From time to time on the Cape’s windy shoreline you see a group of African people standing in the waves, filling with sea-water large plastic containers. It looks like one of those African mysteries one sometimes comes across, and indeed to some extent it is. Yet this one has a sort of explanation. It is a step in the complicated process of dealing with the thokoloshe. These people are going back shortly to Johannesburg with their employers, and they are taking the sea-water for their own use and that of their friends and relatives. They are going to wipe it on the walls of their houses. That way, when the thokoloshe tries to get in he will think he has reached the edge of the sea, and give up.
Who is this unwelcome yet apparently rather naïve being?
Once seen, I would guess, never forgotten. He is a dwarf-faced man only about a metre high, has a single buttock, but makes up for these deficiencies with his most notable attribute. His phallus is so long that he carries it slung over his left shoulder. That the thokoloshe is a product of rather unhealthy sexual fantasy is apparent also from his behaviour.
He seduces innocent girls and indeed those who should know better, and (says Heidi Holland in African Magic):1 ‘Women who have had a sexual encounter with him are said to remain in a state of erotic excitement for days afterwards.’ It is not wise, however. Seduction by a thokoloshe can result in a disabled child. One precaution is to raise your bed on bricks, rather as white settlers used to stand the legs in tins of water to deter ants.
Thokoloshes are presumably too short to climb up.
The other ploy favoured by people living so far inland is to bring back from the coast (or ask your employers to, if they have gone without you) those bottles of sea water.
The thokoloshe is morally ambivalent. He is bad if you are bad, but to innocent children he is a playfellow.
Apart from his sexual role he is to blame for many of the accidents, and worse, of life. He knocks things over and it is his fault if they go missing. He wakes you in the night. He makes you do things you should never have done. The process of dealing with the thokoloshe is not the only ancient belief which affects normal life in modern Africa. Doubtless there are many other habits which are baffling to Europeans but could be explained that way. For instance, bush fires are a serious problem in the scrublands surrounding towns, and some are started by the need to burn down the hut in which the segregation part of initiation into manhood has taken place. How, the white people wonder, can anyone believe such things, to the extent of running their lives by them, in this modern world?
Before meals the white people hold hands and bow their heads while the head of the group addresses an unseen being, who is apparently able to be everywhere at the same time, all the time, and able to hear our words, and understand them in both English and Afrikaans, and in response to our pleas, able to influence our minds, since the leader asks him on behalf of the group to instil gratitude in all their hearts. Once a week some of the white people enter a special building which enables them even better to communicate with this being, through a process of ritual gestures and incantation.
Twice a year they hold great ceremonies in these buildings, supported by lesser rituals in their homes, marking events which occurred in the saga of this being, in a mythological time when the being took a form in which he could be represented on earth. They believe (for instance) that this form of the being was born without a human father and lived again after he was killed, and commemorations of these two beliefs are central to their ceremonial year and indeed govern some of their seasonal secular behaviour as well. They believe that the being in question sees and knows all their deeds and thoughts, and that their personal behaviour is judged, approved or condemned by him; and they hold it right to behave accordingly.
It is somewhat frightening to find that such primitive superstitions not only still rule people’s individual lives, but are apparently accepted as the moral principle of whole nations. What is more, the European people in Africa have themselves signally failed to adopt such spirits as the thokoloshes, and indeed hold it to be an absurdity to do so. Clearly it is taking the white settlers rather a long time to settle in.
Thokoloshe Such an objective conclusion is unsettling, perhaps distasteful. But it is a matter of fair exchange. If the Europeans in Africa have not become African, and would regard much of what is involved in that as retrograde, it is not fair for them to complain that the Africans are slow in conforming to European standards, sometimes meaning that they have not adopted the DutchCalvinistic work-ethic. Religious belief must always be a closed system. If your belief is right, as you must hold it to be, then any alternative is wrong. Yet there is a logical trap inherent in even this certainty. The other parties on their part could say the same thing too. And if one person’s religion is another person’s superstition, to profess a religion at all is to put yourself on an even footing with people you may regard as primitive. 1 Heidi Holland, African Magic. Penguin Books, 2001.
Pages. 132-135.
Dr Michael Senior is a full-time writer specialising in history and mythology.He is a long-standing member of SOF.