National Museum keeps rock art alive

The National Museum in Gaborone held a full month exhibition of the four countries that have been endowed with magnificent rock art or drawings.

These countries are South Africa, Botswana, Mozambique and Mexico, which are working on preserving the rock art for tourism purposes and posterity. Makgabeng Train Shelter at Limpopo, South Africa, showed historical events and rituals associated with rites of passage often represented in the coarsely applied, predominantly white pigment.  The rock art depicts the tradition of the Bantu speaking farmers who practised both arable and pastoral farming.

Kwa Bhaliwe Site in the Eastern Cape has drawings of springbok whereby white and brown pigments known as earth colours are used.  Eland paintings are frequently detailed to reveal the hairline brush strokes that portray the tuft of hairs on the forelock of its head, the eye, nostrils and other defined features of the animal.  Still in South Africa, there is Game Pass Shelter in Kwa-Zulu Natal at Unkhahlamba where a hill's layers are drawn or painted with as many animals as possible making a mark or pattern that reduces with the size of the hill.  The Rosseta stone is a magnificent panel of dying enland associated and transformed human beings helped crack the code to the understanding of San rock art as full of religious and shamanistic symbols.  The paintings show the life of the ancient people at the time, illustrating how they made animals part of their lives. One of the beautiful paintings is the Drieskops Enland Site where a river engraved site on a rock pavement that is the river-bed that floods seasonally, and comprises mostly geometric forms with only a few animal depictions.  The place used to be a ritual arena for the performance of rites of passage or rainmaking.  There is a symbol marked in the rock on the centre of the riverine.

Editor's Comment
Time to end informal sector fronting

The Francistown Umbrella Informal Sector chairperson, David Mbulawa, has highlighted this growing concern, revealing that many local traders are using their licences to facilitate the entry of foreign goods into the market at a fee.Fronting undermines the very fabric of our local economy. It allows foreign traders to exploit the system designed to benefit Batswana, using local licences to cross borders and sell goods at prices intended for local...

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