On the trail of Qing and Orpen
At the end of January this year, the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg launched a new book in its publication series, titled On the Trail of Qing and Orpen. The launch was accompanied by the opening of an exhibition with the same name in the Gallery’s downstairs space (usually used for exhibitions in the broad area of ‘historical African art’ as opposed to the bigger space upstairs that is usually used to showcase the work of contemporary artists). The occasion marked the culmination of a research and writing project that had begun five years earlier.
The six authors of the book are folklorist José De Prada-Samper (based in Barcelona, Spain), linguist Menán du Plessis (Cape Town), rock art specialist Jeremy Hollman (Pietermaritzburg), art historian Justine Wintjes (Johannesburg), and historians Jill Weintroub and John Wright (both based in Johannesburg). De Prada-Samper, Weintroub and Wright are associates of the APC, as is Mbongiseni Buthelezi, who was the guest speaker at the launch. We publish here John Wright's account of the history of the Qing and Orpen project, followed by reflections on the book and the exhibition by those involved in putting them together.
The evolution of the project
In December 1873 a chance encounter took place in the Maloti mountains of what is now eastern Lesotho between a young Bushman named Qing and a Cape colonial official named Joseph Orpen. Qing showed Orpen several richly painted rock shelters in the valley of the Senqu (Gariep, !Garib, Orange) river, and told him stories connected to the paintings. In July 1874 Orpen published an account of what he had heard from Qing, together with copies he had made of some of the paintings, in the Cape Monthly Magazine, the colony’s leading intellectual journal. His article appeared under the title ‘A glimpse into the mythology of the Maluti Bushmen’.
Since the beginnings of serious academic research into southern African rock art in the 1960s, Orpen’s article has become a canonical text. It is the only known source that records in some detail commentary on Bushman paintings by a Bushman who had ‘insider’ knowledge of the art. The article has been subjected to numerous detailed readings, but until the publication of On the Trail of Qing and Orpen had been given little by way of the detailed critical scrutiny and historical contextualization that is required if its significance as an archival source is to be fully realized.
The idea, dating back to 2010, of publishing a detailed deconstruction of the text that went beyond what rock art scholars had written on the subject came from José De Prada-Samper. As he consulted with other scholars, his idea expanded into the notion of publishing a full-length book of critical studies, written by several authors and bringing different disciplinary perspectives to bear. The team of six writers, together with our individual briefs, was finally established by April 2013.
Working on the book
De Prada-Samper worked on producing a closely annotated commentary on Orpen’s original text, which is lodged in the National Library of South Africa in Cape Town. Du Plessis examined the text as a source of information on Qing’s own language, probably one of the !Ui family of what are loosely called the Khoesan languages. By way of background, Hollmann made a synthesis of the results of archaeological research in eastern Lesotho. I wrote on the historical and biographical contexts in which the encounter between Qing and Orpen had taken place. Further filling out the context, Wintjes focussed on ideas and pictures of Bushman rock art that were circulating in Orpen’s world and that he probably would have been familiar with. Weintroub put together an intellectual history of the ways in which Orpen’s article has been used from 1874 to the present.
From the start we worked without an editor to co-ordinate what we were writing about. Though De Prada-Samper was the initiator of the project, for most of its duration he had to operate from Barcelona, and we all ended up largely going our own individual ways. The fact that we did not have a publisher to help set our direction meant that we had to find our own compass. Such cohesion as the project had was maintained through email contact, two workshops for available authors held in Johannesburg, and three fieldtrips, in which not all of us could participate, into the Maloti mountains. It says a lot for our sense of collegiality, and of our individual commitments to the intellectual direction that the project should take, that it held together as well as it did.
Rather as some of us hoped, from early on the project attracted a certain amount of controversy. In response to a somewhat provocative article which De Prada-Samper and I wrote for an archaeological magazine, announcing the launch of the project, three of our colleagues in rock art studies commented to the effect that we had not taken enough account of previous work in the field. Another archaeologist, based in the UK and commenting on our first field trip, felt that it was time ‘that South African-based researchers stopped treating Lesotho as if it did not exist or were merely a subordinate adjunct of South Africa’.
Work on writing our chapters remained rather desultory until, at the beginning of 2015, Justine Wintjes dropped a bombshell in our ranks by announcing that the Standard Bank Gallery was interested not only in publishing our proposed book but in mounting an exhibition on the ‘Qing and Orpen’ theme as well. Wintjes had previously worked well with Barbara Freemantle, director of the gallery, and her staff on two other exhibitions and publications: here was part of the payoff. Deadline for finishing chapters: end of June. With organization of the exhibition to follow: opening end of January 2016.
Galvanized by the gallery’s involvement in the project, we all managed to scramble the final versions of our chapters through to Freemantle by the deadline. By the middle of August three anonymous referees had reported back to her, all of them favourably. Polishing up the chapters followed, then it was time to turn our attention to the exhibition.
