Art form
African rock art
Africa has some of the oldest and most abundant rock art in the world. A cross-hatched drawing on stone from Blombos Cave in South Africa is about 73,000 years old; painted stone slabs from Apollo 11 Cave in Namibia date to between about 25,000 and 30,000 years ago; and hundreds of thousands of paintings and engravings — in the Sahara, the Drakensberg, Namibia, Tanzania and the Horn of Africa — record animals, people and beliefs over millennia.
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The oldest images
In 2018 researchers published a small flake of stone from Blombos Cave, on South Africa's southern coast, marked with a cross-hatched pattern in red ochre about 73,000 years ago — the oldest known drawing made by a human. The same cave had already yielded pieces of ochre engraved with cross-hatched lines and shell beads of a similar age.
At Apollo 11 Cave in southern Namibia — named because it was excavated in 1969, as the Apollo 11 mission returned from the Moon — archaeologists found slabs of stone painted with animals in charcoal and ochre, dated to roughly 25,000 to 30,000 years ago. They are the oldest dated figurative art in Africa.
The Sahara: when the desert was green
Between roughly 10,000 and 5,000 years ago the Sahara was a land of lakes and grasslands, and the people who lived there left an immense record on its rocks. At Tassili n'Ajjer in south-eastern Algeria, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1982, more than 15,000 paintings and engravings survive. Scholars group Saharan rock art into broad periods that follow the changing climate: engravings of large wild animals such as elephants and giraffes; painted human figures with round heads; scenes of cattle herders with their herds; then, as the desert spread, horses and chariots, and finally camels.
The Tadrart Acacus in Libya holds similar riches, and in the Gilf Kebir of south-western Egypt the painted figures of the "Cave of Swimmers" became famous through the novel and film The English Patient.
Southern Africa: San paintings
In the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg mountains of South Africa and Lesotho, rock shelters hold tens of thousands of paintings by the ancestors of the San, hunter-gatherers who lived there for millennia. The eland, the largest antelope, appears more than any other animal. Many scholars, following the archaeologist David Lewis-Williams, read much of San rock art as connected to the experience of healers in trance — an interpretation that transformed the study of rock art worldwide, though it is still debated.
Other great sites include Tsodilo Hills in Botswana, with more than 4,500 paintings, sometimes called "the Louvre of the Desert"; the engravings of Twyfelfontein in Namibia; and the Matobo Hills in Zimbabwe.
East Africa and the Horn
The painted shelters of Kondoa in Tanzania and the Chongoni hills in Malawi — where later paintings are linked to the initiation rites of Chewa farmers — are World Heritage Sites. At Laas Geel, in Somaliland, paintings of cattle with decorated necks and of people with raised arms, brought to international attention by French archaeologists in 2002, are among the best preserved in Africa.
Visiting rock art
Most sites are fragile and best visited with a local guide. Do not touch paintings, and never wet them to make colours stand out for a photograph — a practice once common that damages the pigment. The Trust for African Rock Art (TARA), founded in Nairobi in 1996, works to record and protect sites across the continent.
Related
Rock art is the first chapter of our short history of African art. The great concentrations are described in Southern African art and North African art. For the sculptural traditions that followed, see African sculpture.