Hiding in Plain Sight: Southern Africa’s First Stenciled Rock Art Found in a Shelter Used as a Church

Many years ago, I believe in 2021, I was part of a university field trip. Among the rock shelters we visited was La Rochelle. The shelter stuck with me for several reasons, including that it was also used as a local church (pews, pulpit, and everything) and for the many rock paintings scattered across its surface. One in particular always comes to mind: a human-animal hybrid called a therianthrope, with a long, beak-like head and winglike arms.

What I, and many others before and possibly after us, had not noticed was one image hiding in plain sight. That is until rock art researchers David Pearce and Kiah Johnson took a closer look and noticed the first and so far only instance of stenciled rock art in southern Africa.

Here’s the thing: decades upon decades of research have uncovered images of eland, people, lions, wagons, cows, even a bushbuck. They are painted with a fine brush or a finger. Some use handprints; others use finger dots. Not a single one of these images, and there are a lot, trust me, has ever been stenciled anywhere in southern Africa.

People have walked past these paintings hundreds of times, confident they knew every nook and cranny of the shelter. And yet one piece was overlooked. Southern African rock art was never just art for art’s sake. It carried deep meaning, tied to people’s beliefs, rituals and histories. But with no San painters left to ask, no ethnography that so much as mentions stenciling, and a single example to go on, in a region already scarce in rock art, what can two small figures tell us about the past, and how much more has simply weathered away, lost forever, before anyone thought to look?

The People Who Painted

Rock art has a long and rich history in southern Africa. Most art relates to hunter-gatherer groups, e.g., the San. Some paintings were made by pastoralists, farmers, and various other groups with hybrid identities. Some were painted with brushes, others with fingers, and others still were engraved. Each art tradition is in some way or another differentiated by its technique, motifs, paints used, and more.

One technique has been used elsewhere in the world, from Paleolithic Europe to Australia. I am of course referring to stenciling. Stenciling refers to using a template, from one’s own hand to a cut-out or other objects, to create a negative image. Children often stencil their hands in kindergarten. They place their hands on a wall or piece of paper, then blow or spray some paint over it. What’s left is a colorful outline of their hands.

Stenciled hands are found in Paleolithic Europe, China, and across the Asia-Pacific region. Egypt also has its fair share of stencils, once thought to be miniature hands, perhaps those of infants or preterm babies. Well, as it turns out, they were actually stencils of the forelimbs of varanid (monitor) lizards.

Other objects have also been used elsewhere; for instance, Papua New Guinea has stencils of various objects, including shell ornaments and cassowary bone daggers and claws. Australia has even used small birds.

What do all these places have in common? One, they almost all use some natural, pre-existing object for their stencils, and two, none of them are in southern Africa.

Mpumalanga’s Art

Mpumalanga is a province located in northeastern South Africa. Known as the land of the rising sun, its Highland is not known for its rock art. What rock art the Highland does have is sparse, often faded and poorly preserved, suggesting that decades or centuries of wind, rain, sun, and probably the occasional sheep or cattle rubbing up against the paint have taken their toll. Mpumalanga’s Highlands are particularly scarce in rock art, at least compared to its Lowveld, which has far more.

Despite their proximity, the Highlands and Lowveld seem to have stylistic differences, with Lowveld art similar to other art in the north-east, and Highlands art similar to the rock art found south-west in the Drakensberg.

La Rochelle, also known as Klein Buffelspruit, is located in the Mpumalanga Highlands, near the town of Carolina. It is ‘apparently’ a well-known tourist destination. I say “apparently” because of our journey there; I recall three things: first and foremost, that we punctured our tire. Our car jack didn’t fit beneath the car (go figure), so our prof told us students to dig a hole beneath it (we used our hands and sticks; it probably took us around an hour).

The second thing I remember is that, when we resumed our journey, we spent what felt like half an hour driving in the wrong direction… and just as long driving back (I was in the boot of the car and felt every bump and pothole along the way).

And third, we were in the middle of nowhere. I recall seeing one individual walking along the road. Maybe it was the wrong season for tourists, or perhaps they all got lost; who knows?

Anyway, La Rochelle differs from most shelters in the region because it’s fairly large, about 30 meters long and up to 5 meters deep. Throughout are images of eland, hartebeest, small antelope, humanoids and therianthropes, and more. Four other painted shelters exist nearby along the same contour.

We students were instructed to look for rock art in the area. I recall somehow clambering up a massive rock and into a shallow shelter, where I was chuffed to find some decorated pottery, which I called back to my group. They could not hear me and were still struggling to climb the way I did. I kept calling until I eventually gave up. A few hours later, I reported the pottery to my prof, who said he had seen it too and heard my screaming, but somehow I’d missed the one thing I was supposed to look out for: the rock art all over the shelter wall. Well done, me.