Working on the exhibition
The work of conceptualizing and curating the exhibition fell largely to the three Johannesburg-based authors, Wintjes, Weintroub and myself. For my own part, I had absolutely no experience in this field, but I knew that I wanted the exhibition to be primarily about the backstory and biography of Orpen’s text rather than about Bushman art and ethnography, which was how it had emerged in rock art studies. It was a relatively straightforward business for the three of us to draw up a set of guiding wall texts to go on display. There were 12 of them in all, each of 60 to 70 words, under three thematic headings ‘The words of Qing and Orpen’, ‘The making and unmaking of Bushman studies’, and ‘The entangled archive’. It was another matter to think of how to elaborate these texts into visual displays.
This was very much Wintjes’s department. She and Weintroub took primary responsibility for conceiving and mounting the displays, in the process turning two empty rooms in the Standard Bank Gallery in downtown Johannesburg into spaces for meaningful sets of objects, photographs, videos, wall texts and captions. (In the previous sentence, I was first going to write ‘a coherent set’, but my experience of helping to think out the displays over several months has indicated to me that no exhibition of this kind is ever entirely coherent.) As the exhibition took shape, a tension between the ‘historical’ direction taken by the words and the ‘ethnographic’ direction taken by the visuals seemed to grow. I took some assurance from Weintroub’s comment to me that this was ‘normal’ and inescapable. At the same time I couldn’t get over the irony that this visually illiterate historian was being credited as one of the co-curators of the exhibition.
Last-minute tensions
December and January saw a mad rush to get the displays finished in time for the opening. In these weeks, the differences between the disciplinary perspectives and the intellectual positions of the six authors for the first time began to cause tensions and occasional personal spats. One author was uncomfortable with having objects in the exhibition which might be read as indices of essentialist identities; another insisted that such objects inescapably carried such meanings. One insisted on the importance of historical contextualizing; another felt that contextualizing was not the only layer of meaning to be explained, and that the notion of ‘archive’ was to be distrusted. ‘If everything turns out to be “archive”, then “archive” ends up being nothing.’ One insisted that there were important differences between ‘San’, ‘Khoekhoen’ and ‘Khoisan’; others preferred to blur these categories. We all hoped that we had catered for these differences in the book by highlighting the point in the introduction that we were approaching the encounter between Qing and Orpen from different disciplinary perspectives.
A more immediately serious issue suddenly blew up with just three weeks to go before the opening of the exhibition. At this point the gallery staff noticed for the first time that the word ‘kaffir’ appeared in a number of places, though not particularly conspicuously, in the reproductions of Orpen’s text of 1874 which we planned to put on display. It also appeared in the preliminary design of the publicity poster, based on a photograph of the text, that was being prepared for the opening. Orpen had used the word in the sense of ‘Xhosa person’ or ‘Xhosa language’, which at the time was its common meaning. The word later became a deeply insulting term for black people in general, a meaning which it carries today. In the first few days of 2016, as we were working on the final stages of the exhibition, a public furore about racism had blown up across South Africa, following some crass statements about black people made by white individuals in social media. One of these individuals happened to be a senior official of the Standard Bank; soon afterwards he had been suspended by the bank. Initial reaction from intermediate officials in the bank was that Orpen’s text should be removed from the displays in the exhibition. The book had not yet been delivered by the printers; it was not clear if this instruction – for ‘instruction’ it was – would apply to the book as well.
It was a bad several days while Wintjes, Weintroub, Freemantle and I tried to decide on the best line of response. How to keep Orpen’s text in the exhibition without associating ourselves, or the bank, with its potentially offensive connotations. In the event the matter blew over when it was referred up the line to the bank’s CEO, Sim Tshabalala. To his credit, and our great relief, he decided that the bank did not want to be associated with censorship of what was a minor part of the exhibition, and the instruction was withdrawn. We redesigned the publicity poster, using another page of Orpen’s text.
A few days later the book – 500 copies of it – was delivered on schedule from the printers in Malaysia (with whom the gallery had done previous business), and the launch and the opening went ahead as planned. The guest speaker was Mbongiseni Buthelezi, formerly a Research Fellow in the APC, and now director of research in the Public Affairs Research Institute in Johannesburg. In his address he spoke about the context in which the exhibition and the book enter the public domain, referring on the one hand to the Rhodes Must Fall campaign and its call for the decolonizing of South African history-writing, and on the other to the Khoi-San revivalist movement and its demands for national recognition of Khoi-San land claims. On both counts he saw the exhibition, for all the tensions in it, as raising important questions about the production of knowledge, and as contributing to the ‘slow, painstaking process of undoing categories, vocabularies, ways of seeing and apprehending the world deeply embedded in academic disciplines’.
