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Southern African rock images captured the imagination of many Victorians, from geologists like George William Stow to the celebrated author Olive Schreiner. Whether considered residual traces of a Paleolithic human prehistory, works of art or ornamentation, functional signage, or objects of anthropological inquiry, these images stirred debates over how to regard them and, by extension, the land on which they rested. Painted or chiseled upon the rocks that form an integral part of the regional landscape, the images, according to Stow, testified to the intimate connection between the land and the creative productions of southern Africa's earliest native inhabitants: the Bushmen, also known as the San.¹ In The Native Races of South Africa, published posthumously in 1905, Stow observes: "[T]he ancient Bushmen themselves have recorded [their occupation of the land] upon the rocks, in their paintings, their sculptures or chippings, and stone implements, which are as much their unquestionable title-deeds as those more formal documents so valued among landowners in more civilized portions of the earth."² Although framed within European conceptions of property rights, Stow's reading nevertheless accounts for the San's distinct sense of belonging on the lands they inhabited.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230378018_5

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