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Since its institution in 1999, the ‡Khomani CPAMC [Communal Property Association Management Committee] has not been able to effectively manage the land for which they are responsible. Issues regarding financial management have been particularly challenging for the CPAMC. By early 2000, a formal audit of the ‡Khomani finances was called for by the DLA [Department of Land Affairs]. This revealed improper financial dealings in excess of R150 000, for which the CPAMC could not account.
The DG [Director General] of the DLA declared that lack of capacity and skills was the main contributing factor given that the financial manager at the time only had schooling up to standard four (approximately age 9 or 10) (South African Human Rights Commission 2004:14). (Grant, 2011:222)
The above highlights the need for capacity building, training and support for all CPAs and community trust committees. Education levels in Platfontein are higher than those in the Kalahari; nevertheless, language proficiency is a concern. Many of the community members lack the ability to converse fluently in Afrikaans.66 In an interview, Khwe community leader, Zeka Shiwarra stressed that the Platfontein community needs capacity building in order to hone the skills necessary to adequately support themselves. He expressed his discontent over a comment made by a former Northern Cape Premier that “Platfontein is not an island for the government to come and drop things here” (cited by Shiwarra, interview, July 2012).
According to Shiwarra this was an affront to the community since it was not their intention to ask alms of the government but for the government to assist them to become self-sufficient.
Related to this is the fact that communities are often identified by the state as custodians of a heritage site; however, they are expected to take on this role with little or no guidance, training or education concerning the significance of that heritage and their responsibilities toward it. As described in Chapter Three, Section 5(4) of the National Heritage Resources Act (NHRA, 1999) establishes the rights of communities over heritage resources, their right to be consulted on heritage matters and to be involved in the management of heritage sites;
however, the role of guiding and educating custodians is unoccupied, either by the state or community leaders. Furthermore, while the encouragement of custodianship proves
66 Women in the community are the least proficient in Afrikaans. Some elderly people, not fluent in Afrikaans, English or any other indigenous South African language, are similarly disadvantaged. Zeka Shiwarra noted,
“even now we have this problem with the ID [Identity Document] books… the old people go to the offices and they are given forms and told to have their children help them to fill out the forms but their children also are confused about certain things in the form” (Interview, July 2012).
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successful with those communities taking an active interest in heritage it is doubtful that such legislation is able to enforce obligations onto select groups or the public to protect sites.
Platfontein community leaders make periodic use of the auditorium at Wildebeest Kuil for meetings. Few other community events take place at the site. Events held on site, such as the opening of the military exhibition, are predominantly attended by community leadership.
Morris alluded to the fact that the site may be one of elites, further purporting former notions of the museum as authoritative space (Fieldnotes, July 2010). Nevertheless, it is logistically easier to hold events such as Heritage Day celebrations at the Platfontein settlement.
Typically these events are held at the school or outside the radio station—both of which are central locations to which the community have ease of access.
The above situation is unlike that at rock art sites in Central Mozambique’s Vumba Mountains and KwaZulu-Natal’s Drakensberg Mountains, for example, which are actively used by local communities for monitored ritual practices such as rain-making, divining and healing. Some of these communities include mixed-race San descendants as well as those who share no direct relation to the San. Their ceremonies are rooted in San cosmology and their ritualistic use of sites reflects traditional continuity with the makers of the rock art (Jopela 2010; Francis 2007; Ndlovu 2005; Sætersdal 2004). This creates a different set of challenges and concerns to those at Wildebeest Kuil. Traditional practitioners in Platfontein seem not to use rock art as part of their rituals. In discussion with traditional practitioners from the Khwe side of the community concerning significant elements of their practice, it was noted that predominantly plant-based potions and medicines as well as methods such as mirror gazing for divination are used (Fieldnotes, June 2014). Shiwarra noted that to his knowledge traditional practitioners in the community did not use rock art—at Wildebeest Kuil or elsewhere—for the purposes of their craft (Interview, June 2014). In consideration of its current challenges, it is perhaps fortunate that Wildebeest Kuil does not additionally suffer the complications of heritage preservation in opposition to continued ceremonial use.
