George William Stow was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, on 2 February 1822. As a youth he was interested in engineering, but he studied medicine at King’s College in the late 1830s and early 1840s, only to give it all up to travel to South Africa in 1843 to follow a life of adventure.
The eastern frontier of the British colony of the 1840s was a troubled zone, destabilised by decades of frontier wars between British, Boer and Xhosa. Stow served with the British troops until after the end of the 7th Frontier War, then turned his hand to farming, and then to teaching. When war broke out yet again on Christmas Day 1850, Stow escaped into the interior reaching the Rhenosterbergen and journeying into the hills. There he began to encounter fossils, both lying about freely and embedded in the rock of a kloof. With these discoveries Stow began to engage with the great intellectual debates of the time: the age of the earth, the origins of the continents, the place of humanity in the grand sweep of earth’s history. He wrote poetry and published his ideas.
In 1870 Nature magazine published one of his letters in which he wrote:
During the last three years I have been making pilgrimages to the various old Bushman caves among the mountains in this part of the Colony and Kaffraria; and, as their paintings are becoming obliterated very fast, it struck me that it would be well to make copies of them before these interesting relics of an almost extinct race are entirely destroyed ... I have, fortunately, been able to procure many facsimile copies of hunting scenes, dances, fightings, c., showing the modes of warfare, the chase, weapons, disguises, c. This promises to be a collection of very great interest.
Earlier, Stow had written to Wilhelm Bleek, identifying what he thought to be the key themes in the art. He wrote:
The paintings are not only of different degrees of excellence – but are also of different kinds. Some may have a mythological character but others are certainly historical paintings – and not only represent some particular events but also are, from the marked character and diversity of figure, intended for portraits of various individuals belonging to the several tribes. These are generally representations of battles – huntings and dances – in which the Bushmen are represented wearing the different disguises they are known to adopt on such occasions but which to European eyes when they see representations of men enveloped in skins with Buck’s or Bird’s heads or with tails of iguanas and other animals fastened round their waists, make them believe they must have a mythological, or fabulous meaning – instead of representing the manners and customs of the Bushmen as they really were. That there are mystic drawings and tracings to be found there cannot be the least doubt; as during the last few weeks I have found some most wonderful examples of them. Of all the most characteristic of these I have made most careful cuttings and sketches. There [sic] diversity is astonishing and what is more surprising is the great hundreds of the bullet marks of the assailants, that one could almost write an account of its siege and point out where in their desperate struggle the intrepid defenders were forced back from point to point, where they from time to time turned at bay in their attempts to keep back their enemies, and where, behind a great heap of piled rocks at the end of the cave, they turned for the last time, overpowered but unsubdued, and resolutely continued the conflict until the shout and the turmoil closed with the final discharge of musketry, in the silence of death.
Stow cherished the idea of publishing a book on the San and their art, suggesting that it be called ‘The Bushmen of South Africa: their manners and customs, as illustrated by themselves’. Within a few years, however, this project was taken over by his expansive history of the peopling of southern Africa, including what he termed ‘the stronger races’. In the end very few of his painted copies were included in its final realisation as "The native races of South Africa", and the task of their publication fell to future aficionados.
In 1872 George Stow was employed by Sir Henry Barkly, Governor of the Cape Colony, to survey the territory of Griqualand West, a task he embarked on with some relish. On this subject he read a paper before the Geological Society in London in 1873.39 Two years later Stow undertook the task of studying the geology of the country surrounding the diamond fields of Kimberley, travelling down to the junction of the Orange and Vaal rivers and beyond to connect the work he had done in the previous survey. This involved more than 2500 miles of footwork and enormous stress and anxiety in producing the report.
