To view the rare and precious examples of such art in Europe, for example, in France, requires the payment of large fees and booking weeks in advance, so hallowed are these many thousands of years old relics of times long gone. Yet here in Zimbabwe, not only are few people even aware of the timeless value of these ancient treasures, our youth seems bent on destroying those that are within easy reach.
I speak of amazingly beautiful and very precious San rock art sites across the country in caves, on rock faces, under overhangs. These are very real tourist attractions. To see these paintings, yet to be accurately dated but estimated to vary between 30 000 and 2 000 years old, and to have survived all those aeons, painted in natural dyes, is considered a very rare privilege indeed by visitors to our country. And they stand in awe, not only of the artistry of these very early people, but also, of the fact that they can actually stumble upon these entirely by accident out in the kopjes in areas such as Matobo, Mtoko, Chinamhora and many other places.
A fellow rock art enthusiast last week drew my attention to the defacement of some of the paintings found at Ngoma Kurira — a popular place for tourists to view fine examples of such work. On my last visit there, I saw similar defilement on the rock art to be enjoyed on the side of the massive cliff face of this mountain. Now, these disrespectful people have committed similar despicable acts in the other site found in a cave at this location.
It simply defies belief that some people in this country can have so little respect for these ancient paintings, and so very little understanding of their value to the nation. The San people were, in fact the first people of Zimbabwe.
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Africa is indeed the cradle of humanity and these gentle people who knew how to live in total harmony with nature, destroying nothing, killing only what they ate, and living for the most part on roots, shoots, berries, are our earliest ancestors, their paintings, our most ancient, prized heritage of all in this land.
I’ve even come across such graffiti in Silozwane cave in the Matobo hills, an area known as one of the best in the world for superb San cave paintings, and one of the reasons this is a World Heritage Site.
Tragically, the San were all but annihilated by the various tribes and peoples who came to Zimbabwe and elsewhere in southern Africa after them, and very few remain today — the same fate, in fact, as has befallen all the earliest indigenous people across the continents who were living peacefully as hunter-gatherers — the Maoris in New Zealand, Aborigines in Australia, First Nations Americans and Canadians (formerly and incorrectly called “Red Indians”) are good examples, and in the jungles of the Amazon, a few isolated such peoples are under threat of total extinction as the rain forest, their home for aeons, continues to be destroyed to clear land for agriculture and to plunder timber, at a terrifying rate (also contributing to detrimental climate change).
We had so much to learn about how to live from such people — their medicine, their wisdom, their respect and reverence for wildlife, and ability to live with nature instead of destroying and plundering it, as most humans have done, since mankind invented agriculture. While agriculture started our move to the modern technological world we know today and was the cornerstone of mankind’s development and domination of the planet as a species, it was also the beginning of the end for our natural environment and the wildlife living in it.
Researchers today are desperately trying to gather the knowledge and wisdom of the last remaining elderly San people in the Kalahari, who still know something about their medicines and traditions, before this is lost forever.
How utterly tragic, then, that youths living in the Ngoma Kurira area in Domboshawa, an area which benefits from the fees charged by people there to park cars, be guided, and from the sale of curios, have such blind, ignorant disregard for this, our most ancient heritage, that they feel free to deface it in this manner, ruining it forever.
If this continues across the country, the visitors who come all the way here to enjoy our ancient rock art, will cease to bother.
