!Khwa

Also Known As: also written !khwa:, ǃKhwa; the /Xam word for “water, rain”; in his quadruped form !khwa-ka xoro, rendered by Bleek and Lloyd as “the Rain’s Bull”
Region/Culture: Southern Africa
Mythos: San/Bushmen Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He is the living water in all its states, the pit and the mist and the thundercloud and the hail, moving of his own will and taking whatever shape suits him.
Role in Mythos: He is the punisher who enforces the rules that make people people, and the power the rain-specialists had to court, rope and cut open so the country could drink.
Relation to Humans: He is drawn to the smell of women at menarche and to anyone who breaks the food and seclusion rules, and what he takes he drowns and turns into frogs. He is also spoken to directly, begged to come gently and to keep his tail down, and thanked when he does.

The scent arrived before he did. A woman lay in her hut with her newborn tucked against her on the kaross, still weak, and the air outside turned sweet in a way the old people had a word for. There is no smell like it, they said. Mist came in with the sweetness and shut the camp in, because the mist was his breathing. Then something heavy went past the mouth of the hut at a trot, ears laid flat, tail down, and she understood that the Rain had smelled her and had come courting.

The /Xam of the Upper Karoo called him !khwa, which is simply their word for water and for rain. That is not sloppiness in the record. In a country where permanent water means a scattering of pits and seasonal holes strung across hundreds of kilometres of grey dwarf scrub, water in any quantity was understood to be a living thing with appetites and a temper. It lay in the pit. It rose as mist to graze at night. It walked the plain on rain-legs. It could come and stand at your door.

His usual body was a bull. Dia!kwain, one of the /Xam men dictating to Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd in the 1870s, took up a blue crayon in May 1875 and drew him: a solid, unspectacular bovine, the sort of animal you would walk past in a kraal, captioned as the creature the rain-specialists caught and led about the country when they wanted rain. The narrators fill in what the drawing cannot. His body is the cloud. His legs are the falling columns beneath it. His breath is the fog that sits on the veld at dawn, and his blood is the water that actually reaches the ground. He was also an eland when he wanted to be, and a whirlwind, and a puddle in the shape of something horned, and once a man who threw lightning at his fleeing wife.

Nobody in the notebooks says where he came from. He simply belongs to a different era from the trickster-creator /Kaggen, and the two never appear in the same story. /Kaggen’s time is the beginning, when animals and people were the same muddle and death could be undone. !Khwa belongs to afterwards, to the world the storytellers were sitting in, where death is permanent and people are expected to behave like people.

What he punishes is the failure to do that. The girl at menarche was kept in a special hut on particular food prepared by particular relatives, and the stories about breaking those rules are grim and specific. One girl, sick of the diet, slipped down to the spring and killed one of the Water’s children, a beautiful striped creature the size of a calf, and cooked it and ate it, and did it again. A younger child was left behind to watch and told her mother. Out on the hunting ground the mother saw the clouds stack up and said flatly that something at home had gone wrong. The whirlwind took the girl into the spring and she became a frog. Then it took her mothers, and her father off the hunting ground, and the mats and the arrows with them, and by the water their arrows put down roots and grew back into reeds.

That reversion is the heart of him. Skin cloaks become springbok again and shake themselves dry. Hut poles go back to being bushes. Everything a person had made with their hands unmakes itself, and the people who owned it end up in the pit as frogs. He is the undoing of culture, delivered by weather.

He is not only a story. In the small hours of 28 February 1871 a flood came down on the Karoo town of Victoria West and killed sixty-two people and took most of the town with it. ||kabbo’s daughter, watching from a distance, described the body of the Rain hanging over the place with pots slung on it, and the pots falling. The /Xam blamed a struck sorcery-bell for setting him off.

Against a being like that the /Xam had less force than cunning, and the cunning worked. The woman he carried off rode him quietly, told him she was in pain and asked to be set down at a particular tree, and once he had trotted underneath it she rubbed his neck with buchu until the aromatic dust put him to sleep. She climbed the tree, walked out along it, dropped down at a distance and went home. He woke only when the air turned cool, and went back to his water still believing she was on his back. When she got home she burned buchu and the old women burned horns, so the stink would rise and he would not be angry, and everyone lived who would otherwise have been a frog.

The rain-specialists, the !gitən, took it further. They waited at a spring with a deep pit and let him come out to feed at night, then charmed him, put a thong on his nose and walked him across as much country as they could, because rain fell wherever he went, and finally cut him so his blood came down. They could also choose their weather. A male rain is the bull, torrential and destructive, and people asked for the female rain instead, the gentle one that softens the ground and does not arrive angry.

His limits are the limits of water. Take him out of the wet and he has no body at all. When he leaves his pit, the pit dries. Buchu puts him under, burnt horn turns him aside, a rope on the nose leads him, and the same people who feared him addressed him out loud and asked him to put his tail between his legs because the women and children were watching. The scholars who have spent their careers in the notebooks still disagree about him. David Lewis-Williams reads the rain-animal as a way of speaking rather than a being. Anne Solomon argues he is the /Xam version of the death-linked lesser god other Khoisan peoples describe. José de Prada-Samper argues he is neither symbol nor deity but the water itself, alive. The narrators do not seem to have felt the difficulty.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who or what is !Khwa?

!Khwa is the rain and water of the /Xam San of South Africa’s Upper Karoo, understood as a living being with will and temper. The word !khwa simply means “water, rain”, and in his animal form he is the !khwa-ka xoro, the Rain’s Bull. He is the pit, the mist, the thundercloud and the hail all at once.

What does !Khwa look like?

!Khwa most often appears as a heavy dark bull with lowered ears and a lowered tail, drawn from life description by the /Xam narrator Dia!kwain in 1875. His body is the rain cloud and his legs are the columns of rain falling from it, so what he looks like depends on how far away you are standing. He also takes the form of an eland, a whirlwind, mist, and standing water.

Why does !Khwa punish girls?

!Khwa is drawn by the smell of girls at menarche, and the /Xam kept such girls secluded on restricted food to prevent his attention. Girls who broke the seclusion or food rules were taken by whirlwind into the waterhole and turned into frogs, often along with their families. The stories work as enforcement of the social rules that separate people from animals.

How did anyone escape !Khwa?

The aromatic herb buchu is the one reliable defence in the stories. A woman he abducted rubbed buchu on his neck until he fell asleep, then climbed a tree and slipped away, and burning buchu and horn afterwards kept his anger off the whole camp. Ritual specialists went further, roping him by the nose and leading him across the country to make rain.

Is !Khwa a god?

That depends on who is reading the archive. Anne Solomon argues !Khwa fills the role of the death-linked lesser god that other Khoisan peoples name, standing opposite the creator /Kaggen. David Lewis-Williams treats the rain-animal as a figure of speech, and José de Prada-Samper argues he is not a deity at all but living water. The /Xam narrators themselves spoke to him directly and expected an answer.