Dr Sam (William) Challis
African Fellow, January 2022 - April 2022
Home Institution: University of the Witwatersrand
Sam Challis is Head and Senior Researcher at the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. His focus is on the interaction between hunter-gatherers, pastoralists and farmers, as well as Europeans, as expressed in rock art around the world. He lectures undergraduates in global hunter-gatherer and rock art studies, and advises graduates and postdocs. His DPhil focused on the acquisition of horses by creolised raider groups in the nineteenth-century, and his research programme in Matatiele aims to redress the imbalance of this neglected former-apartheid region while training local community Field Technicians. To this end he is collaborating with Edinburgh partners at the Scotland Rock Art Project (ScRAP) to equip community members to record and preserve rock art in the Eastern Cape.
Project Title: Digital innovation in decoloniality: enhancing the images of ‘Bushman’ resistance
Rock art provides a reverse gaze on the period of colonisation. When examined using the indigenous idiom it can prove a powerful tool in decolonising Western written texts – ‘seeing’ the experience from the perspective of the colonised. African San-speakers, Khoe-speakers, isiNtu language-speakers, Korana, Griqua as well as runaway slaves and European outlaws came together in the face of adversity to form groups of bandits in the borderlands of the Colony (Challis 2016; King & Challis 2017). These bandits used stock theft as a means to survive because their hunting grounds had been taken over, and also as a means of guerrilla warfare to hit the colonists where it hurt, economically.
The mixed bandit groups known to colonists as ‘Bushmen’ expanded their own herds of cattle, horses, sheep and goats. Many of them were from farming and herding backgrounds and even those of forager descent were, by this time, familiar with livestock ownership. As part of their own religious beliefs they depicted their own concerns: their own herds, their own horses, hats and guns which had become widely available for all (Challis 2012, 2018).
One problem specific to the rock art of the colonial era is that, because access to good pigments was increasingly cut off, the pigment quality dropped and thus the most recent images (painted into the 1860s and ‘70s) are often the most faded. They are therefore in need of the most urgent attention. Although the software is available everywhere, being stationed at Edinburgh for four months places me among Africanist scholars and rock art colleagues, in an academic environment where the technologies of the Global North can be applied to address the concerns of the postcolonial Global South.