Archaeology and symbolism in the new South African coat of arms.

SMITH, BENJAMIN ; LEWIS-WILLIAMS, J.D. ; BLUNDELL, GEOFFREY 等

South Africa celebrated its sixth Freedom Day on 27 April 2000. President Thabo Mbeki paid fitting tribute to South Africa's first democratic elections of 1994 by unveiling a new national coat of arms. The old coat of arms, derived from that adopted at Union in 1910, looks fussy today and evokes the values of a long-gone age.

The new coat of arms (FIGURE 1), designed by Iaan Bekker, uses a series of motifs symbolizing another kind of national identity -- one which is South African, African and universal. A central motif is a pair of human figures (FIGURE 2) derived from San rock-art. They are modelled on a human figure on the famous panel (Lewis-Williams 1988) which was removed from Linton (Eastern Cape Province) to the South African Museum in Cape Town in 1918 -- in our view the greatest rock-art panel in any museum anywhere in the world. The San figures are a conscious historical reference intended to escape the colonial legacy and the racial divisions of the old South Africa.

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The Government chose San figures for the central human image, as representing a heritage that unites all South Africans in common humanity. The particular choice of the figure was made by the Rock Art Research Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, the national research centre for rock-art. Its form and poise, and the manner in which a standing human figure is depicted, are characteristic of the hunter-gatherer rock-paintings of southern Africa. As the President explains it, this figure serves to evoke South Africa's distant past, in a country which seeks to embrace the indigenous belief systems of its people.

The motto underneath, also drafted by one of us at the Rock Art Research Institute (JDL-W), is in the /Xam language, one of the several known but extinct languages of the South African San people. The /Xam, like most San groups, did not use abstract nouns; and the motto `Unity in Diversity' which it expresses therefore has no exact /Xam equivalent. It is rendered in the phrase `!ke e: /xarra //ke', which -- translated literally -- means `Diverse people unite', or `People who are different join together'. The colon `:' in the phrase is an accent indicating the preceding `e' is a drawn-out vowel. The `!' and `/' and `//' represent three click-sounds of the /Xam language in the standard system of writing Khoisan languages (see e.g. Barnard 1992). We hope that non-South Africans, ignorant of click-languages but familiar with computer files and the Internet, will not pronounce them as `forward-slash'!

No one has spoken the /Xam language for many decades, but there is good knowledge of it from 19th-century records made by the Bleek and Lloyd family of the language and tales of these San people, many of whom were held in prison in Cape Town, far from their ancestral lands (some /Xam tales are published in Bleek & Lloyd 1911 and Lewis-Williams 2000). When all written history in South Africa is enmeshed in the colonial experience, it is fitting that a nation self-consciously re-founding its identity should turn instead to an archaeological kind of historical image, and to a text taken from oral tradition. South Africa recognizes eleven national languages today. To express the national motto in yet another tongue is to express no partiality to any one of those eleven. That the tongue used is extinct today is a rare and moving tribute to past people of the South African land.

What other national coat of arms expresses such sentiments in such an archaeological and in such an eloquent way?

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References

BARNARD, A. 1992. Hunters and herders of southern Africa: a comparative ethnography of the Khoisan peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

BLEEK, W.H.I. & L. LLOYD. 1911. Specimens of Bushman folklore. London: George Allen.

LEWIS-WILLIAMS, J.D. 1988. The world of man and the world of spirit: an interpretation of the Linton rock paintings. Cape Town: South African Museum.

LEWIS-WILLIAMS, J.D. 2000. Stories that float from a far: ancestral folklore of the /Xam San of southern Africa. Cape Town: David Philip.

BENJAMIN SMITH, J.D. LEWIS-WILLIAMS, GEOFFREY BLUNDELL & CHRISTOPHER CHIPPINDALE, Smith, Lewis-Williams & Blundell, Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, PO Wits 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa. 107bws@cosmos.wits.ac.za david@rockart.wits.ac.za geoff@rockart.wits.ac.za Chippindale, Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3DZ, England. cc43@cam.ac.uk