to empty into rocky coves and open sandy bays.
When Europeans first arrived, the area was filled with the magnificent big game of Africa — elephant, rhinoceros, lion, leopard, buffalo, and a great variety of buck. Hippopotami waded out of river mouths into the ocean surf to greet the startled Dutch sailors, who named the creatures zeekoe, “sea cows.” The natural bounty of a region filled with flowers and birds is reflected in the Khoisan name for one of the mountain ranges, Outeniqua, meaning “laden with honey.” The coast is dotted with gaping rock shelters, which hold some of the richest evidence for that last leap into modern human consciousness that took place roughly two hundred thousand years ago. Few places on earth could be more evocative of an African Eden than this most southern point of the ancient continent of Africa.
As a child I regularly explored one shelter on the Robberg Peninsula, the Mountain of Seals, which juts off the coast halfway between Port Elizabeth and Cape Town. The eastern edge of the peninsula offers a spectacular view of the former whaling station of Plettenberg Bay. The western coast overlooks a small sandy beach cove fringed by rocks and tide pools. I began my pilgrimage home by returning to the Robberg for the first time after many years. I arrived at the end of the day to find the place deserted. I stepped out of the car, followed the path down the cliff to the cove, and was immediately immersed in the sights, smells, and feel of the coast: the sharp, feral mix of the fynbos, seaweed, and salt; the surf crashing on the ocean-scrubbed, bone-white shell-and-stone beach; and the shock of the cold water as I dove in. I scrambled out quickly, spooked by the shadows of large fish next to me in the raised swell. I climbed up and sat inside the mouth of the largest shelter, wide enough for a band of perhaps a dozen people. The floor was made up of fresh and fossilizing shell and bone; in nearby caves, these floors can extend down more than a dozen feet. The whole coastline is rich with archaeological finds from the period when self-conscious Homo sapiens emerged over the past two hundred thousand years. Nothing had changed since my childhood except for the addition of a small knee-high fence through which Stone Age relics spilled down the slope. As I sat warming in the golden last light of the day, I could see almost no sign of the intervening thousands of years of civilization. I felt as if I was stepping through a personal dreamscape into our deep past to when some of the first humans lived in that same place.*
We now know in persuasive detail that the earth was once nothing but wilderness: everything, everywhere untouched by human hand, unseen by human eye; nothing tamed, domesticated, or civilized. We know that out of an African savanna, incubated in it, nurtured by it, a primate lineage gradually evolved into hominids. Then hominids slowly developed the self-reflective, creative consciousness capable of language, art, religion, and politics. The very nature of our freedom and creativity emerged gradually, conditioned by the daily rhythms of sunrise and sunset, the seasonal movements of game, and the smells and colors of fruit, flower, and veldt. This is the first fact of life — one of the most startling discoveries of modern times: human beings were made by wilderness. Yet all our contemporary political institutions were created by men ignorant of this most basic reality.
Around sixty thousand years ago a population of hunter-gatherers walked out of southern Africa and rapidly spread over the rest of the planet. Most human beings alive today are direct descendants of that small group. Parts of that founder population never left their African Eden; they continued to develop and thrive as nomadic hunter-gatherers into modern times, protected by the harshness of the Kalahari Desert. Today their children barely survive, forced off their ancestral hunting grounds, often living in squalor, at the mercy of government agencies. Recent genetic and linguistic mapping studies support what long seemed clear to many of us who grew up in South Africa: Bushmen populations are the closest living relatives to our shared “African Adam and Eve.”* Their traditional cosmology is most likely among the oldest on earth, seeming to recede back into the Paleolithic origins of human consciousness. Traditional nomadic Bushmen led an existence that in some ways seems enchanted, moving in small egalitarian bands held together by an ethos of caring for and sharing with one another, while being sensitively attuned to the natural world.
By contrast, the dominant political and economic institutions of our modern world were created from radically different assumptions about our origins. Political philosophers like John Locke accepted the Genesis account of earth’s creation: that the planet was young, that all the plant and animal species appeared as a result of separate acts of divine creation, which culminated on the sixth day in the miraculous appearance of human beings. They believed the natural world existed as raw material for the central human project of productive labor — converting wilderness into wealth. In 1688, when Locke published his Two Treatises on Government, the iconic text of modern politics, the global human population was less than half a billion and vast tracts of forest and prairie still covered North America. Southern Africa was an Eden filled with great herds of grazing and browsing animals. To Locke and his contemporaries, all of this existed to feed human appetite and ambition. It was simply “waste” until transformed by human labor:
Revelation
After visiting the Robberg and other coastal sites of early modern humans, I continued my pilgrimage north through Johannesburg, the violence-plagued metropolis of the country, and then into the sanctuary of the Drakensberg, the “dragon mountains,” the highest range in the South African escarpment. This was the ancient summer hunting ground and last refuge of the /Xam, the southern San Bushmen. It is also something of a wilderness temple containing one of the largest concentrations of the most complex and beautiful of their sacred rock paintings.
I spent most of the first day following my guide across a gloriously empty setting: golden grass-covered foothills, sandstone cliffs, sheltered bush-lined valleys with icy streams, all framed by mountains, hazy blue and purple in the distance. It was perfect winter weather, warm, sunny, and windless with an impossibly blue sky. Every stone, every leaf, every blade of grass sparkled as if cut from crystal. Occasionally we would spot grazing eland — the largest of the African antelope and the sacred game animal of the Bushmen. We were looking for a shelter that contained a particularly significant collection of old paintings. The guide crossed a stream and then climbed up to the base of a sandstone cliff. We walked through a clump of thick bushes and, without any warning, stepped into the entrance — an enormous overhang of sandstone with a level sandy floor and sun-warmed rock panels. The shelter was like a gigantic natural balcony, offering a panoramic view of the valleys below and the mountains in the distance. But the view that fixed my gaze was the back wall covered with dozens of hauntingly detailed multicolored paintings.
A line of eland seemed to move across the central panel. Several cloaked figures stood behind. Some of the images are carefully painted over one another, in great detail and with obvious care. Off to one side was a large solitary eland with its head down, back legs crossed, and the hair on its shoulders erect, all signs of its death throes. Touching the tail of the eland was an upright human-like figure, also painted with legs crossed — but instead of human feet, the figure had painted hooves with the detailed fetlocks clearly visible. The part-antelope, part-human creature held what looked like a dancing stick in one hand, suggesting the central religious ritual of the Kalahari San — the healing trance dance sometimes called “the little death.”*
The complexity and mystery of the images were immediately obvious. No easy literal interpretation would do. The sensitivity of execution contrasted movingly with the rugged mountainscape outside the shelter. Yet the paintings seemed to complete the scene perfectly by suggesting the presence of an ancient creative hand and beauty-loving eye, both hand and eye crafted by that same surrounding wilderness.
The guide left me to spend the rest of the day alone, examining the paintings and enjoying the view. In late afternoon I walked back, satisfied and relaxed, happily musing how ancestral San life must have fitted into this landscape, hand in glove. The sun was setting below the hills in the distance. On my right, a series of steep sandstone cliffs glowed pink and gold in the last
