DOMESTIC ARTS IN DAMARALAND. 99 



DOMESTIC AKTS IN DAMAKALAND. 



Bt Eev. C. G. B0TTNER. * 



THE peoples with whom missionaries have occasion to become 

 acquainted in Damaraland belong to different races ; and the 

 materials for a fair ethnological museum might easily be collected at 

 any of the more important places. The agricultural Ovambos and the 

 nomadic Hereros and Ovambandierus belong to the Bantu race, the 

 Namaquas and Bushmen to the yellow Hottentot stock, while the tribe 

 called the mountain Damaras are a black people of doubtful origin. 

 But although these peoples differ variously in their manners and cus- 

 toms, yet the general circumstances of their life are such that they ex- 

 hibit only a few differences in their technical accomplishments and 

 trade usages. The desert character of the country, which furnishes 

 only scanty means of subsistence, compels a certain meagerness in all 

 that the people undertake. They are contented to have their simplest 

 wants satisfied, and have never found or aspu'ed after elegance. This 

 part of Africa had, moreover, till a few decades ago, preserved its ex- 

 clusiveness for hundreds and thousands of years. The rainless desert 

 coast offered nothing attractive to the sailor, and even when one had 

 landed on the shore it was almost impossible to penetrate through the 

 wilderness to the interior. As the trade from the intei'ior of the con- 

 tinent likewise hardly reached here, we have to do in this region with 

 a people who until very recently had lived from a remote epoch cut 

 off from the rest of the world. The natives of Damaraland are thus to 

 a certain extent analogous with those primitive people who in pre- 

 historic times lived, as hunters and fishers, in the northern woods, and 

 fought out the struggle for existence in the rudest simplicity. 



Little that is really artistic is to be found among them. Vessels are 

 made by every tribe in its peculiar traditional form, by which their 

 origin can be determined at once, and are decorated with a likewise 

 stereotyped zigzag design, which is traced on iron articles with a chisel, 

 and on wooden ones with a burning sharp stick. We may also add that 

 the Bushmen, who are apparently in the lowest degree of civilization, 

 have painted upon the rocks, in both ancient and recent times, hunting 

 scenes representing all kinds of game and hunters in various situations, 

 which betoken considerable talent in grasping and setting forth typical 

 forms. These designs might, in fact, be regarded as works of more 

 civilized Europeans, were it not that they were found in such various 

 parts of the country, and that they were so much alike in their most 

 peculiar features. 



One of the striking characteristics of South African art is its 

 deficiency in the perception of the straight and of the right angle. 

 Everything that the people make comes from their hands bent and 