Despite ill health, Stow continued to survey the Free State, adding much, at the time, to the knowledge of South African geology. Eventually the survey work he was doing was discontinued and he focused, impoverished and without substantial income, on his work on the ‘native races’ of South Africa. Here, more disappointment was to await him when in 1880 he tried to find a publisher for the manuscript. One rejection letter read as follows:
Giving you every credit for a vast amount of labour and research on a subject of much interest, I regret to add that the extent to which you have expanded it so greatly surpassed what, as it seems to me, the interest of the subject will bear … I speak of course of the portion of the work as yet in my hands, but the prospect of 600 pages more to come is quite overwhelming, and leaves me no alternative but to advise you to consult another publisher.
Weakened by so much ill health and the privations of the previous years of labour, stress and poor diet, his heart failed him and he died on 17 March 1882.
At the time of his death, many of his painted copies of rock art were in the possession of the Lucy Lloyd. She had had a long correspondence with Stow and encouraged him in what she considered to be his centrally important work. She had borrowed the copies to show Diaǃkwain, recording his comments on them, and, wishing to help with their publication, purchased the collection from Stow’s widow for the sum of £100, which she paid off at £5 per month, believing that they were an invaluable archive of images recording many paintings that would not survive either the elements or the wilful destruction that had already obliterated so many others in the rock shelters of the countryside. This was not the whole collection, however, though it is not at all clear exactly how many cartoons or painted copies he actually made during the period he was at work in the field. Stow had mentioned a figure of over 200 ‘facsimile copies of Bushman paintings’ made, but we have only managed to identify 169 final copies (not all coloured or completed. Additional pencil-drawn field copies exist – those copies made in preparation of the final painted copies – but given that his practice was to include several line drawings from different painted compositions on one sheet it is difficult to establish how many final copies the field drawings represent.
Lloyd also purchased Stow’s lengthy manuscript, The Native Races of South Africa, for £20, and saw to its publication in 1905, enlisting George McCall Theal, the prolific historian, as editor. After Lloyd’s death in 1914 the Stow paintings became the property of her niece and heir, Dorothea Bleek, who published a selection of them (72 plates in colour) with the support of the Carnegie Trust in 1930 in a volume titled Rock paintings in South Africa from parts of the Eastern Province and Orange Free State. At the time, this represented an achievement in colour printing (and intense fieldwork) but the plates are, by today’s standards, a poor reflection of the originals. A further slim volume was published in 1953 by Eric Rosenthal and A.J.H. Goodwin which contained small monochrome reproductions, with an introduction and comments by both authors, and several individual images have appeared from time to time in various publications on rock art. Several others have demonstrated interest in Stow’s paintings, among them notably the artists Walter Battiss, who visited many of the sites that Stow had copied and Jacob H. Pierneef who made copies of several Stows as source material for some of his own works.
Stow’s copies are his great legacy. For the rock artists, a whole world of ideas was imaginatively created on the rock surfaces. Stow’s experiences gave him access to a part of this world-view, and his copies reflected his deep admiration for the work he copied and interpreted, and which he saw as beautiful, poignant, mysterious – speaking of ideas about life, conflict and death, about the great dances in which the sick were healed, and about the long history of occupation in a land being invaded by others. While his time in the field was often lonely and his ambitions were only partly realised, he must have felt a deep bond with the San painters, when on a moonless night the campfire was the only illumination and the sparks from the burning embers drifted up to meet the stars. He would have watched the Milky Way, and seen countless shooting stars, which, for the San, signalled the death of someone. He would have felt moved by the majesty of the mountains, and the secrets that an understanding of their long history could reveal. He would have imagined the orphaned children and hundreds of unburied San men and women whose bones lay about in the landscape. He would have heard the hooting of the owls, the soft growl of a leopard, and just beyond the light of the fire, he may even have felt he saw the painted figures of sorcerers and spirits, endlessly shape-shifting, moving out into the darkness. Stow’s painted copies were a tribute to the San and to what he saw as ‘memorials’ to their long occupation of the land. For us today they offer a way of seeing the paintings as they might, at least by one man, have been seen and understood more than a hundred and fifty years ago.