The Europeans brought with them technology, vampires, damnation and priests. The African resisted with traditional bush-lore, water demons, ancestral spirits and the power of the Sangoma. If you really want to experience the clash of beliefs experienced by the indigenous people of sub-Saharan Africa then read the book “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe (the Onitsha people) – it’s remarkable, disturbing and very sad in places.
Africa is huge and much of it remains a mystery. There are genuinely still many African people on this fantastic and mysterious continent that have not seen a Caucasian (white) person. (One of the team experienced this for himself, during 1982, while hiking through the more remote regions of the Transkei Homeland region of South Africa – and this is actually a well explored area!)
The African people of Namibia (German South West Africa), Angola, Zimbabwe (Rhodesia), Malawi (Nyasaland), Zambia (Northern Rhodesia), Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania and many other countries may have won their freedom from colonial rule with the help of communism, plastic explosives and the AK47 assault rifle but they are rapidly surrendering their culture and beliefs to consumerism and two of “Great Religions” - Islam and Christianity.
Times have changed! The pretty Xhosa girls of Umtata have mobile phones and I-pods, the handsome Zulu “bad-boys” of Soweto now show off by drifting stolen cars in empty warehouses and recording American-style “Gangsta Rap” in underground “Shebeen” bars. Some Zimbabweans can’t afford the Trillion “Zim” Dollars they need for a steak (2009) and a loaf of bread but they can still find the time to write online blogs for the BBC. But ... deep in their souls many of them still believe in the other world. This is a place where Westerners are not often invited or, for that matter, welcome. This is the “old” world where beliefs are deep and may even be true. It’s a harsh world as ancient as time and “not cool” in this new rainbow-coloured Africa but still it persists. An African friend once said, “This is the world ridiculed by modern people and so we speak of it not.”
There is much hidden in Africa that remains undiscovered. We have taken a long time to introduce this section on strange African creatures but have done so for a reason. If you are living in the West or far away from the African “bush” then we urge you to respect what you read here about the old beliefs. There is a wonderful line from the Film “Out of Africa” read by Meryl Streep (Karen Blixen) right at the start of the film. It goes...
“I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the north, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up; near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.”
There are literally hundreds of African Cryptids or strange beasts that may or may not exist. Certainly many of them must be imaginary or we would have discovered them by now although I cannot remind you enough just how big the interior of Africa really is and how much of its forests and bush are rarely visited - even by National Geographic film crews. (It’s all about budgets, tropical diseases and not being shot at courtesy of the late USSR) It was only a few years ago that biologists finally acknowledged that there are three species of elephant – not just two. There have been many recent and excitable news stories about the discovery of “Hobbit” skeletons on the Pacific islands of Palau and yet it there are still tribes of Pygmies such as the Aka and Mbuti living in places such as the Congo and Cameroon.
“Every white hunter who has trekked the African big-game trails has heard tell of strange marauding beasts of a kind that never figures on his game-licence, but which, so the natives say, prowl the dark trackways of the bush around the kraals, or lurk in the forest ways and swamps.”
“Nor is the African native a fool in the ways of the bushveld and its beasts; he does not assert that a beast is an mngwa when any old woman in the kraal could tell by a glance at its spoor or by the way it attacked that it is a lion, a leopard or a hyæna. Native hunting lore clearly distinguishes the bush beasts.” Source: Captain W. Lichens, late of the Intelligence and Administrative Services, East Africa.
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Shona African Witch Doctor - Sangoma
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Idoma Mask |
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The Tokkeloshe - Night stalker and Servant of the Witch Doctor |
We will soon provide a list of all the mysterious African creatures that we have been researching ...
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