Tokoloshe

In this week's episode we're heading to South Africa and looking at the horrible Tokoloshe from Zulu mythology. Why do South Africans keep their beds up off the floor? How do these horrible monsters manifest in dreams? Find out this week!

Transcript

INTRO:

Hello and welcome to Myth Monsters, my name is Erin and I’ll be your host for these little snack bite size podcasts on folklore and mythical monsters from around the world. 

These podcasts focus on the actual cryptids, folklore and mythic monsters from global mythology, rather than focusing on full stories of heroes and their big adventures.

I’ll also be dropping in some references that they have to recent culture and where you can see these represented in modern day content so you can learn more, and get as obsessed as I am about these absolute legends of the mythological world.

We’re halfway through April, and it’s nearly the Easter weekend thank goodness - not sure if this is a tradition elsewhere, but here in the UK we do always have a long weekend for Easter which is much appreciated. Christian originated country does actually sometimes have its benefits - so next weekend I’ll have some time off to sort my move out!

Don’t worry - I am moving soon, but I’m pre-writing and recording the episodes so that you’ll still get my lovely voice on a Thursday, but if you follow me on social media, you’ll notice I am a little quieter than usual so I can sort my life out!

DESCRIPTION:

We’re covering a new type of mythology monster this week - and we’re heading back to Africa to look at the Zulu and Xhosa monster, the Tokoloshe. It’s also called the Tikoloshe or the Hili in some spellings, but I’m going with the most pleasing to look at and say if I’m completely honest. 

You might not have heard of this one, but it’s one of the most prevalent within South African mythology. The best way I can describe this monster in one word is horrible - I think that’s the best one I can come up with. 

The Tokoloshe is usually described as a dwarf sized, white goblin, which has a protruding belly, a large hole in it’s forehead and gouged out eyes. But this is just its normal appearance, they can appear as large primates, or even bears when summoned. It’s said its favourite victims are school children, and this monster is mostly used as a bogeyman tale to make sure children behave but these monsters are particularly gross.

They are aggressive, but they don’t just roam around looking for prey, they are, as I said a second ago, summoned. 

Tokoloshe are the embodiment of jealousy, and are summoned by a witch to cause misery on the intended, by the person wishing to curse them. It’s considered one of the harsher curses, as these little goblins are truly the stuff of nightmares. It’s said to have a very large male appendage, which is so big, they have to carry it over their shoulder like a firehose - which when I first read during my research, I actually laughed out loud with the image in my head. However, as they are technically a type of demon - they have a ravenous sexual appetite - so you can kind of imagine where this one is going.

Anyway, to summon this monster, the person asking for the curse has to swear to give the soul of a loved one, but when the Tokoloshe is summoned - it will choose which one. It will also only take its payment when it’s ready - meaning the perpetrator could be waiting months, maybe even years for their loved one to be taken.

The summoning is pretty intense too, the witch would need to find a dead body, and pierce the eye sockets and forehead with a hot iron - then sprinkle the body with a special powder, which shrinks it. The Tokoloshe is then alive, and ready to torment the victim and is paid by the summoner feeding it curdled milk and cutting the hair on its head. If summoned by a woman, the Tokoloshe would also have sex with it’s master as a reward, and also an obligation - and it can even be considered a familiar of the witch.

Now, this is the pretty terrible part, the Tokoloshe would then rampage towards the victims house in complete darkness, but also completely invisible if it drinks water, or eats a pebble - and basically lives with that person until the demon is satisfied. It would torment this person in various ways, with little things like biting their toes in their sleep or scratching them, to as far as raping both men and women, strangling, causing sickness and even death. So it’s pretty terrible - and one that is still really upheld in these cultures now. 

The only positive of this, is that you’re meant to sleep really well if you’re being targeted by a Tokoloshe, as it wants to keep you asleep so it can do all these things to you. So you’ll have some really good dreams, including sexy ones too apparently, and be really well rested - I’m not sure it’s worth the pay off though.

So how do you protect yourself and eventually get rid of these little brutes? So to stop yourself from being attacked, you would raise your bed up so that the Tokoloshe is too short to reach you. As beds in Zulu culture when this monster myth started were on the floor of homes, they would use bricks and paint pots to elevate their beds off the floor so they were out of reach as they are particularly bad climbers and very short. You could also scatter blessed salts around the door frames and window sills of your house, and they are actually sold as Tokoloshe salts - which is fun. 

