Case file · Sacred site
The 'White Lady' of the Brandberg
In 1948 the French prehistorian Henri Breuil claimed a rock painting in Namibia's Brandberg showed a white woman of Mediterranean or Cretan origin.
1948 CE · -21.11, 14.65 · status: explained
The account
The painting was found in 1917 by the surveyor Reinhard Maack. Breuil's theory of foreign visitors fitted colonial ideas that Africans could not have made sophisticated art.
The sceptical view
Later research shows it is a San painting, part of a larger scene, and the 'lady' is probably a man painted with white clay, perhaps a healer or initiate.