The practice of rock engraving does not form part of !Xun and Khwe traditional practice, instead the community has a strong tradition of dance (and story-telling which often occurs through dance). The community’s connection to the engravings is in part due to their ownership of the land and a sense of kinship with the ancient engravers stemming from a
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deemed greater link between all San peoples. A prevailing concern has been the increased incidents of on-site vandalism (rising steadily between 2010 and 2012). Much of this vandalism has been caused by children from Platfontein who frequent the site. A particular group of children are believed to roam the area rather than attend school (Wilson & Ndebele, interview, March 2011). Wilson and Ndebele cite hunger and boredom as the primary reasons these children frequent the site. Wildebeest Kuil has become a site for hunting, scavenging and playing. As a result the bins outside the centre are sometimes found toppled over. The nearby rest-stop67 across the road has become another frequented site. When I passed by in September 2012 I found the place overrun with litter. This new ‘dumpsite’, with its discarded food containers, attracts hungry children from the settlement.
Many of the newly replaced station boards at Wildebeest Kuil have been vandalised; there are puncture holes from hurled stones, scratches and graffiti. After the 2010 fire that destroyed the boardwalk (discussed later in the chapter) the guides found graffiti on rocks at the engraving site; the now opened area allows for easier access to the engravings. Moreover, the children who frequent the site have taken to using a newly made bicycle route to make their fires. Between May and June of 2012, two of the tourism centre’s windows had been shattered; moreover, vandalism increased during school vacations (Wilson & Ndebele, interview, June 2012). Some instances of vandalism are discovered only when Wilson or Ndebele take visitors onto the site. Ndebele noted that he had found damaged and torn down station boards while taking visitors on a guided tour. He explained that when this happened he did not hide the fact of vandalism from visitors (ibid).
With the arrival of a renter at the cottage on the grounds of the servitude there was a considerable decrease in vandalism on the site. This is due to the renter’s two dogs that roam the servitude in the evenings. Wilson remarked that the children are afraid of the dogs and have stopped playing nearby (Interview, June 2013). Prior to this, an on-going concern had been the puncturing of holes in the pipe leading from the water pump to the visitor’s centre.
In the summertime children from the settlement would create a make-shift sprinkler out of the punctured pipe to use in water games (Fieldnotes, July 2010; June 2011; September 2012).
Older women have also been seen drinking from the punctured holes at the water pump and
67 This is a small parking area adjacent to the road, found on long stretches of motorway for road users to safely pull over during periods of rest.
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two were noted as having said that a tap should be placed there for their convenience (Fieldnotes, September 2012). A dam adjacent to the water pump and independent of the tourism centre had been used as a swimming pool by children from the community as well as a place for washing clothes during times that the settlement’s water supply had been cut off.
The draining of the dam in 2012 has meant that this is no longer an attraction for the children
“who would previously swim there and then move on to the site to make mischief” (Morris, email, 9 April 2013). In addition to these concerns, the community frequent the site during the winter months to forage for firewood thus contributing to a marred aesthetic. Many households in Platfontein rely on outside fires for the cooking of meals. During winter these fires burn for longer periods of time providing warmth against plummeting temperatures, with an increasing need for fuel-wood the community must search further away from the settlement, a fact which leads them to Wildebeest Kuil (Fieldnotes, September 2012).
In a presentation titled “On-going chapters at Wildebeest Kuil 2007–2011: Trauma and Change” shared with a research cohort from the Centre for Communication, Media and Society on 17th June 2011, Morris, stated that the McGregor Museum had spent over R150 000 in replacing stolen cables and the insurance company subsequently refused to cover claims for future cable theft on the property (Fieldnotes, June 2011). Thereafter, the museum announced that it no longer had the budget to repeatedly make repairs on the property; in addition, damages outside of the building are no longer covered by insurance (Morris, email, 9 April 2013). Even so, Morris notes “we somehow manage to get the things fixed”; this includes “repairing frequent lightning damage to the pump and electrical infrastructure” (ibid). Wilson, Ndebele and Morris believe that the cable theft was not committed by members of the Platfontein community but rather by outsiders skilled in such extraction (Fieldnotes, June 2011; September 2012).
In his presentation, Morris described the damage done to the site by a mentally challenged individual from Platfontein. This individual frequently starts fires in the fields surrounding Wildebeest Kuil as well as along the R31. He creates ‘installations’ on the wire fences along the roadside with refuse he collects lying nearby and sometimes sets fire to these creations.
While Morris called these ‘installations’, passers-by would not be blamed for believing the sight to be windswept refuse caught in the fence. While many of these activities have not directly involved Wildebeest Kuil, on one occasion, having gotten hold of tins of old and ill-
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stored paint, the individual proceeded to paint the rusty vehicle that forms part of Wildebeest Kuil’s Station Two. The station’s newly replaced information board was also paint-damaged while another station board was removed altogether (Fieldnotes, June 2011).