You would banish this monster by going to see a sangoma - which is a Zulu witch doctor, who would find and destroy the muthi left by the original witch who created the Tokoloshe. Muthi is traditional African medicine, which for the creation of the Tokoloshe consisted of oils, herbs and animal body parts. This mixture is then buried close to the house of the person the witch wishes the tokoloshe to focus on - so the sangoma simply destroys this and the Tokoloshe is banished. However you can also ask them to ask your ancestors to protect you with incense, or to use the blood of a black chicken to cleanse your body - so there are options. 

The other option is to kind of wait it out, til it’s satisfied then you can figure out who cast the curse by seeing whose relatives have died recently I suppose. 

ORIGIN:

Now onto etymology - well I’m so sorry but I couldn’t find any definitions of this that break down the existence of the word I’m afraid. I did find that in English it means a malevolent mythical man-like animal of short stature, but that’s just the word’s description, so not very interesting. However, the only thing I did find is that the hard T in Tokoloshe is really odd in isiZulu, and the only other word that works like this is the Tsetse fly - which can cause a sleeping sickness, so it might be linked to this, so that’s kind of cool. 

I would usually go on to talk about where these monsters historically came from and how long they’ve been mentioned in folklore, but I honestly could not find anything - but with this, you can kind of tell that it’s quite an old folktale. It’s also said that the natives tend to avoid speaking about this monster to avoid its wrath, much like the Skinwalkers of Native American folklore or Slenderman from US modern folklore, so it’s quite hard to find much information on this part of this monster. 

When talking to my South African pals about this monster, I found that they just knew the description and the prevention methods to keep it away from you - not really much about the historical or folklore aspect, so the idea of not talking about it must be pretty rife. 

However, what I can tell you is that it’s old enough to link back to when natives would have their beds on the floor as I mentioned earlier and  would build fires in their rondavels to keep warm in the nights. Their beds, which were grass mats, would be on the floor encircling the flames. Now why do we think that is? That’s because fire creates carbon monoxide, which is known as the silent killer - most people in western countries have carbon monoxide alarms as our boilers can leak these and literally kill us in our sleep. Carbon monoxide is much heavier than air, so anyone on the floor would be particularly susceptible - meaning sometimes, these families would wake up to one of their perfectly healthy relatives dead in their bed.

This death was often linked to the Tokoloshe, tormenting them to death in their sleep - which thus created the solution, raising the beds with bricks or anything they could get their hands on to avoid being attacked by them, but it also mitigated the carbon monoxide poisoning risk! 

But that doesn’t mean that belief in the Tokoloshe has faded in South Africa, oh no - my friends who I chatted to about this are all in their mid to late twenties, and all know about the Tokoloshe, as it is considered a real risk. The Zulu and Xhosa communities are known as being very superstitious, which is never to anyone’s detriment of course - much like native folklore that we see across the world, so it does make sense. 

There are a load of sightings to talk about and you can find them all really easily on Google too - these reports make it into South African newspapers, and make for a brilliant read from across the pond. Tokoloshe are blamed for a myriad of problems to this day, such as divorce, infidelity, murder and sexual assault, I found one case in 1933 where a man murdered his 9 year old nephew because he believed he was a Tokoloshe and one that three kids in the 1990’s were admitted to hospital with needles in their bodies, again blamed on the Tokoloshe. 

The most famous story of a Tokoloshe in modern times are a couple of front page articles in 2009 where a woman was terrorised by a Tokoloshe, losing her job, house and getting divorced and saying that she had seen a monster with hairy legs entering her bedroom with her two children. Other stories focus on the sexual aspect of the Tokoloshe with some saying that she dreamt of having sex with a Tokoloshe and it was very real and he was so good. However, one of the friends of the woman in the article said that ‘it will come for you every night until you can’t have children anymore’.

There’s also an interesting discussion on the Tokoloshe appearing as a different race to the person they are sexually assualting in these dreams - which has apparently created racial disparity in some regions, some saying that as a black woman, they would dream of having sex with a white man and vice versa, then the Tokoloshe is kind of used as a scapegoat to avoid any issues between races in South Africa. 

