A four-decade love affair with endangered ancient African rock art

AFRICA’S ANCIENT rock art gives us a fascinating glimpse into the world our ancestors lived in almost 100,000 years ago.

I’ve been to a few ancient African rock art sites like on Mfangano island in Lake Victoria and on the shores of Lake Turkana called Lokori which in Turkana means “place of giraffes.” In this harsh desert, there’s not a single giraffe in view, long extinct due to an ancient wave of climate change but the giraffes remain etched in rock, a testimony that they were once there.

My ultimate desire is to see the world’s largest rock art petroglyph carving in Niger — the life-size pair of giraffe carved in stone between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago, in the heart of the Sahara in the Tenere Desert (“where there is nothing”). Yet thousands of years ago, from the rock art found around, the Sahara was obviously a thriving land of forests and rivers, animals and people.

The giraffes, measuring almost 18 feet were recorded only as recently as 1987 by Christian Dupuy followed by an expedition led by David Coulson who brought it into the international limelight.

David Coulson is a photographer par-excellence, internationally acclaimed and probably the leading photographer of African Rock Art. He is also the founder and chairman of the Trust for African Rock Art and together with Alec Campbell, a founding trustee of Tara, David has produced a book, African Rock Art, Paintings and Engravings on Stone published by Harry N. Abrams Inc., New York in 2001. It is a comprehensive illustrated book on African rock art.

“You cannot see the giraffes from the ground. You have to climb the hill,” Coulson tells me. He has climbed hundreds of such remote hilly outcrops in Africa that are the repository of the priceless art to photograph ancient rock art — so much so that after four decades of tugging heavy photographic equipment up the mountain slopes he’s had to have his knees replaced recently. But he’s still smiling and just as enthusiastic about his long-term affair with African rock art. His mission is to archive Africa’s rock art for perpetuity — in the state-of-the-art digital centre at the Tara offices in Karen in Nairobi.

A rocky affair

“I got involved in ancient rock art by accident,” Coulson reminisces. “I’m not an anthropologist or an archaeologist. I’m a photographer, illustrator and writer.”

He founded Tara with Campbell in 1996 concerned about the deterioration of the ancient rock art from natural elements like the wind, sun and rain and also destruction by people with graffiti and mining. Supported by wellwishers and organisations like Unesco, Tara is raising the profile of Africa’s endangered rock art.

Coulson chanced upon ancient African rock art in the 1970s, when he met the internationally renowned fossil finder, Mary Leakey of Olduvai Gorge fame.

“Mary introduced me to rock art,” recalls Coulson. “You really should do a book’, she said to me because there was so little known and recorded about the ancient rock art of Africa.

“It’s a huge task archiving all the photographs l have taken over the past four decades,” says Coulson. “We now have 25,000 digitised image including the data and we’re adding to it all the time.”

Tara is working with Aluka, a digital library of scholarly resources from and about Africa.

It’s an institutional tool for research and free for universities and museums in Africa. Many of the images are also used for exhibitions in museums, conferences, children’s books, newsletters, brochures and now community workshops.

Email: rupi.mangat@yahoo.com
Blog: rajuafrica.blogspot.com