Qualla: Matsieng Footprints

Matsieng Footprints: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

According to the people who have lived here longest, this is where the world began. On a flat shelf of sandstone northeast of Gaborone, a giant named Matsieng is said to have climbed up out of a waterhole, trailing his animals and his followers behind him. The soft ground recorded their steps, then hardened, and the marks are still there - up to 117 carved footprints and animal tracks pecked into the rock, alongside three natural rock-holes that fill with rainwater. Some traditions give Matsieng one leg, others two, but the heart of the story holds: this is the place of emergence, the threshold between the underworld and the living earth.

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Matsieng Footprints: Footprints That Lead Nowhere

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What unsettles you at Matsieng is how deliberately the prints refuse to make sense as prints. They rarely appear in pairs. Only a few read clearly as a right foot or a left. They form no trails, point toward no destination, and are scattered among the tracks of big cats and other...

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Matsieng Footprints: Deep Time on the Rock

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The engravings are old, somewhere between roughly 3,000 and 10,000 years, which places their likely makers among the hunter-gatherers of the region - perhaps ancestors of the San or the Basarwa. Scattered Late Stone Age artifacts have turned up at the site, though the carvings th...

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Matsieng Footprints: A Creation Story in Many Voices

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The legend of Matsieng runs remarkably consistent across the different peoples of the surrounding country. In the Tswana telling, Matsieng emerges first from the waterhole, followed by the San, the Kgalagadi, and the Tswana in turn - an origin shared, a single doorway through whi...

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Matsieng Footprints: The Woman Who Took the Rubbings

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The site entered the written scholarly record in 1918, when the South African museum director and botanist Maria Wilman came to study it. She took rubbings of the petroglyphs, pressing impressions of the engravings to preserve and compare them - an early act of documentation for ...

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Matsieng Footprints: Still a Living Place

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Matsieng is not a relic sealed behind glass. No one knows for certain what the site was used for in the deep past, but many believe it served as a place of rainmaking, and that purpose endures. The rock-holes no longer water livestock, yet local communities still come to perform ...

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