three interconnected problems having to do with health, game, and rain. Shamans who acquired the power of healing might pull the illness out of a stricken person and into themselves, then sneeze it out along with a bloody discharge, which was then wiped onto the ill person with the theory that its smell protected against evil. Game shamans—the rock art sometimes shows them wearing caps made from the scalp of an antelope, the ears sewn to stand upright—worked to control the movements of antelope herds and confuse the trickster deity, /Kaggen, who liked to protect the special animals. And finally, the rain shamans tried to outsmart and catch certain mythical rain animals, whose blood or milk, when spilled, would be transformed into water that fell as rain.
That, in any event, is what I learned at Twyfelfontein and later from considering a handful of books on the subject. I also spoke about such things with Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of the anthropological classic The Harmless People (1958) and, more recently, The Old Way: A Story of the First People (2006), both of which draw on her experiences as a girl visiting and living among four language groups of the still surviving Kalahari Desert Bushmen.8 She knew nothing about the rock art, Thomas told me, since the Kalahari Bushmen did not do that kind of art. Their art was in their music—and, for the men, in their hunting and the mythlike stories they told about hunting.9 Also, she added, none of the Bushman groups she knew had shamans, at least not in the sense of someone being an elite, professionalized healer.
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