he earliest known human inhabitants of Rhodesia were the small nomadic people we call the Bushmen. Sometime about the fifth millennium B.C. tney Began to dominate the great Rhodesian plateau after driving away the even more primitive hominids who were “blue-prints” for Homo sapiens. Although nearly all the Bushmen have disappeared from Rhodesia, our knowledge of them is yet surprisingly precise; it is largely derived from the records of their lives which their rock artists left behind in more than 1 500 Rhodesian caves and shelters, and from studies of Bushmen still living in Botswana and South-West Africa.

he Rhodesian Bushmen were most proficient hunters but they never killed except for food. They possessed such tracking skill that the Bantu who followed them to Rhodesia believed they had an extra pair of eyes in their feet. But what makes the Bushmen of such special interest is their insatiable passion for covering every suitable rock shelter they could find with records of their own lives and with likenesses of the animals they admired.

uring their halcyon days in Rhodesia, the Bushmen disdained any form of agriculture: they were food-gatherers and hunters. For hunting they employed bows which are almost identical with those used by their contemporary descendants in the Kalahari.

or 5000 years the Bushmen were masters of Rhodesia. The stone murals they left behind in such large numbers unveil a primitive peoples’ temperament in a way which is unique, and by recording the country’s early history they have themselves provided a national tapestry of stone and pigment. The earliest known paintings can be attributed to the first millennium A.D., but these must have been the end results of a long tradition whose earlier exposition is lost. Later paintings took on a more vibrant sense of movement and the Bushmen appear to have passed some of the milestones of their craft, such as knowledge of foreshortening and perspective, before European painters. Their expressions of l'art pour l'art were, however, replaced during the fifteenth century by a pictorial narrative of strife as the Bantu from the north invaded the Bushman hunting grounds. Finally the Bush­men were driven out of Rhodesia to the inhospitable steppes of the Kalahari.