HARDING1973-005 - rock art depiction
Brandberg rock-painting bullroarer depiction
Namibia - Brandberg - Damaraland - Southern Africa
Sacred / spirit
Source term: depicted bull-roarer
In a frieze painted above and to the right of the famous "White Lady" of the Brandberg massif in western Namibia, a running, white-painted figure carries a bull-roarer in its hand. Abbé Henri Breuil, who copied the panels in the 1950s, called this figure the "Baboon-man" for the tail and snout that he judged were late additions to an originally human body. J. R. Harding, surveying the instrument's history in 1973, pointed to a second bull-roarer Breuil had found on a boulder some distance from the White Lady, carried by one of three men walking in single file, each wearing a helmet crowned by an enormous ostrich plume. Harding read the "dressed-up" character of both groups as a sign that the instrument was being used ceremonially, and set the Baboon-man beside Stow's account of the southern San "Baboon dance," in which dancers costumed themselves as the animal.
"It is carried," says Breuil, "by one of three men walking in single file, each one wearing a helmet crowned by an enormous ostrich plume."
Harding 1973:41 (quoting Breuil, The White Lady of the Brandberg, 1955)
- Object
- A bull-roarer painted in the hand of a running figure, with a second on a nearby boulder.
- Map confidence
- medium - representative coordinate for named people, place, site, or region in Harding
- Source location
Page references
p. 41; cover illustration