African art rocks the world at digital library

An upside-down rock painting of rain animals — an indication of death in San culture — is among the African treasures listed on the recently launched World Digital Library.

For the San, death was both literal and metaphoric. It involved a shaman’s passage to the spirit world that was believed to exist behind the rock’s surface.

The painting is from the eastern Free State of South Africa, which is noted for its depictions of upside-down antelope in unusual contexts.

An image of the painting is part of the Woodhouse Rock Art Collection of the Department of Library Services at the University of Pretoria.

The collection has more than 23,000 slides, maps, and tracings from rock art sites in South Africa.

The San are hunter-gatherers.

They lived throughout Southern and East Africa for thousands of years before they were displaced by African tribes and European settlers.

They continue to live in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia.

The digital library features unique cultural materials — including manuscripts, maps, rare books, films, sound recordings, prints and photographs — collected from libraries and archives around the world.

The library also has an 1889 map of the Great Trading Routes of the Sahara used by French explorer Edouard Blanc.

The map reflects the growing priority that Europeans gave to land-based trade during the 19th-century imperial Scramble for Africa.

In articles about his work, Blanc stressed the importance of identifying “natural” geographic routes in Africa. This map is hosted by the Library of Congress.

The website was launched by Unesco and 32 partner institutions recently.

It offers unrestricted access, free of charge, to these materials.

The launch was at Unesco headquarters and was co-hosted by director-general Koichiro Matsuura and US Librarian of Congress James H. Billington during a semi-annual meeting of Unesco’s executive board.