Vandalism on the site has also been perpetrated by members of the public. Before guides were employed at Wildebeest Kuil, visitors would be given an audio device and would listen to a narration put together by archaeologists Morris and Geoff Blundell (2004) as they explored the site. The audio tours were stopped when it was found that some of the rocks were vandalised and some visitors had tampered with the recordings and taped their own voices over the narration.68 The vandalism of rock art sites is a global concern. In March of 2011, cases of vandalism—scratches made into the rock—were found on Australia’s Burrup and nearby areas (Laurie, 2011). Jane Balme of the Centre for Rock Art Studies at the University of Western Australia noted that “[v]andalism and dust from busy roads are now two of the biggest threats to rock art in the north of the state”; furthermore it was noted that increased human traffic in remote parts of the Pilbara and Kimberley (Australia) areas proved a major threat to rock art (cited in Laurie, 2011). Rangers installed on the site and cultural programmes set up to educate people about the significance and heritage value of the art were possible solutions proposed (Laurie, 2011). Vandalism of heritage resources and accompanying conciliatory attitudes occur in both the developed and developing world thus highlighting that poverty and a lack of development are not always the primary causes of apathy toward heritage and other social resources.
While rock paintings and engravings differ in style and method of creation (cf. Lewis- Williams, 1983) some common challenges to rock art sites include environmental damage and natural disasters (see discussion of a fire at Wildebeest Kuil later in the chapter), human traffic, uninformed use of sites, pollution, and vandalism. Environmental damage is a factor that is almost impossible to control and unless a site is well maintained and ardently supervised natural disasters may prove fatal. Human traffic—walking over rock engravings or touching paintings and engravings on the rock surface—can cause accelerated weathering of the art and surrounds. The uninformed use of sites poses another challenge. Visitors have been known to throw liquids on rock paintings or trace the grooves of engravings with chalk
68 In addition, some visitors complained that they had questions that could not be answered by the recording and the cost of batteries for the recorders also proved an excessive expense.
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in order to enhance the image for their photography. Another concern is pollution which mars the aesthetic of sites and expresses a disrespect of the heritage on offer, depreciating the experience for the next visitor. Vandalism, as discussed above, is an enormous concern.
In an article titled “Abusing the Bushmen’s canvas” (Cordes, 2012), rock art enthusiast Victor Briggs described his experience of vandalised rock art shelters over the forty-year period of his documenting the art at sites around South Africa. Briggs described an occasion in 2002 in the Cedarville area of KwaZulu-Natal where a school teacher scrawled her name and the names of her accompanying students in a rock art shelter. On a different occasion, a student scratched his name into the cave wall of a rock art shelter in the Cathcart area while Briggs gave a talk on the need to protect rock art. In the same year, Briggs had accompanied an academic to a rock art shelter. He discovered years later that the man had “surreptitiously scrawled his name below a ledge” (Cordes, 2012:np).
In other instances, caves and shelters have been used by shepherds for sheep shearing and/or as pens for livestock. Resident in-dwellers have splattered animal dung onto the walls “to dry before using it as fuel” (ibid) or have hung meat to dry along the walls; animal oils, fat and blood then seep into the rock causing accelerated deterioration of the rock paintings (cf.
Jopela 2010; Ndlovu 2005). According to Briggs, shelters in the former Transkei are used by certain Xhosa groups as initiation sites and are often “visited by igqirhas (traditional healers) who chip the red ochre from Bushmen paintings for use in traditional medicine” (Cordes, 2012:np). This practise is similarly described by Michael Francis (2007) and noted in Chapter Three. Another cause of accelerated deterioration of rock art is the removal of art from caves and shelters. While the removal of art has played a role in its preservation, during the professional removal of the famed Linton Stone, for example, considerable damage was inflicted on the remaining rock art in the shelter. Briggs believes that there is no longer need for the removal of rock art for preservation purposes. Moreover, he notes that amateur removals have proven extremely damaging to sites; examples of which can be found in the Bolo, Cathcart and Maclear districts in the Eastern Cape (Cordes, 2012).
