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In God's Places
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Secondary Title:
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(Iindawo Zikathixo)
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Filmmaker Name:
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Richard Wicksteed
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Film Length:
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52 min
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Film Year:
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1997
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Duration:
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46-75 min
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Decade:
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1990s
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Color:
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color
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Closed-captioned:
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closed-captioned
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Region:
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Africa
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Subject:
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Storytelling, Myth and Folklore
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Iindawo Zikathixo – In God's Places traces the cultural legacy of the indigenous San (Bushmen) people in south-eastern Africa as it was shaped by the migration and interaction with Bantu and European peoples. Filmed in the Drakensburg Mountains in the Transkei, as well as in Lesotho and the northeastern Cape, the film features the indigenous rock art as a background against which the story of the Bushmen unfolds.
Bushmen hunter-gatherers were the first people to inhabit the southern African landscape. For thousands of years, they migrated over the Drakensberg foothills, following the wild animals they hunted and painted. Iindawo Zikathixo explores the cultural interaction that developed between the Bushmen, Xhosa and Sotho-speaking peoples, and exposes the merciless force with which European settlers dispossessed the Bushmen of their hunting and gathering grounds. Some aspects of Bushmen culture survived the genocide, and Iindawo Zikathixo investigates these through music, dance, oral history and traditional rituals in remote communities and those that intermarried with San and absorbed their cultural practices.
A central location of the film is the Inxu River Valley in the former Transkei, where the last known Bushman rock artist, Lindiso, lived, painted and made rain for the Xhosa-speaking Mpondomise until about 1930. The filmmakers visit Lindiso's painted shelter with his grandson, Maqulana and with Sipani Togu, an Mpondomise diviner of Bushman descent. Mr. Togu conducts rainmaking and other rituals he associates with the Bushmen in the painted rockshelters of the Inxu Valley.
Iindawo Zikathixo offers a snapshot of the persistence of Bushmen expressive forms and practices and will be of interest to all those concerned with southern African cultural heritage.
[Note: although some people featured in this film are shown touching rock art, this occurs in the traditional or ritual contexts and is not usually acceptable because touching damages the paintings. In the interests of conserving rock art, visitors to painted shelters are advised not to touch the rock art under any circumstances.]
Director
Richard Wicksteed
Producers
Irene Staehelin & Richard Wicksteed
Associate Producer
Simon Stanford
Script Consultant
Frans Prins
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