Anna Steyn first formally recorded the rock art of La Rochelle in 1995, and Mduduzi Maseko re-recorded it in 2020. The shelter itself has been in use for a long time, and in 1938 it was used to celebrate the centenary of the Battle of Blood River and the Voortrekker centenary (the Geloftefees), with a ‘time capsule’ and plaque installed in the wall (since removed). At some point, the shelter floor was leveled and covered in concrete, and wooden pews were installed; it still occasionally hosts church services.

Despite its long history of use and the many people who have surveyed and recorded the rock art, one image somehow evaded everyone’s attention.

The First Stenciled Rock Art of Southern Africa

Upon first noticing the stencils, Pearce realized he wasn’t entirely sure what he was seeing, but it started to come into focus like an optical illusion. The painting appeared to be of two figures, perhaps humans, surrounded by a ‘halo’ of paint specks.

The splattered appearance suggested that someone had splashed or red liquid paint over a template, creating a stencil.

Southern African rock art is incredibly rich and diverse, but this is the only known stenciled piece. That means we can only say so much about it. There are no living San painters one could approach to ask about it; even if there were, we have no idea how old the art is. Was it made in 1900 or was it made 1,900 years ago? A modern viewer’s interpretation may differ from the intended meaning, whether it was created relatively recently or thousands of years ago.

No ethnographic records mention stenciling, and there is no corpus of other stenciled rock art to compare it to and derive meaning from.

What we know is that, at least in hunter-gatherer art traditions, the production of paint and the making of images were ritualized. The substances used to make the paint were considered powerful, symbolic, and meaningful. It is tempting to think that creating this stenciled art held a similar ritual and symbolic meaning, but we can’t say exactly what without starting to make stuff up.

Now remember how I said most rock stencils are made from existing objects: hands, daggers, birds. Well, unless you happen to know of nine-centimeter-tall humans living in southern Africa, these images were made from a purpose-made template.

That is rare not only in southern Africa but globally. Very few instances of rock art were made from templates. One relatively well-known example is a rock shelter in Australia filled with many miniature stencils.

Such templates were likely made from beeswax in northern Australia. We know southern African hunter-gatherers used honey, so we can infer they would have had access to beeswax. We also know honey and bees both carried significant symbolic meaning in San cosmology, so using beeswax as a template material could have been an appropriate choice. However, there is no evidence that wax was used here.

Another possibility is the use of clay. It’s abundant in the region and was used by local farming communities to make pottery, so why not use it to make a template?

But as with wax, there is no evidence that clay was used to make templates.

In the end, just about anything could have been used to make a template, from wood to bone. But that’s all speculation.

What we do know is that this is the first and so far only stenciled rock art in southern Africa. No such art tradition is known for hunter-gatherers, local pastoralists, farmers, or any other group. Perhaps it was made by another group. Pearce suggests stencils could have been used for things beyond rock art, perhaps on bodies, clothing, or stone-built structures, which could be why they are rare in rock art. Alternatively, the region’s rock art is poorly documented, and what remains is often very faded.

Some sites are on steep rock faces, with no protection from the elements. There could well be, or once were, more stenciled rock art pieces here, but we have yet to find them, or perhaps the wind and rain have washed them all away.

So what are we left with? Two stenciled figures, perhaps humans, standing just about nine centimeters tall. We don’t know the artist; we have no date, story, or meaning to go with them. Just paint that people have walked past for decades.

And yet that doesn’t make them worthless; they are pieces of someone’s culture we simply don’t yet understand. Southern Africa already has one of the most detailed and elaborate bodies of rock art anywhere in the world, and this adds to that diversity and complexity.

Every painting, whether we understand it or not, whether it is the first or the millionth, reflects someone’s intentions, beliefs, culture, and worldview. It shows that even in southern Africa, where rock art is so well studied, there are new discoveries still to be made, some of them perhaps waiting in plain sight.

Do you have stenciled rock art where you are from? And do you think this is a one-off experiment or simply one of the last remaining images, with the others having faded away?

Let me know what you think, and if you'd like to support this blog and the person writing it, you can chip in once, monthly, or yearly. Only if you'd like to.

Reference

Pearce, D. and Johnson, K. (2026). FIRST REPORT OF STENCILLED ROCK ART IN MPUMALANGA, SOUTH AFRICA. South African Archaeological Bulletin. https://www.academia.edu/178536368/FIRST_REPORT_OF_STENCILLED_ROCK_ART_IN_MPUMALANGA_SOUTH_AFRICA

You made it this far? Here's a little fun extra: my doodles from my 2021 field trip...