After the excitements had died down, I circulated the other authors in the Qing and Orpen project, telling them of my intention of writing this report for the APC, and asking them to contribute a brief paragraph in which they reflected on their own involvement in the project. The five contributions received follow below.
Field trip, June 2013. Crossing the Senqu river near Moorosi's Mountain, south-eastern Lesotho
José De Prada-Samper
I conceived the project as an in-depth exploration of Orpen’s article that had to be developed at different levels: textual, folkloristic, historical and archaeological. I am glad that, eventually, other levels were also included in the project. I felt that the article was an important source of ethnographic and historical information, but that since the late 1970s it had only attracted the interest of rock art scholars, who had focused on a limited part of the text at the expense of disregarding completely vast amounts of valuable information. Some of this is in all likelihood connected with rock art, even if in an indirect or ‘lateral’ way.
My initial idea would have required all members to contribute to the notes, and I suggested the points in the text that needed their input. This is something that never quite came off, and I think it is a pity, because it would have linked all the contributions to the central element of the project.
I also conceived the project as a kind of encyclopaedic companion to a reprint of Orpen’s article. This is the reason why for me the visual materials to be included should have been conceived as providing information (on animals, landscapes, objects etc.) that contributed to a better understanding of the text. In my opinion, Orpen’s article absolutely requires this kind of visual support. In our correspondence we discussed several times the issue of the visuals, but since at that moment publication still seemed quite far away we never discussed the matter in depth. When finally it was the moment to sort out the matter, it was no doubt impossible to undertake the kind of time-consuming work that my notion would have entailed.
In any case, I always visualized the book, at least in ideal terms, as resembling very much the typical, lavishly illustrated book about the Drakensberg, its landscape and its rock art, even if it was in many ways conceived as something quite different. The final product, while not being really what I had in mind, is still a far cry from the typical coffee-table rock art book. It has its limitations, yes, but it is still beautiful.
Jeremy Hollmann
I was invited to contribute to the Qing-Orpen project by José De Prada-Samper in 2011. My brief was to provide the archaeological context for the places that Qing and Orpen visited in the Lesotho highlands and the rock art which was discussed and copied. My first response was ‘Why me?’ After all, I pointed out, the archaeology of the Lesotho highlands had been extensively researched by archaeologist Peter Mitchell. Researcher David Lewis-Williams has been using the Qing-Orpen text for over 30 years to analyse southern African rock art. More recently, Sam Challis had done important research into the rock art of Sehonghong and Melikane. The response to my question was that De Prada-Samper was looking for a fresh contribution from somebody who was not directly involved in the production of this knowledge but who could rather assess and comment on it.
As it turned out, I was not able to exercise this critical, evaluative function as fully as I would have liked. My role was more confined. It focussed on providing a brief history of the archaeological excavations at these two important sites as well as at Pitsaneng, a third significant archaeological site. In addition, I felt it necessary to examine the now iconic rock art copies of Orpen within the context of the rest of the rock art at these sites. My chapter thus aimed to provide readers of the book with the necessary perspective to appreciate the time depth of hunter-gatherer archaeology and culture in the Lesotho highlands. It pointed out some of the motifs and paintings that deserve further research. I also briefly alluded to the seemingly intractable problem of conserving the rock art at these three sites.
I would have liked especially to discuss the matter of indigenous comments on rock art, as these lie at the heart of recent approaches to southern African rock art research. For example, some of the comments made on a copy of the Sehonghong paintings are possibly incorrect. (Dia!wain, a /Xam Bushman, identifies one of the copied rock art images as a woman.) How does one decide on the value of indigenous comment? So much significance rests on the few sentences that have been recorded.
Jill Weintroub
How have Orpen’s mediated recordings of Qing’s fragmentary folk stories come to carry so much certainty when they are applied to the interpretation of rock art?
How is it possible that so much certainty can prevail in the era of thinkers like Michel Foucault, Carlo Ginzburg, Greg Dening and others, who have highlighted the contingencies that govern how the past is narrated? Not to mention critiques of historiography inaugurated by Hobsbawm and Ranger’s invention of tradition argument, as well as David William Cohen’s interventions about the production of knowledge, among others.
Is the nature and operation of power in the ‘discovery’ of knowledge about the past sufficiently attended to in rock art interpretations drawing on Qing and Orpen? Can ethnographic analogue applied to rock art (albeit judiciously and conservatively) remain authoritative in the aftermath of the post-WW2 soul-searching (by James Clifford and others) in the discipline of anthropology that has exposed its questionable role in the creation and perpetuation of a pristine and primitive ‘other’ as an object of western knowledge?
Despite all these new and nuanced cautions, the Qing-Orpen text is too often deployed in rock art studies with limited historicizing and contextualizing. Despite emanating from an epoch of documented turbulence, violence and social upheaval, what Qing told Orpen is too often unproblematically conceived of as representative of a supposedly homogeneous ‘bushman’ culture commonly associated with rock paintings across southern Africa.
