Elizabeth Goodall: a quiet contribution to rock art research in Southern Africa
Date
2020
Authors
De Harde, Laura
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Abstract
This thesis examines the rock art research of Elisabeth Mannsfeld/Elizabeth Goodall, paying particular attention to the hand-painted reproductions she produced as a member of the ninth Frobenius expedition to southern Africa in 1928 to 1930, and the work she produced thereafter while working at the Queen Victoria Museum (now Zimbabwe Museum of Human Sciences [ZMHS]) until her death in 1971. The German-born Goodall (née Mannsfeld) arrived in southern Africa as a member of the German-Afrika Expedition led by the ethnographer and explorer, Leo Viktor Frobenius. A trained artist, Goodall (working under her maiden name Mannsfeld) was primarily employed to record the hundreds of rock paintings that she and the other members of the Frobenius team encountered scattered across the southern African landscape. During these formative years, she worked closely under Frobenius’s tutelage; and formed part of a team of artists and scientists working in collaboration to forge an understanding of the painted images they explored. In 1931, roughly a year after the Frobenius Expedition ended, Goodall relocated to Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe) where she began working as an independent researcher. Goodall’s career is one intertwined with her role at the Queen Victoria Museum where she worked right up until the day before her death. Today Goodall is survived by a plethora of hand-painted rock art recordings and fragmentary archival materials housed in a storeroom in the ZMHS. During a site visit to the museum in 2016, I discovered that Goodall’s archive had been somewhat neglected, leaving a largely untapped resource of visual information pertaining to southern African rock art. Moreover, unlike some of her contemporaries working on rock art in the early part of the twentieth century, Goodall’s research has received little engagement from academics in the intervening nearly five decades since her death. Using the rock art site, Aberdeen Farm, Harrismith as a first case study, I explore how Goodall’s legacy has been constructed through a relatively recent (and still current) re-engagement with the recording techniques she employed in 1929. Goodall’s career has been interesting to compare with the rock-art-related research of acclaimed South African artist Walter Battiss, with whom Goodall corresponded on rock-art-related matters and whose career she appears to have followed. Both researchers worked intensively on rock art and produced many pictures inspired by the art (although in different ways and with different outcomes) that have been preserved, at least in part, in institutional archives. During my site visit to the ZMHS, I collected, photographed and compiled a digital archive that I have used to inform my study. I have therefore conducted two types of fieldwork in my exploration of Goodall’s copies: one that actively follows her footsteps in the landscape, and another practised ‘virtually’, from behind my laptop in Johannesburg. In Part Two, I draw on this fieldwork to provide a deeper exploration of Goodall’s copying practice in relation to two further case studies, Makumbe Cave and Diana’s Vow
Description
A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Art History), 2020