Aigamuxa

Midday on the dunes, and the sand is hot enough to blister a heel. A figure is kneeling out there, face down, one leg folded beneath it and the other thrown straight up at the sky, holding perfectly still. It is not praying. It is looking.

The Aigamuxa carry their eyes in their feet. The earliest account puts them at the back of the foot, near the heel; later ones move them forward onto the instep. Either way the arrangement is the same practical disaster, a creature that hunts by sight and cannot see while it is moving. To take in the horizon an Aigamuxab has to halt, drop onto its hands, and hoist a foot into the air like a man checking his boot for a thorn. Some tellings have them stand on their heads instead. It is a bad way to build a hunter, and the stories know it.

They are not one monster but a people, or something the tellers handle as a people. Aigamuxa in the plural, Aigamuxab for a single one, with women among them and households somewhere behind the dunes. What marks them out from their neighbours, beyond the eyes, is the teeth, which the record calls excessively elongated and gives one job. The Aigamuxa eat human beings.

Here is the detail that lifts them clear of the ordinary run of ogres. They do not think of us as people. To an Aigamuxab a human being is a zebra, something to be run down on the flats and torn apart, no different in kind from the striped herds grazing the same country. The line sits in the record without apology, as though it were the most natural mistake in the world.

Jackal met one, and Jackal is Jackal. The trickster falls in with an Aigamuxab out in the open, works out where the thing keeps its eyes long before the thing works out anything about him, and at the chosen moment flings a fistful of tobacco into them. He is gone across the flats while the ogre is still down on its hands with a foot in the air, grinding tobacco and grit into its own sight.

The longest of their stories begins a long way from any monster. A woman bears a son, and the women around her, envious, carry the baby out and leave him to die, laying a dog in his place. The child does not die. An Aigamuxa woman finds him and raises him as her own, which is the nearest thing to tenderness anywhere in the cycle, and he grows up in her house waiting for his chance. He gets horses from the Boers, and water, and thorns, and a rock. Then he rides.

What follows is the oldest chase there is. She comes after him and she is faster than a horse. He drops the water and it swells into a lake she has to swim. He drops the rock and it heaves up into a mountain she has to climb. He drops the thorns last, and while she sits in the dust drawing them out of her body one at a time, the boy she raised gets clean away.

Another captive buys his freedom more cheaply still, leaving a rock behind him in his own place, and his keeper hacks at the thing until the blade turns and the captive is over the horizon. In a fourth story a cannibal woman of this people makes a habit of killing her daughter’s suitors while they sleep. One of them wakes early enough, runs, and climbs a tree. She sets about the trunk with an axe. He whistles up his hounds, and they take her down at the foot of it. The Zulu tell almost the same story several hundred miles away about a monster of their own, which is either borrowing or the same fear arriving twice.

Beyond the eyes and the teeth the tellings are close to silent about what an Aigamuxab actually looks like. Human in shape is as far as most will go. Height, colouring, dress and voice all go unrecorded, and no one says where the Aigamuxa came from either. There is no first Aigamuxab, no curse, no quarrel with a creator. They are simply out there in the sand, the way lions are out there.

Everything that survives of them was gathered in a single stretch of fieldwork between 1903 and 1905, when a German naturalist crossing Namaland and the Kalahari took the stories down in Nama and printed them with a German translation facing. Two years later an American folklorist lifted the Aigamuxa tales out of that volume and set them beside the ogre stories of the rest of the world, and almost everything written in English since has come through that one door.

What they can do is straightforward enough. They are strong enough to carry off a grown person and to keep one alive in the house for years. They can outrun a horse across open ground. The teeth do the rest, and there is no charm, no name, no ritual anywhere in the record that turns an Aigamuxab aside once it has your scent.

What undoes them is the thing they were built with. Everything else about an Aigamuxab is defeated by the fact that it cannot look and move at once, so any pursuit becomes a series of stops, and any pursued person becomes a series of small head starts. Tobacco in the eyes finishes it. So does a rock dressed up as a sleeping man, or an obstacle thrown down behind you, or a pair of dogs. In every story that reached the page, the person walks away and the Aigamuxab is left kneeling in the sand with one foot raised, trying to work out which way the horizon went.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Aigamuxa?

The Aigamuxa are a race of man-eating beings from the folklore of the Nama people of southern Africa. They are human in shape but carry their eyes in their feet, and they hunt and eat people. A single one is called an Aigamuxab.

Why do the Aigamuxa have eyes on their feet?

No telling explains how the arrangement came about; it is simply how they are made. The consequence matters more than the cause: because the eyes face the ground while the creature runs, an Aigamuxab must stop and raise a foot, or go up on its hands, in order to see anything. The earliest record places the eyes at the back of the foot and later accounts move them to the instep.

How do you escape an Aigamuxa?

You use the eyes against them. The trickster Jackal throws tobacco into an Aigamuxab’s feet and walks away while it is blinded, one captive leaves a rock behind in his place for the ogre to hack at, and a foundling raised by an Aigamuxa woman escapes by dropping water, a rock and thorns behind him, which become a lake, a mountain and a body full of thorns. In another tale a man treed by a cannibal woman calls his hounds, and they kill her.

Do the Aigamuxa eat people?

Yes, and the record is blunt about it. They hunt human beings with teeth described as excessively elongated, and they regard the people they hunt as zebras rather than as people. That misclassification, more than the teeth, is what the stories treat as monstrous.

Which people tell stories about the Aigamuxa?

The Aigamuxa belong to the Nama, a Khoikhoi people of what is now Namibia and the northern Cape. The tales were collected in Nama between 1903 and 1905 and published with a German translation, and that collection remains the source of nearly everything known about them.

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