On The Trail of Qing and Orpen Jose M Prada-Samper, Menan du Plessis Jeremy Hollmann

On The Trail of Qing and Orpen 

Author: Jose M Prada-Samper, Menan du Plessis Jeremy Hollmann Jill Weintroub Justin Wintjes John Wright

Publisher: Standard Bank of South Africa

Edition: First 2016 

ISBN: 978-0-620-66845-1

Language: English  

Condition: Excellent. Clean copy with no marking and tight binding 

Binding: Softcover        

Pages: 210. Print with images  

Additional Information

In December 1873, a young Bushman named Qing served as a guide for several days to a force of police and levies from the Cape Colony that was making its way up the Senqu (Orange) river in the heart of the Maluti mountains in what is now Lesotho. The force was under the overall command of Inspector James Grant; in charge of the levies was Joseph Orpen, who had recently been appointed as British Resident in Nomansland (part of what is now East Griqualand).

The force was one of several parties of armed men that had been sent out from Natal and the Cape to track down and capture Langalibalele kaMthimkhulu. He was chief of a group of Hlubi in Natal who had fallen foul of the colonial authorities and had fled across the Drakensberg or uKhahlamba mountains to seek refuge in the newly annexed British colony of Basutoland.

The encounter that took place between Qing and Orpen on this occasion has become famous in the annals of southern African rock art studies (though not, it seems, elsewhere in our intellectual history). In the course of their march through the broken country of the Senqu valley, Qing showed Orpen the large and richly painted rock shelters now known as Melikane (Medikane) Shelter and Sehonghong Shelter, together with a third smaller one, possibly the one known as Pitsaneng Shelter.

For reasons that still need to be fully established, Orpen was interested enough to draw copies of some of the paintings, and to record in some detail what Qing told him through interpreters about their meanings and how they related to myths recounted among surviving communities of Bushmen in the Malutis. At the end of the expedition, after his return to his headquarters at Gatberg near what is now Ugie village (at the foot of the Drakensberg in the Eastern Cape), Orpen seems to have wasted no time in writing up an account of what he had heard from Qing. He sent it off, together with copies of certain of the paintings, to Cape Town for publication in the Cape Monthly Magazine (CMM), the colony's leading intellectual journal.

The editor, John Noble, sent it for perusal to Dr Wilhelm Bleek, who had become well known in the city for his researches into the languages, customs and beliefs of the |xam Bushmen of the northern Cape. Orpen's article, with comments on it by Bleek, and illustrated with images of selected paintings, was published in the CMM in July 1874 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 1970s, Orpen's article has become a canonical text. It is the only known source that records in some detail comments on the meanings of Bushman paintings given by a person who had an 'insider's' knowledge of the subject.

Over the years, the article has been used over and over again alongside texts recorded from |xam informants by Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law,Lucy Lloyd, in the 1870s and '80s, and statements made by informants among Kalahari Bushman communities recorded by academic researchers since the 1950s, to shed light on the meanings carried by the rock art, not only of the Malutis, but of southern Africa as a whole.

Orpen's article has been subjected to numerous detailed readings, but it has so far been given little by way of the intensive critical scrutiny and historical contextualising that it needs if its strengths and limitations as an archival source are to be fully realised. Most scholars have tended to take it at face value, without giving much attention to the particular circumstances in which it was produced and which shaped the meanings which they see it as carrying.

The result is that the article is frequently raided for factual information on Bushman art and mythology in general, with little appreciation of the extent to which its content may be specific to time and place. We know what Orpen wrote, and therefore something of what Qing told him, but very little about why Orpen wrote as he did. By the same token, we know nothing of what he left out and why, virtually nothing about why Qing spoke as he did, and nothing about what he failed to tell Orpen, and why. Scholars like Pieter Jolly have gone some way towards raising these issues, and they now need specialised study from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

This is where QOP comes in - the recently established 'Qing and Orpen Project'. It was,in the first instance,the brainchild of José M de Prada-Samper, who was until recently a research fellow in the Centre for Curating the Archive at the University of Cape Town, and is currently attached to the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He did postgraduate studies at Columbia University in English and comparative literature, a path which eventually led him into the field of folkloristics.

For some years,he has been researching the |xam texts recorded by Bleek and Lloyd, and has published in this field. Towards the end of 2010, he turned his attention to the Orpen article, which had previously been studied primarily by scholars of rock art. He soon came to feel that the article needed incisive textual deconstruction and extensive annotating if it was to become more readily accessible to a wider readership. He also learnt that the published text differed in a number of small but significant respects from the text which Orpen originally submitted.

From this grew his idea of republishing Orpen's text with a detailed commentary. In the course of 2011, as De Prada consulted with other scholars, this idea expanded into the notion of producing a full-length book of critical studies, written by several authors, and bringing different disciplinary perspectives to bear on the text.

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