Impundulu

Over the hills of Pondoland the sky goes the colour of wet slate and the work stops. Nobody hoes in a storm. Nobody touches milk. The rule is not really about the weather, it is about not drawing attention, because the noise overhead is a sound a bird makes with its wings, and the bird has a temper and a memory. When the lightning finally comes down it ploughs the ground open like an ox team, and at the end of the furrow, people said, it leaves its eggs.

The bird is the impundulu. Albert Kropf’s Xhosa dictionary, in the enlarged edition Robert Godfrey brought out at the Lovedale mission press in 1915, records it in the flat voice lexicographers keep for impossible things: a bird that sets its own fat alight and sends it down as lightning, though others say it is a ghost with a cow’s head. Certain people, the entry goes on, are believed to have one, inherited from an ancestor, and to work harm on others with it. The Zulu dictionary of Clement Doke and Benedict Vilakazi is shorter and somehow colder: a bird supposed to be used by women in witchcraft. Kropf also lists a second, modern sense of the word, which by 1915 had attached itself to the electric tramcar.

Nobody quite agrees on what it looks like, and that disagreement is the steadiest thing about it. A Mpondo account collected by Monica Hunter gives it red legs and beak and a pure white body, and then adds that sometimes it appears blue, and all sorts of colours. A diviner she spoke to described something stranger and more exact: the head of a bird, the lower part like a man, feathered with spotted feathers, red legs, a red bill, and a forehead like a human being’s. Sixty years earlier, in Henry Callaway’s collection of Zulu testimony, a man who had wanted for years to see the thing was finally shown a single feather from another man’s bag on the Umsunduzi, and could not settle what colour it was. It glistened. He thought it was red, then saw that it was green, then decided it was something between the two. He was shown a bone as well, run through with fine grey lines. One Mpondo man put it more usefully than any of them: it was like a peacock’s feather, with different markings, and it looked like a rainbow.

Where it touches down it leaves things behind, and this is where the belief stops being scenery and starts costing money. The rings of dark grass out on the veld are strike sites, and people dig there for the egg. They dig at the foot of a tree that has been hit. In Callaway’s Zulu material the diggers are after a hard object like the shank of an assegai buried at the strike, and after the bird itself, which stays on the ground in the fog afterwards and can be killed by whoever gets there first. Its fat was reckoned the most powerful lightning medicine there was, and a heaven-doctor who had eaten the bird had a courage that a doctor without one could not fake. The trade in these parts was brisk enough that white shopkeepers in East London were selling what they claimed was the fat of familiars.

A boy was left alone in the cattle enclosure one afternoon while the men went inside with the milk sacks. He put his mouth to a cow and drank, and a voice behind him said, leave some for me. He turned round and saw a thing with the head of a bird and the legs of a man. He told nobody. A fortnight later he fell ill, and it was the diviner who dragged the story out of him.

That is the impundulu going about its ordinary business. Its other life is domestic. In Pondoland it belongs to a woman, always, and to her it does not come as a bird at all. It arrives as a very beautiful young man who becomes her lover, and the descriptions of him are precise in a way the descriptions of the bird never are: a stiff collar, whiskers, a very red mouth, dressed as though he had come back from the goldfields. Another woman said he wore a many-coloured trade blanket. He waits until she is alone, at the river or out gathering firewood. It begins with dreams, and to dream of a river, or of green fields, or of pumpkins, counts as the same dream. First she dreams of him and then she takes him. A herbalist can treat it, with washing medicine made from the root of a white amaryllis and a full confession of every dream, but only while the thing is young. After that it stays.

At a homestead called Ncotsho, a stranger turned up and asked whether anyone there knew the son of so-and-so, because he had a message: the man’s sister was ill. The man went home, was told to go to her, and died on the road. Word of his death reached his sister, who had never been sick a day. Her people went to a diviner, who asked whether they had not seen a man carrying a message about a girl being ill. That, he said, was the impundulu.

Its killing is bureaucratic rather than wild. It asks its mistress for people. On the farms of the Ciskei the same creature was said to suck people’s blood outright, or to kick them so that their backs and chests hurt and they spat blood, and the diagnostic sign in Pondoland was equally specific: pain between the shoulder blades, then blood in the cough. Chest pain, stomach ache and headache all meant something else. One family left the countryside for town because every one of them had died spitting blood except the daughter-in-law they held responsible. A nurse in East London watched a young mother explain that her baby would not feed because she had an impundulu, and a Thikoloshe, and the snake, and they were jealous. She said she loved the baby very much, and that she loved them too. The baby died within the week.

The inheritance is deliberate and it is done with a blade. A woman with an impundulu, when she is dying, scarifies two of her daughters and rubs medicine into the cuts so that they will not be afraid when the thing shows itself to them. Those two will get their own from the sky. Her sisters, uncut, will never see it. The mother’s own bird goes back where she got it, or drifts about looking for somebody to sleep with.

Its limits are mostly the limits of an animal. It likes milk, and a herbalist who wants it dead puts poisonous herbs in a bowl of milk and waits; the trapping is described as a thing that has actually been done, not a thing that might be. It can be killed at the strike site by anyone quick and stupid enough. Its eggs can be dug out before they come to anything, although the same eggs, ground up with a fish that shines in the dark and stirred while an enemy’s name is spoken, will bring a cloud over that enemy’s house. The one restraint that mattered most was social. It kills when it is asked, so the way to be safe from it is to be owed nothing by anybody who has one. When it strikes without being sent, people said the chief was amusing himself. Impundulu is addressed as inkosi, chief, out of politeness, and Hunter got a quiet telling off for asking blunt questions about him on a hot morning: do not speak of the nkosi like that, especially when the sun is so hot.

Almost nobody claimed to have seen one. The phrase Hunter heard over and over was that people would not talk about these things if they were not there, and even diviners, whose living depended on the bird, told her they had never laid eyes on it themselves. Her informants added one more thing that is easy to skate past. The impundulu, they said, was a comparatively new familiar in Pondoland, and they had got it from the people living to the west of them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the impundulu?

The impundulu is the lightning bird of Xhosa and Zulu belief, a creature understood to be the lightning itself and to be kept by particular women as a familiar. Thunder is the beating of its wings and forked lightning is its droppings. It kills people when its owner asks it to.

What does the impundulu look like?

Accounts differ sharply. The fullest description gives it the head of a bird, the lower body of a man, spotted feathers, red legs, a red bill and a human forehead, while other tellings make it a pure white bird with red legs that can look blue or any colour at all. Everyone who claimed to have seen a feather agreed only that it glistened and shifted colour.

Does the impundulu drink blood?

Yes. On the farms of the Ciskei it was said to suck people’s blood, or to kick them so that they suffered pain in the back and chest and coughed blood. In Pondoland the recognised sign that the impundulu had killed someone was pain between the shoulder blades followed by blood in the cough.

How does someone get an impundulu?

It passes down the female line. A woman who owns one scarifies two of her daughters before she dies and rubs medicine into the cuts so that they will not fear it when it reveals itself, and those daughters go on to get their own from the sky. Daughters who are not cut never see it at all.

Can the impundulu be killed?

It can. The bird is known to be fond of milk, so a herbalist wanting rid of one sets out a bowl of milk laced with poisonous herbs, and it is also said to be vulnerable on the ground immediately after a lightning strike. Its eggs can be dug out of the strike furrow before they hatch.

Related Entries

Tokoloshe, Mamlambo, Inkanyamba, Grootslang, Unkulunkulu, uMvelinqangi, Obayifo, Adze, Asanbosam (Sasabonsam), Soucouyant, Asema, Strix, Thunderbird