In the beginning before time began, the world was alive with possibilities. Animals were people, people could command the wind and the rain, and the sun had the power of speech. Many languages were spoken and stories, carried by the breath of those who spoke them, floated on the wind. But then things changed and the world lost its magic. This book tells a story of wonder and loss and the possibility of redemption.

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.
"Unconquerable Spirit "reveals the scope and the beauty of his labors. Stow's paintings are more than just copies of what he found on the rocks. They are interpretations of the art of the San, informed by his own understanding of a particularly turbulent time in South African history and his sense of the tragic demise of the San way of life. This book celebrates his pioneering achievement and reminds us, too, of the richness of the imaginative universe of the San.

From the hands of Pippa Skotnes and her team who produced the beautiful and acclaimed Jacana books on the San and their rock art, Claim to the Country and Unconquerable Spirit, comes a smaller but equally handsome volume on rock art copies made by the great German ethnologist, Leo Frobenius. Frobenius visited South Africa and Zimbabwe in the 1930s and with a team of German artists produced a magnificent collection of rock art copies, a set of which the Union government bought for GBP5,000 and deposited with the South African Museum in Cape Town, where they have lain neglected for more than seventy years. Now these copies, some measuring several metres in length, are being exhibited in Cape Town and other centres of South Africa.