in the search of great art

We left Swaziland and drove through Kwazulu-Natal to make it to Drakensberg Mountains on the border of the country of Lesotho (less-OO-toe), a country contained within South Africa.  The distinctions between this part of South Africa and the country from which we had just ripped ourselves away were few.  Men and woman walked in the hillsides and along the road with long, ten metre stacks of reeds and lumber piled on their heads.  Zulus and Swazis will really carry anything or their head: buckets of water, an axe, produce.  We passed flocks of people waiting at unmarked stops along the road, anticipating a minibus that would take them home for the day.  We passed rows of people walking along the road from the farm, from school, from cleaning, from the hills.  We waved and they would wave back with broad smiles, toothy and toothless.

We made it into Drakensberg after the sun set, and stayed in a cozy B&B where a lovely woman named Baby made us fried eggs, sausages, and thick slices of toast with butter and jam the next morning for breakfast.  She was a master knitter and sewer, and showed me the wool cardigans and cotton jumpers and button-down shirts she created to give to local workers who needed them.  Her designs were flawless and precise, practical and durable.  I was awed by her generosity and grassroots contribution to enable the struggling working class in South Africa (the unemployment rate here is 50%), a race and class she had probably been taught to fear and hate as a white girl in this country.

It was Wednesday.  We made it to a nature reserve called "Giant's Castle" after a two hour drive on thin strips of road through isolated township communities set in dry, grassy hills.  Once we got near the reserve, we spotted springbok and baboons from the road.  Megan and I 

hiked for over an hour by a clear gurgling stream and we finally arrived at the end of our long drives, our long walks, our aching anticipation.  We found ourselves in cool, dark caves with

 alizarin and ochre and white and umbre cows, people, and mythical characters painted on the walls by healers from over 5000 years ago.  The artists were San, or Bushmen, hunter-gather communities who blackened the roofs of these caves with fires for cooking and warmth, who surrounded their transitory space with images from their lives, dreams, and trances.  There were black people lined in a patterned row, a person handing another person a baby, three golden cows predominating one slab of rock.  There was a snake, people dancing, people running, people fighting.  My favourite was a half-man, half antelope with three antelope heads, and a tail with a line of white dots.  An image from a dream or an ancestor.  I had not expected to see work so precise, with each mark so carefully planned and permanent, and to see images so fully developed in imagination and spiritual maturity.  I have seen great art painted on the walls of the Sistine Chapel, but in its own way, this art painted on the walls of caves is just as irreversible and important for its testament to the human capacity to stretch itself in all ways to create something, to leave a mark of its existence in relation to something or someone supreme.