AfricanRockArt

In the late 1990s I was working in the Ennedi Mountains in North Eastern Chad (Sahara), a 17,000 square mile wilderness of plateaux and canyons, and was recording 6000 year old paintings in a series of caves. I entered one of the caves with my eyes on the cave roof where all these beautiful paintings were, when I heard my friend say: "Don't move! Look down!" And I then saw a 5 foot horned viper curled up about half an inch from my open sandal. I came so close to treading on him. Given the fact that I was a thousand miles from any hospital or medical help, I could not possibly have survived if I had been bitten.

I guess you just get used to it.

In African rock art we recognise certain power animals, animals which were believed to have special powers, for example, the power to bring rain. Examples of these rain animals are hippo, giraffe, kudu, and eland. The kudu and the eland are animals found today in Southern Africa and the eland is the world's largest antilope, which was revered by the San or Bushmen for thousands of years for its special powers. The stories of how and why the eland possessed these powers is told in their mythologies. The eland was painted on cave walls more than any other animal and more beautifully than any other animal, after which the Bushmen would often dance in front of the paintings to invoke the animals' powers. Equally, when the Bushmen hunted eland they did not do so for the meat, they hunted it in order to harness its powers.

Libya, where we have done a lot of work in the past, is difficult to work in now, but most of Egypt, so long as you listen to the right advice, is easy to travel through. Meanwhile there are countries like Chad, Niger, Morocco and Mauritania, which also pretty safe.

1. A lot of the most interesting and important rock art in Africa was made by hunter-gatherer peoples, such as the Bushmen-San of Southern Africa, who were prolific artists and who painted for at least 30 thousand years. In addition, there is a huge amount of art in places like the Sahara desert, which was not always a desert, that was made by pastoral societies/cultures between 4000-8000 years ago. The Ancient Egyptians produced beautiful art in addition to their hieroglyphs, but this is not normally considered as rock art.

2. When I first got interested in rock art I was an author/photographer working in different remote areas of Africa. In the course of my travels for this work I came across a lot of this art which sparked my interest in the subject. Subsequently I was encouraged by the famous paleontologist, Dr. Mary Leakey, to start a foundation in order to promote and protect the rock art.

3. The most magical experience of my job was probably when we first found two enormous, life size carvings of giraffes on a rock outcrop in Niger (Sahara desert), which I later published in the National Geographic Magazine in 1999. These giraffes were made over 6000 years ago and were described as one of the greatest discoveries of pre-historic art ever made.