People and the Arts

San/Bushman woman in western Botswana (Kalahari Desert). Ancestral San hunter-gatherers were responsible for much of the rock art of southern Africa.	San/Bushmen standing in a painted shelter at Botswana's Tsoldilo Hills (1980s). Some of these San used to say that their ancestors painted the white paintings, but that the red paintings were painted by God.	Tuareg custodian at the Dabous Giraffe site in Niger, west of the Aïr Mountains.
Tuareg guide in a rock shelter covered in millennia-old paintings from the Pastoral and Horse periods of Saharan art, superimposed by some camel period paintings and recent graffiti.	Red and white geometric paintings in a shelter in southern Mauretania. Local guide looks on.	Sandawe woman in central Tanzania's Kondoa province not far from the Kondoa World Heritage rock art site. Some of the earliest art was made by ancestral Sandawe.
Director of Antiquities for Somaliland, Dr Sada Mire looks at pastoral paintings at an important painting site.	Ethiopian villager sitting on a rock inscribed with ancient geometrics, southern Ethiopia.	A Ndorobo hunter-gatherer at a Samburu painting site in northern Kenya.

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