Kholomodumo

Also Known As: Lesotho Sesotho; also Khodumodumo, Kgodumodumo in South African Sesotho, and Kammapa in some tellings; the name is old enough that its sense is argued, and the usual reading is something close to “great noise”
Region/Culture: Southern Africa
Mythos: Sotho-Tswana Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It swallows every living thing it meets and keeps them alive inside itself, growing with each village until its own size becomes a cage.
Role in Mythos: It is the emptiness that a hero is born to undo, the disaster that explains why there was once nobody left in the valleys.
Relation to Humans: It does not bargain, curse, tempt or test; it simply arrives and eats a nation, cattle and dogs and hens included. The people it swallows are not killed but stored, which is why the whole catastrophe can be reversed with a knife.

The valley was quiet in the wrong way. No dogs barking down the slopes, no goats complaining, no smoke standing up off the cooking fires, and in the last village a woman sitting very still on the ash-heap with grey powder drying on her arms and her eyelids and the backs of her hands. She had heard it long before she saw it. Everybody in that country had heard it coming.

Names crowd around this thing because nothing else about it will hold still. Kholomodumo in Lesotho, Khodumodumo and Kgodumodumo across the border, Kammapa in other tellings, and the word itself old enough that Sesotho speakers argue over what it once meant, most often landing on something like a great noise. What it does not have is a face. No teeth are described, no eyes, no colour, no number of legs. Nobody in the story ever looks at it properly. The tellers give bulk and appetite and leave the rest of the page blank, which turns out to be far worse than a description would have been.

It came into the country through a gap in the mountains and ate its way down the valley, village by village, taking the people first and then the cattle, then the goats, then the dogs, then the hens off the thatch. Whatever moved went in. The woman on the ash-heap survived by not being alive enough to notice: she smeared herself grey from scalp to ankle, crawled into the calves’ pen and crouched on the ground with her chin down and her breathing shallow. The thing came and put itself over the opening and looked in. She was the colour of the floor. It took her for a stone and went away.

That was the mistake, and it was not hers.

Full of a valley, it turned back toward the narrow neck of rock it had come in by, and could not fit. It had grown while it fed. It wedged there and stayed, and from the village wall it looked like a new hill had arrived overnight in the pass.

Meanwhile the woman gave birth. She put the baby down on the ground and went to find something soft for a bed, and when she came back a grown man was sitting where she had left an infant, holding two or three spears, with a string of divining bones at his throat. She asked him where her child was. He told her he was her child. Because of the bones, ditaola, the tellings usually call him Ditaolane; some just call him the little boy, and the version that reached the modern stage calls him Senkatana. He asked what had happened to the people, and to the cattle, and to the dogs, and got the same answer every time.

He ground his spear-points on a stone before he went. When he came to the end of the valley the beast opened itself to take him, and he stepped aside, and it could not turn. All that bulk was a wall now, not a weapon. He went round its flank and put one spear in, and then a second, and it settled and died without any of the noise its name promises.

Then came the delicate part, which is the part the tellers enjoy. He set his knife to it and a man’s voice shouted from inside, telling him not to cut. He tried further along and another voice cried out, too late, the blade already through the man’s leg. He shifted again and heard a cow low, and somebody call out to mind the cow. A goat. A dog. A hen. He worked his way around that enormous unresisting body listening for whoever was directly under the edge of the knife, and one at a time he let a nation back out into the daylight.

They gave him cattle. They gave him their daughters. They made him chief, and for a while the valleys filled up again.

The man with the ruined leg never let it go. He waited until he could feel the mood turning, and then he began saying quiet things to people who were already tired of being grateful, and to the ones who had privately decided that anyone born full-grown was not quite a person. They dug a pit and covered it with dry grass; he walked around it. They built a fire in the courtyard meaning to throw him in, and something like a madness came over them and they threw one of their own instead. They tried a precipice, and he brought the dead man back up alive. They took him hunting, gave him the deepest place in the cave and lit a fire across the mouth of it in the night, and when they turned round he was standing among them. In the end he simply stopped. He let them do it, and did not defend himself. Some of the Basotho finish there and add one line: that his heart went out of him and escaped and became a bird.

Not every telling ends in that key. In one he escapes by turning himself into a stone that somebody throws across a river. In another, printed by Édouard Jacottet in his Treasury of Ba-Suto Lore in 1908, he is kept alive by an ox that warns him of every ambush, that cannot be killed without agreeing to it, and that comes back after being slaughtered and eaten. That version carries the coldest detail in the whole cycle: his own mother, worn down by what the neighbours are saying about her strange son, bakes poison into his bread. The ox tells him not to eat. His father eats it instead and dies.

The monster’s powers are all one power, and it is enormous. Nothing outruns it, nothing fights it, no charm turns it, and no shelter holds against it except the accident of looking like a rock. Its weaknesses are the same power run to its end. It grows with everything it eats until it cannot pass through a gap it walked through the day before. It is too vast to pivot, so a man on foot can simply walk around it. It has no armour anywhere. And because the swallowed keep on living, breathing and lowing and cackling inside it, every single thing it has ever done can be undone by somebody patient with a knife.

The story has not stopped moving. Thomas Mofolo put it into Moeti oa Bochabela, where old men tell it to a restless young dreamer named Fekisi and it comes out sounding like a promise of a redeemer. Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng, who took a doctorate at Wits for work on African folklore, turned it into the Sesotho play Senkatana, giving the assassin a name, Bulane, and a wife, Mmadiepetsane, to do the persuading. And in 2020 palaeontologists named a nine-metre Triassic dinosaur out of the Maphutseng bone bed in Lesotho Kholumolumo ellenbergerorum, because that is the word Basotho people reach for when they are shown enormous bones coming out of their own ground.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Kholomodumo?

Kholomodumo is a swallowing monster from Sotho-Tswana myth in Lesotho and South Africa, also called Khodumodumo, Kgodumodumo or Kammapa. It is described only as vast and shapeless, with no face, limbs or hide given in any telling. It ate every person and animal in a valley and then grew too large to leave through the mountain pass it had entered by.

Who killed Kholomodumo?

A hero born to the one woman who survived, usually named Ditaolane after the divining bones found at his neck and called Senkatana in the modern play version. He was born and became a grown man within the space of a few minutes while his mother went to fetch bedding. He killed the monster with two spears by stepping around its flank, since it was far too swollen to turn and face him.

How did the woman escape Kholomodumo?

She smeared herself all over with ashes from the ash-heap and crouched motionless in the calves’ pen. When the monster looked in it saw something the colour of the ground that was not moving, mistook her for a stone, and went away. She was pregnant at the time, which is why the story continues.

Why is a dinosaur named Kholumolumo?

In 2020 an early sauropodomorph from the Late Triassic rocks at Maphutseng in Lesotho was formally named Kholumolumo ellenbergerorum. The genus name is the Sesotho name of the swallowing monster, chosen because Basotho people have long used that word for the giant bones weathering out of the ground there. The species name honours the Ellenberger family, who worked the site.

What happened to the hero after he cut the monster open?

The people he freed made him their chief, and then turned on him. The man whose leg he had accidentally cut while opening the monster nursed the grudge and stirred up others, and they tried a covered pit, a fire, a precipice and a burning cave mouth, all of which failed. Worn out by it, he eventually let them kill him without resisting, and some tellers add that his heart escaped and became a bird.