Buuti

Also Known As: also written Bouti in French and Buti; the ogress of the Somali phrase read into the place name Jabuuti, “the defeat of Buuti”
Region/Culture: East Africa
Mythos: Somali Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: Buuti is an ogress of Somali tradition in Djibouti who drinks the blood of young women, kills women and children by choice and hides behind harmless appearances.
Role in Mythos: She is the terror whose overthrow gives Djibouti its name in the Somali telling, where Jabuuti is read as the place where Buuti was broken.
Relation to Humans: She preys on people, on young women and children above all, and reaches them by looking like someone safe. Her defeat is remembered in the name of a city and a country, though no telling in print says who defeated her.

There is a country named after the death of a monster. Say its name the Somali way, Jabuuti, and the word comes apart in the mouth into two pieces. Jab is a breaking, a defeat. Buuti is the one who was broken.

That is the Somali account of where Djibouti got its name, and it is one of several. The Afar, who share the country, have been said to derive it from a word of their own for a plate. A Yemeni Arabic reading turns it into a sailor’s shout to bring the dhow in. Somebody has even proposed the Egyptian god Thoth. The Somali version is the only one with blood in it. A survey of the country’s languages from Laval University in Quebec gives it in a single line: the place where the ogre was broken.

Buuti is the ogre, and in the fuller tellings she is an ogress. The French spelling is Bouti. Her story reached print through a Djiboutian writer, Omar Youssouf Ali, who published a small book in Djibouti in 1997 and again in 2008 under the title Bouti, the Ogress of Ancient Times, and said on the cover that it was taken from a Somali tale. A reviewer for the French national library’s journal of children’s books read it and found even the cover frightening. This ogress goes after young women to suck their blood and bite off their breasts. She kills, and she prefers to kill women and children. She does it by getting close.

That is her method, and it is the whole of what the tale tells about how she hunts. She can efface herself behind the most reassuring of appearances. A camp of herders at dusk, smoke from the cooking fire, goats being counted in, and a visitor at the edge of the firelight who looks like anybody’s aunt: nothing in that picture is wrong until it is too late to matter. The story calls her immortal and terrifying.

What she really looks like is another matter. The tale gives her no fixed body, which is reasonable for a creature whose talent is looking like somebody else. The only portrait is the one the book’s illustrator, Salam Mohamed Saleh, drew for the cover, where her name is lettered in dripping red and she leans toward the reader with pointed teeth and long clawed fingers.

Nobody says where she came from. No telling gives her a mother, a husband or a beginning. The novelist Abdourahman Waberi, born in Djibouti, put a piece called The Ogress of the Origins into his 1994 book The Land Without Shadows and went further than the storytellers did. He made her the forgotten mother of the place, a cannibal godmother who could give life as easily as take it, and he dated the country’s troubles from her death. That is a writer’s reading and not a folktale. It shows how firmly she sits in the name.

Her end is the strangest part. The name says she was defeated, and it says so of one particular piece of ground, the shore where the port city now stands. Somebody broke her there, and the event mattered enough for the place to be called after it. The hot salt wind off the Gulf of Tadjoura has been blowing over that word ever since. Who struck the blow, and with what, has not come down with it. The hero has been lost and the monster kept.

Her strength lies in disguise and in appetite. She cannot die in the ordinary way, and she chooses the victims least able to fight. A second storybook, by the French writer Yves Pinguilly, retells her with a rain of camel’s milk and a bundle of khat that leaves her too cheerful to eat anyone, and its reviewer warned that he had taken liberties.

Her weakness is recorded in two syllables. An immortal ogress ought not to be beatable, and the Somali name for the country insists that she was beaten. The tale and the place name do not agree with each other, and neither has given way. The reviewer who met her in the storybook thought her purpose was plain enough: she is a figure from tradition who is there to give fear a face, so that it can be seen to lose.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Buuti in Somali folklore?

Buuti is an ogress in Somali tradition from Djibouti. She drinks the blood of young women, kills women and children, and hides behind harmless appearances. The Somali explanation of the name Djibouti says the country is named after her defeat.

How is Buuti connected to the name Djibouti?

In Somali the country is called Jabuuti. One Somali reading splits the name into jab, meaning a defeat or a breaking, and Buuti, the ogress, so the name means the place where Buuti was defeated. Other explanations of the name exist, including an Afar word for a plate and a Yemeni Arabic phrase about a dhow.

What does Buuti do to people?

Buuti attacks young women to suck their blood and bite off their breasts, and she kills women and children by preference. She gets close to her victims by taking on reassuring appearances. The tale describes her as immortal and terrifying.

What does Buuti look like?

No collected tale gives Buuti a fixed body, because she hides behind other appearances. The best-known picture of her is the cover of Omar Youssouf Ali’s storybook, drawn by Salam Mohamed Saleh, which shows her with vampire teeth and clawed fingers.

Who killed Buuti?

No telling in print names the person who defeated Buuti or says how it was done. The place name Jabuuti records only that she was broken at that spot. The identity of the hero has been lost while the name of the ogress survived.