This is a typical site for one of the great artistic heritages of Africa, its rock paintings. They tend to be found in caves or under overhangs in places where there is a view and where the people who painted them felt safe from attack.
This is the Markwe Caves in what is now Zimbabwe which we visited in 1967. They contain....
....some spectacular images - humans, animals and strange, squiggly lines - crowded layer upon layer. The paintings are often old - some Zimbabwe ones may date back some 20,000 years.
A few of the small kopjes scattered across the 4,000 acres of the land owned by Bernard Mizeki College, the school where we taught, had their rock paintings.
We saw rock paintings again during our visit to Namibia in 2009, when we were staying at Erongo Wilderness Lodge. One of their expeditions was to this kopje where Paula's Cave contains....
....some much less crowded but equally vivid scenes. These are hunters chasing an antelope while....
....from the way they are holding hands this may be a group dancing. Look carefully: they appear to be in two rows, perhaps facing each other and so, perhaps, men and women.
Many of the images are difficult to interpret. At first sight these may be a troop of baboons but there are certain human-like characteristics which suggest they may be humans dressed as baboons, perhaps as part of the dancing.
Namibia has some of the oldest of Africa's ock art, dating back almost 30,000 years. This type of painting is often ascribed to the hunter-gatherer 'bushmen' who inhabited eastern and southern Africa before the Bantu people arrived from western Africa bringing iron and cattle.
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