Stone galleries of the ancients: The |Xam, silenced artists of Agter Pakhuis

In a part of the northern Cederberg known as the Agter Pakhuis, a remote cottage stands at the foot of black-and-gold sandstone cliffs. A stream runs nearby and supplies its water. The cottage is called Perdehoek, for no reason I could discover. Further along the mountain is another, called Hoek Sonder Koffie, its name equally mysterious.

Their isolation suggests the cottages may once have housed stock minders, men tasked with protecting sheep or goats from leopards.

Today they’re comfortably furnished with the cast-offs of local farm houses that no longer have room for dark rosewood-veneer dressers, battered kitchen tables, 1930s Art Deco couches and melamine sideboards.

There’s electricity, hot water and a stoep with a firepit. Here you can sit with a glass in hand and watch the Milky Way emerge as the sun sinks behind the crags to the west.

But their attraction is not simply solitude, or the absence of a cellphone signal. The mountains rising behind the scree slopes on which they stand form part of what may be the greatest open-air art gallery in the world.

For thousands of years, the people who lived in the Cederberg, in the semi-desert to the east and along the coastal plain to the west, painted on the sandstone walls. They’re variously described as |Xam, San and Khoekhoen, names that refer to different peoples and histories rather than a single culture. What they left behind are enigmatic and often startlingly beautiful images: animals, people, processions, hunts, scenes and patterns whose meanings remain elusive.

The painters worked with natural pigments. Reds and yellows came largely from ochres, blacks from substances that included manganese oxides and whites from kaolin and other pale minerals. These pigments were ground and mixed with binding agents that may have included animal fat, blood, plant sap or other organic substances, according to recipes we can no longer reconstruct with certainty.

The age of the paintings remains a matter of debate and they were almost certainly made across immense spans of time.

Something of that duration can be sensed in the shelters themselves. On otherwise rough sandstone, the most frequently used handholds and footholds have been polished to a veneer-like sheen by generations of human touch. How many hands and how many years does it take to wear stone smooth?

The history of the artists and their descendants is not a happy one. Across the world, hunter-gatherer societies have been displaced, shattered or absorbed by more settled and heavily armed peoples.

In the Cederberg, bows and spears, even when tipped with deadly poison, could not match Dutch and later British firearms. The |Xam communities of the region were destroyed or dispersed and the |Xam language eventually fell silent.

What remains of it survives in thousands of pages of stories, testimonies and conversations recorded during the 19th century and preserved in the Bleek and Lloyd Archive at the University of Cape Town.

The archive offers an extraordinary, if partial, way of hearing the voices of people whose paintings still inhabit these mountains.

All the images above and many more can be reached within roughly a 20-minute walk or drive from Perdehoek (hundreds of thousands more are scattered along the entire Cederberg chain). They’re remarkably close, yet surprisingly difficult to find among the folds and ledges of the sandstone. Without a knowledgeable guide, you could pass within metres of them and never know they were there. DM

Cottages in the area can be booked at travellersrest.co.za