And that’s another thing, is that they are used often as a scapegoat to other crimes, such as the child abuse and murder in the first two stories I mentioned - it’s also sometimes easier for victims of rape to seek medical attention from their local sangoma rather than face the consequences of revenge or shame from local doctors or hospitals, and can then blame it on the Tokoloshe to avoid repercussions from this - which is unbelievably sad. There was even a serial killer called Elifasi Msomi in 1953 who raped, killed and dismembered 15 people in South Africa and said that he was possessed by a Tokoloshe whilst he did it - so that’s pretty screwed up.

Now I’ve only really got one real life comparison for this - and that’s the lemur if you can believe it or not. It’s said that the primate version of the Tokoloshe myth sounded a little too familiar to lemurs, who are native to South Africa and tend to not really care if they’re in your house or not. They can be found to be sitting on people in their sleep or even injuring them - so this could maybe be a possibility, but it seems like a serious push.

CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE: 

Onto cultural significance, for art - there are some really crazy art pieces around the Tokoloshe, but most of them are independent creators, so for this week, I would advise having a look if you fancy looking at these horrible goblins. They’re really cool, and there is so much variation, but it doesn’t make them any prettier to set your eyes on.

For movies, I’ll warn you, there are not many but the ones about the Tokoloshe as A Reasonable Man from 1999, which is about the uncle murdering his nephew, The Tokoloshe from 2018 and Tokoloshe: An African Curse from 2020, this one is also called Tokoloshe: The Calling sometimes. A Reasonable Man actually has some really good reviews, so I would advise having a watch. 

Although for some other sleep based monster films, you also have Marianne, The Nightmare, Mara, The Haunting of Mia Moss and Dead Awake. 

TV is super slim on pickings I’m afraid, there aren’t any on the Tokoloshe and finding TV shows with monsters who attack in your sleep is a little rare but I do know that X-Files and Twilight Zone are both good ones for this kind of thing!

For video games, you’ve got Among the Sleep, Happy Game, Alan Wake, Weird Dreams, Legend of Zelda and Neverending Nightmares - but again, they’re more to do with nightmares or shadow people, nothing on the Tokoloshe I’m afraid.

For my book recommendation this week, I suggest looking at The Terror that Comes in the Night by David J Hufford as it’s always a recommendation when it comes to sleep based monsters, this book is written by a folklorist who looks into monsters like this. Another for specifically Zulu and African folklore, look into Indaba My Children: African Folktales by Vusa mazulu Credo Mutwa, for some amazing stories for all ages from the whole African continent. 

DO I THINK THEY EXISTED? 

Now it’s time for, do I think they existed? 

You know what, I have actually been a bit convinced when it comes to this one. Only because of the sheer, full hearted belief, so much so that it’s in newspapers that the people of this culture have behind it. I know we talk about fairies and angels in the UK, but it’s generally something to be slightly mocked for if you’re really into them - whilst in South Africa, this one is whole-heartedly accepted and respected too. I love it when these kind of folklore stories are still prevalent in the modern day, as a mythology podcaster and generally a folklore fan, it fills my heart with joy that these kind of stories still go around - it brings people of the same community and culture together, which should totally be celebrated, but maybe not in the form of a sleep raping goblin.

But do I think there are monsters that are symbols of violent sex, mischief and weapons of witches? Totally - and with the history this one has behind it, it’s completely taken on a life of its own, so who knows if this one is roaming the lands? If you know anything about this monster, or are South African yourself and have a story - please do get in touch, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one.

OUTRO: 

What an interesting monster, and our first one from this type of mythology - and not something I knew very much about, I’ll be the first to admit. Hopefully we’ll be covering something a little more unknown to Western audiences again soon!

Next week, we’re heading back to the Americas for the first time in a little while and we’re looking at another horrible spooky monster from our nightmares, the Wendigo from native Canadian mythology. Don’t say their name next Thursday and I’ll take the hit for doing it instead - don’t worry.

For now thank you so much for listening, it’s been an absolute pleasure. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give it a rating on the service you’re listening on - I’ve got the twitter for any questions, or suggestions on what monsters to cover next and I’d love to hear from you. The social media handles for Tiktok, Youtube and Instagram are mythmonsterspodcast, and twitter is mythmonsterspod. But all of our content can be found at mythmonsters.co.uk - you can also find us on Goodpods and Patreon if you want to help me fund the podcast, ya know if you feel like it.

Come join the fun and share this with your pals, they might love me as much as you do.

But for now, stay spooky and I’ll see you later babes.