From HANS KRUUK
The Masai cave painting illustrating Roger Lewin’s ‘Stone Age Psychedelia’
(8 June) is to be found in the Serengeti, Tanzania (not Kenya), and the
people who made it would have thought little of the suggestion that shamanism
or some other religious or magic motivation was behind it.
In the sixties I photographed many of the paintings, and when I talked
to the people who were actually drawing and painting in that same or nearby
rock shelters, I was told that they used these rock faces to illustrate
their stories and discussions, like a blackboard. This happens especially
during the olpul, the all-male preparation for a raid or battle, when the
warriors eat meat for days on end, and boast of their prowess, their cattle,
their killing of lions or elephants.
The patterns which identify clans and age-groups on the shields are
displayed, cattle are drawn with huge humps, horns and penises (‘My bull
is bigger than any’), lions are shown surrounded, white dots on an elephant
demonstrate where to spear it. Different species of wild game are depicted
with a frequency that appears to be related to the ecological significance
of such animals for the Masai. Patterns of lines and dots punctuate stories
of battles, or of games (eg bao, the board game), or they are mere doodles.
Such a simple, prosaic explanation might also account for many rock drawings
elsewhere; no magic is required.
Hans Kruuk Aboyne Aberdeenshire
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