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The White Lady is a Man, Man
November 23, 2011 | 
Author If you have ever been to Namibia you will probably have heard about the White Lady. If you are expecting to see something like a Caucasian female, your first look at the ancient rock painting will leave you confused. The reason for this confusion is simple: The White Lady is a man. And he ain’t white either…
Looking at the painting most people would probably describe the most prominent figure as some kind of a warrior or medicine man. This is also the description Reinhardt Maack gave. Maack was the first Westerner to set eyes on the painting in 1917. When he and a fellow explorer first climbed the Bandberg Mountains they found a rock shelter under which they slept. In the morning Maack discovered a rock painting on the wall next to him. It showed several people and antelopes in a hunting or dancing scene. Prominently featured was a male figure holding a bow and arrow and something resembling a flower. The figure was coloured white from the waist down, the rest of the body was black.
photo taken by Harald Süpfle
Maack made several sketches of the painting. To him this was a picture of a hunter or shaman, painted by the San people an estimated 2000 years ago. So how could this African hunter be named ‘White Lady’?
Enter Henri Breuil. The French priest and anthropologist first set eyes on Maack’s drawings in Cape Town in 1929. Contrary to everyone else Breuil was certain this rock painting depicted a female. Being a recognized expert on Mediterranean cave art, he determined the painting to be of non-African origin. He came up with some quite fanciful stories of how Europeans could have painted rocks in Southern Africa a good 2000 years ago.
In 1945 Breuil visited Namibia and subsequently published a paper and a book entitled ‘The White Lady of Brandberg’. Even though Breuil’s theories were refuted a long time ago, the name stuck. So we now have a San rock painting of a male African hunter called ‘White Lady’. But what’s in a name anyway.
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