This was the thinking that underpinned the argument in my chapter in On the Trail of Qing and Orpen. I hoped to show that the text had historical contingency of its own – it was a text that had circulated in time and across space, and had been part of other orders of knowledge, in particular orders of knowledge related initially to German romanticism, and later to evolutionary ideas about the ‘survival of the fittest’, and to hierarchical racial knowledge.
Does this idea emerge in the exhibition? It was one of the motivations underpinning our juxtaposing the ‘bushman’ objects/artworks alongside our library of books, but I am not sure whether visitors are able to pick up this nuance.
Justine Wintjes
The exhibition was a challenging event to pull off, for all the reasons alluded to in the various comments in this report, and many more. In proposing to put together an exhibition that would accompany the book, I intended for the exhibition not simply to reflect, summarize or illustrate what is in the book, but to extend its contents into a different mode of exposition: one that opens up to the realms of the pictorial and the tactile.
I was the primary person who chose objects to put on display, with input from others in the group. I selected objects that in some way echoed the kinds of visual or material culture that were alluded to in Qing and Orpen’s text. Because nineteenth-century materials are fragile and rare, we were obviously constrained in our choices – for example we could not have the original manuscript on display because it is too light-sensitive, so we included high-end colour reproductions overseen by master print-maker Niall Bingham. We also placed into the displays rock art pieces removed from their original landscape context, digging stones collected as surface finds across the region, nineteenth-century paintings and sketches by Thomas Baines, George Angas and Andrew Anderson (among others) that make reference to Bushmen and rock art, historical objects of ‘Bushman’ manufacture such as a hunting kit found in a cave in the Natal Drakensberg in 1926, as well as more contemporary materials, including activist T-shirts, a wire-sculpture of a Lesotho taxi purchased at Melikane, photographs by Hollmann – breathtaking panoramic views of the landscapes as well as digitally enhanced photographs of particular rock art panels from Sehonghong and Melikane – and books from Wits libraries and our own personal collections.
These objects and artworks have been placed in provocative juxtapositions, and the wall texts are open-ended and throw questions back at the engaged and interested exhibition-goer. For example, the ‘Bushman’ objects from Wits Art Museum are displayed in a crowded fashion in a glass cabinet, echoing the storeroom storage context of the museum and old-fashioned ‘cabinet of curiosities’ modes of display. In the cabinet next to them is a sample of the many books that have been published in the wake of Qing and Orpen’s meeting. In this way, the objects, to some extent frozen in a physical state of preservation in a museum, begin to open up questions in relation to the process of production of scholarly knowledge, and the books, for their part, begin to be turned into objects of material culture. Rather than being an exhibition presenting a strong visual argument or proposition, On the Trail of Qing and Orpen is about the fleeting nature of the encounter between the two men, the ways in which we have to work with what we have and all the empty spaces in between, and the uncertainty and indeterminacy of any form of knowing.
John Wright
From the start of the project, I have seen it as being primarily about making a deeper examination than has previously been done of the life-history of Orpen’s text as it appeared in the Cape Monthly Magazine of 1874, and not about the study of ‘Bushman rock art’. From this perspective, the main issues have to do with the circumstances under which Orpen came to conceive of the article, and to research and write it; the historical and personal contexts in which Qing developed his knowledge of the stories that he told Orpen; the historical and personal contexts in which Orpen, originally an ‘outsider’ to South Africa, developed an interest in Bushman rock art and mythology; the ways in which Orpen’s article has circulated since 1874; and what impact it has had in the 142 years since its publication on ways of seeing nineteenth-century Bushmen among non-Bushmen and also among Bushman descendants.
Most of the texts in the various chapters of the book are also aligned in this direction: they serve to point readers away from seeing it as yet another ‘rock art’ book, or at the very least, encourage them to see the art in a wider than usual context. To my (admittedly untrained) eye, though, the visual impact of the plentiful and beautiful illustrations in the book, together with the ‘coffee-table’ quality of its production (this is not a criticism!), serve to make it into an aesthetic object in which our arguments that Bushmen, and ways of seeing Bushmen, had histories gets rather smothered. Rock art once again emerges as a dominant sign in an ethnically conceived Bushmanness. There is a clear tension in the book between these contrary pulls.
For me, this tension emerges even more strongly in the exhibition. Though reproductions of Orpen’s text get a striking visual showing, as do other published works with a ‘Bushman’ theme, the powerful visual displays of art and cultural objects commonly and uncritically attributed to Bushmen, together with big (and beautiful) images of landscapes, shout much louder than the rather muted historical voices in the captions and wall texts. I guess this is inevitable in any exhibition of this kind. But I would like to think further with colleagues about how to capture visual images for History rather than ethnicized Culture.