Unconquerable spirit

George Stow was a Victorian man of many parts - poet, historian, ethnographer, artist, cartographer and prolific writer. A geologist by profession, he became acquainted, through his work in the field, with the extraordinary wealth of rock paintings in the caves and shelters of the South African interior. Enchanted and absorbed by them, Stow set out to create a record of this creative work of the people who had tracked and marked the South African landscape decades and centuries before him. For the first time, the beauty and scope of his labours are revealed, in Pippa Skotnes magnificent book, Unconquerable Spirit. In this volume and the accompanying exhibition at Iziko South African Museum, Pippa Skotnes introduces the extraordinary collection of copies of San (or Bushman) rock paintings made by George Stow in the 1860s and 1870s. She sees these not just as copies, but rather as Stow's interpretations of the ideas that most moved the San people and, in part, as a product of the turbulent frontier wars and the end of the San way of life that George Stow was witness to. The book reproduces all Stow's extant copies as well as examples of the many maps, drawings, notes and poems that he produced in his busy driven life.