Matsieng

North of Gaborone, on the Francistown road just past the village of Rasesa, a slab of sandstone lies flat in the veld with two deep holes punched through it. They hold water. Around them, faint enough now that you have to be shown where to look, are more than a hundred shapes cut into the stone: human feet, the split hoof of an antelope, the pad of something with claws, and one huge print of a single foot. The people who live there will tell you that the rock was soft once, and that the first man walked across it before it set.

His name was Matsieng, and by the reckoning of most of the merafe of Botswana he is where everybody started.

The story does not begin on the surface. It begins underneath it, in a country belonging to Tintibane, who is called the child of the Supreme God and the Earth and who holds the lower world where the dead are eventually returned. Matsieng lived down there in comfort and without effort, which is the sort of arrangement that never survives a story. Loowe came for him. Loowe is the agent of Modimo, a one-sided being who shows himself as a giant with a single leg, and what Loowe offered was the light. Follow it, he said, and Matsieng followed it up through the rock and out into the thin bright gap between earth and sky, and the door closed behind him.

Then he was hungry. This is the part the tourist copy leaves out, and it is the best part. The first man on the surface of the world stood in the open with nothing to eat and no way back down, and it was Tintibane who took pity on him, sending up the wild animals for him to hunt and the goats for him to keep. Among them came the giraffe, which walked ahead of him and led him to the place where the women were. Everything that makes a life up here, the hunting and the herding and the marrying, arrives in that account as compensation for a door that will not open again.

Others came up after him. Men, women, children and cattle climbed out of the same hole in a long procession and set off across ground still wet from making, and every foot that pressed into it left the mark that is in the rock today. The great single print is the one that gets pointed out first, and here the story and the study part company. Popular accounts, including a good deal of the signage and the guidebooks, hand that footprint to Matsieng and make him a one-legged giant. The Sotho-Tswana tradition as it reaches print through the theologian Gabriel Setiloane says something else: the large one-legged footprint is Loowe’s, and Loowe brought the animals and the people out of the hole and then went back down to live underground with Modimo and the ancestors. Two figures, one of them borrowed the other’s leg somewhere along the way, and the borrowing is now repeated everywhere.

There is not one hole either. The Batswana place the emergence at Ga-Ditshweni, the Place of the Baboons, in what was Bophuthatswana; at Ga-Loowe in Botswana; and near Orangeville in the eastern Free State. Several localities in the region claim the origin myth and each is certain. The merafe who count themselves children of Matsieng are consistent about theirs: it is Lowe’s, beside Rasesa, and until recently people still went there to pray. Nineteenth-century missionaries and travellers wrote down what they saw of it, which is how a pre-Christian pilgrimage ends up in a colonial notebook.

What is cut into the stone is older than any of them. The Botswana National Museum, which administers the site, dates the engravings to somewhere between three and ten thousand years ago. The Botswana Tourism Organisation says the marks were probably made by Khoe herders in the early second millennium. The British Museum’s survey of southern African rock art reckons the footprint-and-cupule engravings of the eastern Tuli Block were made by San hunter-gatherers, attached to San belief, and taken over later by Tswana farmers. The dates do not agree with each other and none of them puts a Tswana hand on the chisel. The museum’s own noticeboard at the site does the honest thing and prints both readings, one saying Matsieng left these footprints when the rocks hardened and the other saying archaeologists interpret them as a form of rock art, and lets the visitor stand between them.

The geology has a plain answer for the holes themselves. They are gnammas, rock basins opened by water sitting in a hollow and eating downward into Waterberg sandstone over a very long time. That explanation and the other one have coexisted at the site for as long as anyone has bothered to write either down.

What Matsieng grants is descent, and in southern Africa descent is a land claim. To swear by Tintibane, as the Bangwaketse did, is to say out loud that you did not arrive from somewhere else. The oath they kept ran: I swear by Tintibane, the child of the Earth, sealed by the earth. Against a colonial-era history lesson that files every Black southern African as a late arrival off the back of a migration, a family tree that starts in a hole in the local rock is not a quaint story. It is an argument.

His limits are the ones written into the first minute of his life. He cannot go back. The realm he was tempted out of stays shut to the living, and the only route back into it is the one everybody takes eventually, which is why Sotho-Tswana burial equips the dead for a journey: food, seed, utensils, clothes and blankets go into the grave, and the mourners send messages with the traveller. Animals are counted into that community of the dead as well. Everything that came up out of the hole is expected back down it.

Nobody has ever said what he looked like. The record gives him a name, a route, a hunger and a nation’s worth of descendants, and leaves the face blank.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Matsieng?

Matsieng is the first ancestor of the Batswana in Sotho-Tswana tradition, the first man to come up out of the underworld onto the surface of the earth. The ruling houses of the Bakwena, Bangwato, Bangwaketse, Bahurutshe, Bakgatla, Barolong and several Bakgalagari groups all trace their descent from him, and Batswana describe themselves as the children of Matsieng.

Where did Matsieng come from?

He came up from an underground realm belonging to Tintibane, who is called the child of the Supreme God and the Earth. Loowe, the agent of Modimo, tempted him to follow the light to the surface, and once he was out he could not return. Hungry and stranded, he was given wild animals to hunt and goats to keep, and a giraffe led him to the place where the women were.

Where are the Matsieng footprints?

They are at a protected national monument near the village of Rasesa in Kgatleng District, Botswana, on the road north from Gaborone toward Francistown. The site is a flat sandstone slab pierced by deep water-holding holes, with more than a hundred engraved human and animal footprints around them. The Botswana National Museum administers the site.

Was Matsieng a one-legged giant?

Popular accounts say so, but the scholarship attributes the single leg to a different figure. Following the Sotho-Tswana material set out by the theologian Gabriel Setiloane, the huge one-legged footprint in the rock belongs to Loowe, the agent of Modimo, who led the people and animals out of the hole and then returned underground. Matsieng’s own appearance is not described anywhere.

Who made the Matsieng engravings?

That is disputed and no answer credits the Batswana with cutting them. Estimates of their age range from three to ten thousand years old, while the Botswana Tourism Organisation attributes them to Khoe herders in the early second millennium, and the British Museum’s rock art survey treats the footprint engravings of the eastern Tuli Block as San work later adopted by Tswana farmers. The national monument’s own noticeboard presents the traditional and archaeological readings side by side.

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