Southern Africa is the historic range of the San peoples, and their religion is the oldest continuously attested in Africa because it left a record on rock.
Tens of thousands of painted and engraved sites survive across the region, from the Drakensberg to Namibia, some of them very ancient and some painted within the last two centuries. The dominant modern interpretation reads much of the imagery in terms of the trance dance, still practised in living San communities, in which healers enter an altered state through hours of rhythmic dancing and singing, draw out sickness, and travel to deal with the dead and with the game. Figures with animal features, bleeding noses, and postures matching those described by healers appear repeatedly, and the eland, an animal of exceptional ritual importance, is the most commonly painted large mammal.
The other principal source is textual and unusual. In the 1870s Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd recorded many thousands of pages of narrative, in the language of Xam speakers imprisoned in Cape Town, taken down verbatim with an interlinear translation. That archive preserves a mythology of the early race, of the trickster Kaggen, and of the origin of the moon and the stars, from a people whose language is now extinct.
Mathias Guenther's comparative study warns against treating San religion as a single system, since practice varies considerably between groups.