The destruction of rock art (as the manifestation of an ignorant disregard or a malicious and deliberate act) results in the eventual loss of a non-renewable heritage resource. While graffiti
“could be respected as historical sources in their own right” (Cordes, 2012:np; cf. Parkington,
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Morris & Rusch 2008), such graffiti at rock art sites “almost always exists at the expense of the Bushman’s canvas” (Cordes, 2012:np). It is thus the responsibility of landowners and community authorities to protect the art; by controlling access to sites as well as monitoring on-site activities (cf. Smith 2006; Ndlovu 2005; Blundell 1996). While museums today “go to great trouble to reconfigure the environmental and social context from which the exhibits they display have been taken” (Parkington et al. 2008:123); there is little substitute for viewing the rock art in its natural environment. This notwithstanding, the vulnerability of the art begs the question: “where and under what circumstances to allow or even encourage people to visit sites of great historical significance” (ibid)?
The current widespread use of technological devices such as geo-positioning systems, archives and data bases offers “precise information on the location of vulnerable heritage treasures”; possibly putting these sites in danger whether from graffitists or collectors (Parkington et al. 2008:123). As John Parkington, Morris and Neil Rusch note, “[n]othing, not good legislation, not high fences, not professional secrecy, can prevent the maliciously motivated visitor” (2008:124). The imperative is thus affirmed to educate communities to protect sites of importance in their locales (ibid). This is consistent with the custodianship described in the NHRA (1999) in which heritage may be those aspects of culture and landscape (both tangible and intangible) under the protection of a community and passed on to future generations serving the need for a sense of identity and belonging (cf. chapters Three and Six). Tourism will also benefit local community members employed at the site and may convey additional benefits to the larger community (cf. Chapter Five). While noting that it is too early to judge, Parkington et al. believe that “people who benefit financially from the preservation of rock paintings or engravings, will not deface, nor, hopefully, countenance the defacement of the images under their custodianship” (2008:124). While the Platfontein leadership acknowledge that the task of educating their community concerning the significance of the rock engraving site at Wildebeest Kuil falls to them, they have not been active in this role. It is uncertain whether or not they have the capacity to do so. There is no partnership yet in place between themselves and the museum with the objective to facilitate community education about the significance of the site.
In October 2010 a fire broke out at Wildebeest Kuil, destroying a small number of the rock engravings and R35 000 worth of renovations (funded by the Northern Cape Department of
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Tourism) two days after its completion (Wilson & Ndebele, interview, March 2011). Young children from the Platfontein settlement had made a small fire in the nearby veldt in order to roast a bird they had caught. The fire was taken up by the wind and quickly spread across the dry grassland. Fires occurring naturally in the veldt are not uncommon and the risk of fire damage is a concern of rock art sites around the world. In many cases it is nearly impossible for vast areas and rocky outcrops to be under constant vigilance. Nevertheless, the new boardwalk was not treated against fire. A month earlier a workshop attendee had seen the building in progress and asked what measures were in place in case of a fire. It was believed that the pathways around the stations would act as fire breaks and no other measures were activated (ibid). As described earlier in the chapter, children from the settlement have taken to making fires in these pathways. Plans for a new boardwalk were halted by internal staff cuts at the McGregor and pending approval by the South African Heritage Resource Agency (SAHRA) (Morris, email, 9 April 2013). In April 2014 a new wooden boardwalk (treated with a fire-resistant compound) was erected.
Fires are a regular sight on the plains in this area. On a trip to Platfontein in June 2011, I witnessed two separate fires supervised by children. No adults were present and the children were actively feeding the fires. The first was a fire in the veldt about 200 metres from the settlement’s main road. Three young children were feeding a black-smoked fire with what looked like old furniture and other refuse from the surrounding area. The second fire sighting was while driving on the outskirts of the settlement. My colleagues and I came across a small group of children, who looked no more than 10 years of age. They were gathering refuse to feed a fast growing, high-flamed fire. Fires such as these could be easily swept up by a gust of wind and—fuelled by the surrounding overrun dry grass and combustible refuse—cause devastation in the settlement. This highlights the need for contingencies against fire to be incorporated into any future boardwalk construction at Wildebeest Kuil and for educational programmes to be held within the community.
Fires, theft, and vandalism prompted talks toward the construction of an electrified fence between Wildebeest Kuil and the settlement at Platfontein (Fieldnotes, September, 2010).
Community leaders were in favour of this idea; however, due to the great cost and little guarantee that the fencing would not be stolen, no attempts have been made to execute this plan. Fencing that marked off the servitude along with fencing set up to keep in game had