The White Lady
– neither a lady, nor white
100 years later the White Lady may have faded, but is still famous
The Brandberg is an open-air art gallery with more than 43 000 individual rock paintings. But it was a single painting that made the mountain famous and kindled a myth that refused to die for many decades. Willie Olivier recently followed in the footsteps of the man who discovered the famous painting to tell the 100-year old story and take fresh photographs.
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n the 4th of January 1918 a party consisting of surveyor Reinhard Maack, high school teacher Professor Ernst Gries and Georg Schulz, was descending through the Tsisab Ravine after they had made the first recorded ascent of Königstein, the highest peak on the Brandberg and in Namibia, two days earlier. Despite being overcome by exhaustion, hunger and thirst, Maack decided to look for rock paintings in the lower reaches of the Tsisab, while his two companions continued down the ravine. When he decided to rest in the shade of an overhang, now known as Maack’s Shelter, he was taken by total surprise at what he saw – a frieze that would not only become world-famous, but also the subject of much controversy. Maack carried a pencil and note book with him and wrote down: “I decided to sketch only the remarkable middle group and some particularly striking figures in my log book, as well as note the main colours and mark their relationship to each other by means of simple symbols so that I could later reconstruct…” He was of the view that the central figure of the frieze had distinctly Mediterranean characteristics, and he had no doubt that it was male. Enter the French priest and pre-historian, Abbé Henri Breuil, who at the time was considered an authority on cave art in Europe. Whilst attending the joint British-South African Congress for the Advancement of Science at the University of Johannesburg in 1929, Breuil saw copies of Maack’s drawings. He immediately concluded that the central figure depicted a young white female of Mediterranean origin and attributed the painting to foreign explorers that had ventured into Africa. It was during Breuil’s second visit to South Africa in 1942 that he came across photos taken by archaeologist Dr Ernst Schertz ten years earlier. His secretary and assistant, Mary Boyle, immediately attributed Mediterranean origins to the central figure, now dubbed the White Lady, comparing it to the female figures in the bull leaping fresco in Knossos, Crete. Although Breuil travelled extensively to rock art sites in several southern African countries during his earlier visits it was not until 1947 that he and Mary Boyle managed to visit Maack’s Shelter. The Abbé delivered a paper – The White Lady of the Brandberg, South-West Africa, her companions and her guards – in his presidential address to the South African Archaeological Association in 1948. And with that address the myth of the White Lady was born – a mysterious figure of unexplained origin. Breuil’s first volume of The Rock Paintings of Southern Africa was published in 1955 under the title The White Lady of the Brandberg. His controversial and romanticised interpretation of the central figure, the peopling of southern Africa and the age of the paintings did not go unchallenged, however, and was dismissed by several archaeologists.
TRAVEL NEWS NAMIBIA SPRING 2018
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