The short answer: the San people, specifically the ancestors of the hunter-gatherer communities who lived across southern Africa for tens of thousands of years. The longer answer requires understanding why that was ever in question, and what the paintings actually depict.
The San as the Authors of Southern African Rock Art
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San rock art is found across southern Africa from Tanzania to the Western Cape. Tens of thousands of sites exist, ranging from single figures scratched into rock faces to elaborate painted panels with dozens of overlapping figures and symbols. The Brandberg Massif alone contains over 1,000 individual sites.
The San did not create these images as decoration or as records of daily life. The paintings are the product of shamanic practice. San spiritual specialists, known as !gi:ten, entered altered states of consciousness through the trance dance, a communal ritual involving rhythmic movement, hyperventilation and intense concentration. During trance, they experienced vivid visions and believed they could cross into the spirit world to draw power, heal the sick and control rain.
Rock art was the medium through which these experiences were recorded and revisited. The images were not memories of visions but active conduits to spiritual potency. Painted shelters were liminal spaces where the boundary between the physical and spirit worlds was considered thin.
What the Maack Shelter Panel Shows
The shelter in the Tsisab Ravine, named after Reinhard Maack who documented it in 1917, contains a dense painted panel approximately six metres wide. The central figure, around 40 centimetres tall, is painted in white, red and black. It stands upright, holds what appears to be a cup or flower, and is surrounded by smaller figures, animals and abstract forms.
Key elements that identify the panel as a shamanic scene include bent-forward postures in surrounding figures, nasal bleeding depicted on several figures (a classic marker of trance in San iconography), therianthropes (figures combining human and animal features), and the presence of the eland, an antelope associated with spiritual potency across San belief systems.
The central figure’s white colouring is not ethnically significant. White pigment derived from silica, calcite or bird droppings was used by San painters across the region and carries no racial meaning in this context.
Dating the Paintings
Precise dating of rock paintings is difficult because the organic binders in San pigments are often too degraded for reliable radiocarbon dating. Contextual and stylistic analysis places most Brandberg paintings in a range between 2,000 and 4,000 years old, though some may be considerably older.
The Maack Shelter panel shows multiple layers of overpainting, indicating it was returned to and added to over an extended period. It is not the work of a single artist on a single occasion.
Why the Question Was Ever Disputed
When Abbe Henri Breuil published his interpretation of the White Lady in the 1950s, he proposed that the central figure showed Mediterranean, Egyptian or Cretan influence, pointing to the white body paint and what he described as non-African physical features. His theory reflected the wider colonial-era assumption that sophisticated art in Africa must have had external origins.
That argument has been comprehensively rejected. The full story of Breuil’s theory, why it gained traction and how it was eventually overturned is examined in the Henri Breuil and the White Lady controversy.
San Authorship in Context
The Brandberg paintings belong to the same tradition as rock art found across the region. Sites like Twyfelfontein, 150 kilometres to the northwest, share the same symbolic vocabulary even though Twyfelfontein is predominantly engraved rather than painted. The underlying belief system is consistent.
Understanding San authorship changes how you experience the site. The paintings are not ancient graffiti or puzzling remnants. They are a coherent visual language produced by a people with a sophisticated understanding of consciousness, the natural world and the relationship between the two. The guide to San rock art symbols unpacks that visual language in practical terms before you visit.
Visiting the Site
The Maack Shelter is reached via a 45-minute walk up the Tsisab Ravine from Brandberg Rest Camp. A San guide is mandatory and accompanies all visitors. Everything you need to plan the hike is in the White Lady complete guide.