'My Heart Stands in the Hill': Rock Engravings in the Northern Cape

Abstract

Parts of the Northern Cape have a rich heritage of art works in the form of rock engravings that were done by the /Xam San and their ancestors over the past 10 000 years or more. They are an enduring reminder not only of the creative skills of the artists, but also of their beliefs and rituals. The rock engravings are of special significance because a few of the /Xam-speaking San whose ancestors made engravings also contributed to a written testimony that provides more insight into these beliefs than is available anywhere else in South Africa. This written record offers a possible explanation not only of the context in which the art was created, but also of the symbolism behind its placement in the landscape. The written testimony is in the Bleek Collection at the University of Cape Town's Jagger Library which comprises over 170 quarto notebooks with more than 11 000 pages of handwritten notes in /Xam, translated into English, and many letters, notes, photographs and reports.1 The collection represents the work of Dr Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek, born in Berlin in 1827, of his sister-in-law Dr. Lucy Lloyd, born in England in 1834, and of Bleek's daughter, Dorothea, who was born in Cape Town in 1873.2 Together they dedicated much of their lives to the study of /Xam. Initially, Bleek's purpose in the 1860s when he was librarian in charge of the Grey Collection at the South African Library, was to develop a theory of the evolution of syntax that would be applicable to all languages of the world.3 He had hoped to be able to show that Nama was related to the languages of North Africa, including Ancient Egyptian, and to trace the history of peoples through their languages. When he realised that there was in fact no connection between them, and that the languages spoken by the San in South Africa were fast becoming extinct, he made a concerted effort to find people who were still speaking them.4 As a result of this quest he interviewed several /Xam men from the Kenhardt, Carnarvon and Calvinia districts of the Northern Cape who had

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