Hai-uri

The grass stirs where nothing should be stirring. A hunter on the dry Cape flats stops walking, because he has felt this before at exactly this hour, when the light goes flat and gold and the heat lifts off the stones in a shimmer. Something is standing half-hidden in the scrub. One shoulder, one arm, one leg, one wet eye fixed on him. He never sees the whole of it, because there is no whole of it to see. Then it springs, and it covers the ground between them in a single bound.

This is the Hai-uri, a monster of the Khoikhoi peoples of southern Africa, and its horror lies in what it lacks. It has only one side. One eye, one ear, one arm, one leg, half a face, half a mouth. The other half of its body is simply not there, either missing outright or held just beyond sight, so that it flickers at the edge of vision like something the eye keeps failing to catch. It is not a creature that was cut in two. It was born this way, complete in its incompleteness, and it eats people.

Descriptions of it are spare, the way folk creatures often are when everyone already knows to fear them. What the stories agree on is the halving and the hunger. Being partly invisible, it can stand close to a person and register only as a wrongness in the air, a movement with no body behind it. What it cannot do is walk like a person, having only the one leg. So it hops. It moves in leaps, and the leaps are fast, faster than a man can run, which is the whole reason a one-legged thing is worth being afraid of. The single limb gathers and releases, gathers and releases, and it comes on in bounds across the open veld.

There is no grand origin story attached to it, no god who made it or hero who first fought it. It belongs instead to a whole family of half-beings that turn up across the region and beyond. The Khoikhoi told of the Aigamuxa as well, an ogre with its eyes set in the soles of its feet, forced to lift a foot to the sky to see. The Zulu had the Tikdoshe, a one-legged, one-armed adversary. In Central Africa there is the Chiruwi, another creature made of a single side. Even the ancient Mediterranean carried the idea, in the monopods that Pliny placed at the edges of the known world, shading themselves under a single enormous foot. The half-man is an old and widespread nightmare, and the Hai-uri is southern Africa’s version of it.

It does not hunt alone in the imagination, either. The Bi-blouk is its female counterpart, told in the same breath, a half-bodied huntress of the same country. Between the two of them the flats are not safe for anyone who wanders off by themselves.

A person walking home at dusk, a herder who has strayed too far from the others, a child sent to fetch something and dawdling on the way back. These are what the Hai-uri waits for. The kill is quick when it lands. It seizes with its one hand and it feeds.

Here is the thing, though. Half a body is also half a grasp. The Hai-uri has one arm to catch with and half a mouth to bite with, and a person who does not freeze, who twists free of that single hand and keeps moving, stands a real chance of living. Its speed is terrible but its grip is not. The same subtraction that makes it uncanny is the flaw that lets its prey slip loose.

Its powers all come from its strangeness. The partial invisibility lets it close the distance unseen. The leaping gives it a hunter’s speed on a single leg. Its whole nature is ambush, the sudden spring on someone who thought they were alone. Its limits come from exactly the same source. One hand cannot hold what two hands could. One leg cannot chase forever. A creature that hunts by shock has nothing left once the shock has passed and the victim is up and running. It is a monster built entirely out of what has been taken away from it, and everything that makes it deadly and everything that makes it survivable are the same missing half.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Hai-uri in African mythology?

The Hai-uri is a man-eating monster from the Khoikhoi mythology of southern Africa. It is a partly invisible creature with only one side to its body, possessing a single eye, ear, arm, and leg, and it hunts and devours people who are caught alone in open country.

What does the Hai-uri look like?

The Hai-uri has only one half of a human-shaped body: one eye, one ear, one arm, one leg, and half a mouth, with its other side either missing or invisible. Because it has a single leg it cannot walk normally and instead moves in fast, bounding leaps, and its partial invisibility makes it hard to see until it strikes.

How can you survive a Hai-uri?

Because the Hai-uri has only one arm and half a mouth, its grip is weak, so a person who does not freeze and manages to twist free of its single hand has a genuine chance of escaping. Its danger comes from the speed and surprise of its leaping ambush rather than from an overpowering hold.

What is the difference between the Hai-uri and the Bi-blouk?

The Hai-uri and the Bi-blouk are a male-and-female pair of half-bodied hunting beings from Khoikhoi folklore, described in almost identical terms. The Bi-blouk is the female counterpart of the Hai-uri, sharing its single-sided body, partial invisibility, and appetite for human prey.

Are there other creatures like the Hai-uri?

Yes, the half-bodied being appears widely. The Khoikhoi also told of the Aigamuxa, and the one-sided monster has close relatives in the Zulu Tikdoshe, the Central African Chiruwi, and the one-legged monopods of ancient Greek and Roman geography, all of them creatures defined by having only a single side or limb.

Related Entries

Bi-blouk, Aigamuxa, Grootslang, Inkanyamba, Tokoloshe, Kishi, Popobawa, Mngwa, Monopod