Tribal painting in South Africa with particular reference to Xhosa painting

Abstract

The following work is an attempt to approach the subject of tribal mural decoration by a discussion of its formal, symbolic and technical aspects. Although an aesthetic evaluation is part of the aim, no attempt will be made to categorise works aesthetically; there will be no attempt to define when the activity of wall painting attains the ambiguous status of art. The tribal names of the various peoples will be given without singular or plural prefixes: Xhosa instead of amaXhosa, Ndebele instead of amaNdebele. The term Xhosa will be applied in a wide sense to include all the Xhosa-speaking peoples with the exception of the Fingo, whose art retains, at least in the Eastern Cape, distinctive remnants of an archaic style that seems to have been ancestral to present-day Xhosa pointing.