Dorothea Bleek by Jill Weintroub

Author:Jill Weintroub [Weintroub, Jill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Historical, Social Science, Anthropology, General
ISBN: 9781868148806
Google: 4jZjDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2016-03-01T02:59:44+00:00

Seeing for herself

By the time her edited publication of Stow’s copies appeared in 1930, Dorothea was adamant that it had been ‘irrefutably proven’ that ‘many of the thousands of paintings in the caves and on the rocks [had been] painted by the Bushmen themselves’.121 In her 1932 lecture she stated that rock art should be regarded as the ‘most important historical documents left us by the early inhabitants of the country’.122 The proof of ‘bushman’ authorship was incontrovertible. Her cautious view challenged that of influential prehistorians, archaeologists and artists of the 1920s and 1930s, including the Abbé Breuil, as we have seen, the anatomist and anthropologist Raymond Dart, as well as the artist Walter Battiss, who suggested an ancient foreign authorship for the art and other aspects of bushman culture.123

Dorothea’s modest, evidence-based view drew on the writings of Stow and earlier travellers in the region, and was supported by her own fieldwork and observation over the preceding 15 years among remnant bushman groups across southern Africa. As she stated in her introduction to the collection of Stow’s copies, modernity had ended the painting tradition and this had led to recent doubts about bushman authorship. ‘I have not the least doubt that the paintings are the work of Bushmen, nor, as far as I know, has any author up to the beginning of the present century expressed any doubt on the subject.’124 Fieldwork had provided evidence of the irrevocable impact of modernity in the form of civilisation and the forces of history on bushman lifestyle. It had destroyed not only their painting tradition, but also their ‘lore’.125 As she wrote in Rock Paintings in South Africa:

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