Rock art and changing perceptions of southern Africa's past: Ezeljagdspoort reviewed

Abstract

Since 1835 travellers and scholars have been looking at, and ‘reading’, a strange painting of apparently fish-tailed figures at Ezeljagdspoort, in the southern part of the Cape Province, South Africa. Each reading has been made within some external frame-of-reference, whether supposed histories of racial conflict or Jungian archetypes of child-like primitive insight. These set aside, a surer route to an ‘inside’ reading may be based on our knowledge of Bushman shamanism.