The Lightning-Bird of Pondoland

The cases are the cases of the Eastern Cape. The territory is the former Transkei, the country of the Mpondo, of the Bhaca, of the southern Xhosa. The cases were entered, into the late 1950s, in the magistrate court records of the district commissioners as homicides for which the impundulu was named as the instrument and the witch as the responsible party. The bird itself was not in court. The bird, the records say, came at night, and only to the kraal it belonged to.

It belonged to a woman.

The ethnography that Hammond-Tooke compiled in Bhacaland in the late 1950s describes the inheritance of the impundulu as matrilineal. A daughter received the bird from her mother on the mother’s death. The bird was kept in the hut of the witch. By day it was invisible, or was kept as a white fowl, or was hidden as a small object beneath the sleeping mat. By night it came out in the shape it preferred. The shape was a man.

On the man in the grey suit

He was white.

The records are specific on the colour. The impundulu in human form was a white man, tall, in a grey suit, hat in his hand. He came in the evening. He came to the door of the hut. The witch let him in. The husband, sleeping on the other side of the hut, did not wake. The bird in man’s form sat beside the witch on the sleeping mat. The witch lifted her skirt. The bird drank from a small cut at the inside of her thigh. The cut, in the morning, was the only physical trace.

Hammond-Tooke’s informants were consistent on the order. The drinking was not predatory. It was the maintenance of the relationship. The bird required the blood of its mistress. In return, the bird was the instrument of her grievances. If she had been wronged by a neighbour, the bird went. If she had been refused at a beer-drink, the bird went. If a co-wife had been favoured, the bird went.

The bird did not enter the houses of the wronged. The bird passed them.

On the kick in passing

The strike was not always seen.

The records of the Mpondo informants describe the impundulu as moving fast at night, and as visible only to those it was visiting. To everyone else the night was unremarkable. The wronged neighbour, walking from one kraal to another, might feel a sudden weight against his chest, or a kick at his ribs, or a wind that was not the wind. He would walk on. By morning he might have a small bruise. He might not. The records emphasise that the strike was rarely felt at the moment it was given. The first sign was the cough.

The cough came within days. The records of the district surgeons in the Transkei, into the 1950s, entered the diagnosis as phthisis, as tuberculosis, as pleural effusion. The records of the kraals entered the diagnosis as the bird. Hammond-Tooke’s analysis in the Man paper of 1974 sets the two registers side by side. The colonial medical archive recorded the histology. The Mpondo archive recorded the cause. The two were not, in the local view, in conflict. The bird had done it. The lung had filled because the bird had kicked it.

The blood came up at the second week. The patient, the records say, did not last past the fourth.

On the inquest at the kraal

The witch was named.

The records of the magistrate court describe the procedure. When a death by impundulu was suspected, the family of the deceased called a diviner. The diviner did not work from the corpse. The diviner worked from the household of the deceased and the network of grievances around it. The bird, the records say, did not strike at random; the bird struck where the witch had been wronged. The diviner asked. The household answered. The witch was named.

The naming was followed, in the older period, by the mhlahlo, the public ordeal at which the named witch was required to confess and to surrender the bird. In the colonial period the mhlahlo was banned. The naming continued. The naming, in the magistrate records of the 1920s and 1930s, was sometimes followed by the witch’s death at the hands of the bereaved family. The court tried these as homicides. The defence, in several of the cases Hammond-Tooke summarises, was that the deceased had been a witch, that the impundulu had been hers, and that the killing had been the only available means of stopping the bird.

The court did not accept the defence. The kraal did not accept the court.

The bird, in the cases where the named witch was killed, was said to die with her. In the cases where the witch was acquitted, the bird was said to have been passed to the daughter the night before the verdict.

The archive holds no position on whether the impundulu takes the form of a man or only seems to. The archive observes only that the cut was at the thigh, and that the cough came on the second week, and that the district surgeons of the Transkei wrote phthisis in the column for cause of death, and that the kraal, in the next column it kept for itself, wrote the bird.