Ditaolane

Ash saved her. She had been sitting on the heap outside the huts when the sound came down the valley, so she pushed both hands into the cold grey powder and worked it over every inch of her skin, then crawled into the calves’ pen and stopped moving. The thing that came looking filled the entrance and studied her for a while. A stone, it decided, and went away.

Behind it the valley was empty. Khodumodumo had come through a pass in the mountains and worked the villages one after another without any particular hurry, taking the people, the cattle, the goats, the dogs and the fowls, and it swelled with every swallow until the narrow neck of rock it had entered by would no longer let it back out. So it stayed there, wedged in the gap, a shapeless mass the size of a hill that had not been there the day before. Some tellers call it Kammapa instead. Nobody gives it a shape, because it does not really have one.

The woman was near her time. She gave birth to a boy on the floor of the calves’ pen, set him down, and turned away for the minute it takes to gather something soft to lay him on. When she looked back a grown man was sitting in his place with two or three spears across his knees and a string of divining bones around his neck. She said, “Hallo, man. Where is my child?” He said, “It is I, Mother.”

The bones are where his name comes from. *Ditaola* are the pieces a Sotho diviner throws and reads, and a child who arrives already wearing them arrives already knowing things. Other versions do not bother with the name at all and simply call him Moshanyana, the little boy, which is its own kind of joke about a person who was never small for longer than a minute.

She took him up onto the wall of the kraal and pointed at the pass. That object filling the gap, as big as a mountain, is Khodumodumo. He climbed down, fetched his spears, ground the blades against a stone until they took an edge, and walked the length of the valley.

The beast opened its mouth for him and he simply stepped around it. All that bulk had nowhere to turn; it could not swing itself about fast enough to reach him, and he drove a spear into its side, then a second, and it settled and died. Then he took his knife to it, and the carcass began to argue. A man’s voice shouted not to cut there. He tried a second place and slashed a stranger’s leg to the bone. He tried a third and a cow lowed and somebody yelled at him to mind the cow. A goat bleated, a dog barked, a hen went up in a clatter, and he worked around all of them until the whole population of the valley came out into the light, blinking, filthy, alive.

They gave him cattle until he had a herd, and their daughters to choose a wife from, and the chieftainship, and he built himself a good kraal and settled into it. It lasted a while.

The man whose leg he had cut never let it go. Long after the wound closed he was still moving quietly among people who had begun to resent their deliverer, and among those who had never been comfortable with a chief who could not possibly be an ordinary human being. They dug a pit and covered it with dry grass, the same trick the Bapedi are said to have used on Huveane, and he walked around it. They built a fire in the courtyard meaning to throw him in, and something like madness came over them so that they fought each other and threw in one of their own instead. They tried to push him off a cliff, and he brought the man who went over back to life. They took him hunting, gave him the deepest place in a cave, and stacked a fire across the mouth of it while he slept; when they turned round he was standing among them.

He let them do it in the end. He stopped countering, and they killed him, and some of the Basotho who tell it add that his heart went out of him and escaped and became a bird.

Not every teller ends there. One version has him slip away by turning into a stone that one of his enemies throws across a river, which is a strange note for a man who spent the whole story refusing to run. Another gives him an ox that warns him of danger, cannot be killed unless it consents, and comes back to life after it has been slaughtered and eaten; in that telling the person who tries to poison him is his own mother, frightened by what the neighbours are saying, and the poisoned bread kills his father by accident instead. The ox puts it plainly: you would have died yourself, your mother does not love you.

His powers are all of a piece with how he arrived. He came into the world finished, armed and reading the bones, so nothing surprises him and nothing quite kills him either; he outlives fire, pit and precipice, and hands life back to a man who has already hit the rocks. What none of it protects him against is being disliked. The monster was slow and enormous and could be got around in an afternoon. Ill-will is small, patient, comes from the people he saved, and arrives inside his own house wearing the face of his mother, and against that his gifts do nothing at all.

He is a hero, not a god, and it is worth saying so plainly, because he collects divine-sounding labels in modern retellings that the older collections do not support. What those collections do show is how far back the story is written down. When Eugène Casalis printed it in 1841 in his study of the Sotho language as *Kammapa and Litaolane*, it was one of the first three Bantu folktales ever put in front of European readers, and for nearly two decades afterwards almost nothing else from the region was in print. Édouard Jacottet, who collected two separate versions of it in Sesotho, thought Casalis reliable but gently warned that the missionary had a habit of smoothing his material into something a European reader would find easier to like. The tale kept moving. Thomas Mofolo used the swallowing monster in *Moeti oa Bochabela* as a foreshadowing of a redeemer, and in 1952 Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng turned it into *Senkatana*, a Sesotho tragedy published by Witwatersrand University Press and still read as a classic of the language; Mofokeng, who had taken a doctorate on African folklore, was dead of tuberculosis five years later at thirty-four.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ditaolane?

Ditaolane is a hero of Sotho-Tswana tradition who killed the swallowing monster Khodumodumo and released the people it had eaten. He was born full-grown in a calves’ pen, already carrying spears and a string of divining bones, after his mother survived the monster by covering herself in ash. The people made him their chief in gratitude and later killed him.

What monster did Ditaolane kill?

Ditaolane killed Khodumodumo, also called Kammapa, a huge shapeless creature that swallowed every person and animal in a valley and grew so large it became trapped in the mountain pass it had entered by. Ditaolane speared it from the side, where it was too heavy to turn and reach him, then cut the carcass open and freed the people, cattle, goats, dogs and fowls inside.

How did Ditaolane die?

Ditaolane was murdered by the people he had rescued, at the urging of a man whose leg he accidentally cut while opening the monster. They tried a covered pit, a fire in the courtyard, a cliff and a burning cave, and he escaped all of them before finally allowing them to kill him without resistance. Some Basotho tellings add that his heart escaped his body and became a bird.

Is Ditaolane the same as Senkatana?

They are the same figure under different names. The Sesotho folktale is titled *Moshanyana oa Senkatana*, and the hero also appears simply as Moshanyana, meaning “little boy”, or as Litaolane in the oldest printed spelling. The name Senkatana became the usual one for him after Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng’s 1952 stage tragedy of that title.

Where does the story of Ditaolane come from?

The tale comes from the Basotho of Lesotho and the surrounding highveld, and it was among the very first African folktales ever published in Europe. Eugène Casalis printed it in 1841 as *Kammapa and Litaolane*, and Édouard Jacottet later recorded two full Sesotho versions of it. Versions of the same swallowing-monster story are told across a wide stretch of Africa.

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Kholomodumo, Modimo, Tokoloshe, Inkanyamba, Grootslang, Impundulu, Mamlambo, Unkulunkulu, uMvelinqangi, Amadlozi, Ibonia, Perseus, Theseus