Mamlambo

Also Known As: uMamlambo, Sis’Mamlambo, “mother of the river”, from isiXhosa and isiZulu umlambo, river; called iNathlathu among the Bhaca, and often identified with iChanti
Region/Culture: Southern Africa
Mythos: Xhosa Mythology, Zulu Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A shape-shifting familiar bought rather than worshipped, which multiplies its owner’s money and cattle and takes payment in the lives of the people closest to him.
Role in Mythos: It is the dark twin of the river beings who make healers, offering private wealth where they offer public power.
Relation to Humans: A person acquires one deliberately, by purchase or by a recipe, and is then owned in return. The bargain is understood to end in the deaths of the buyer’s parents, wife or children, and finally in his own early and friendless death.

A woman in a village near Komani was invited into a wealthy friend’s house and watched her open a jar. Inside, a snake lay coiled on a pile of hundred-rand notes, quiet as a rope. The friend died not long afterwards, and people told the woman what she had been shown.

That is the shape almost every account takes. Somebody prosperous keeps something in a container, or behind a door nobody else is allowed through, and the prosperity and the thing in the room are the same fact. In isiXhosa and isiZulu umlambo means river, and uMamlambo is read as mother of the river, though the being belongs less to water than to money. Belief in it grew up among Xhosa-speaking communities of the Eastern Cape and travelled outward from there along the migrant labour routes until the word was current in Zulu speech too. It is not a god. Nobody prays to it. You buy one.

Its form depends on who is looking. John Henderson Soga, writing in 1931, gave up on cataloguing it and said flatly that its appearance and qualities are subject entirely to individual fancy. The Keiskammahoek survey of the 1950s recorded it as inyoka amadoda, the snake of men, a male witch’s familiar that could present itself as a beautiful woman, as a baby, or as a charm or ornament attractive enough to pick up. Among the Bhaca of the Transkeian uplands, Hammond-Tooke found it under the name iNathlathu, sinister, usually held by men, typically taking the form of a snake and occasionally that of an overwhelmingly attractive woman. He collected the story of a man who kept refusing to marry and put up with his friends’ teasing about it, until one night people saw him with a woman of extraordinary beauty who vanished as they came closer. That, said the man who told it, was his uMamlambo.

Where it comes from depends on who you ask, and the answers are unusually practical for a supernatural being. The Greater Dictionary of isiXhosa records a recipe: certain herbs put into a bottle of sheep’s milk, the bottle buried in the manure of the cattle byre, and after some days a kind of caterpillar appears in it. That is the thing. More often it was bought. Monica Hunter, working in Pondoland in the 1930s, was told that men acquired it at the mines from European or Indian sellers, and one of her informants described it arriving as a piece of leather that would not burn, then becoming a snake, then becoming a girl who always appeared in European clothes and with whom the man slept without ever mentioning her at home. An elderly man from the Tyumie Valley remembered a friend on the train back from the Witwatersrand opening his trunk to find a snake in it, having bought medicine in Johannesburg that the sellers told him was part of uMamlambo. He said he would push the trunk into the water as they crossed the bridge over the Orange River, because otherwise Sis’Mamlambo would kill many people at home.

It works quietly. A few men sit drinking sorghum beer, and the beer is better than it has any right to be, thick and sour-sweet and warm from the calabash, and they say so, and one of them has been caught. Joan Broster recorded that particular trick: the familiar hides in the pot, the drink tastes delicious, and a man goes home bewitched without a mark on him.

The bill comes due against the household. Hunter’s informants said possession led inevitably to the deaths of wife, children and parents. Hammond-Tooke’s said a parent, usually, was the price of the money. Contemporary accounts collected in the Eastern Cape run the same way, with owners required to give up whoever they love most and, failing that, required simply to put the creature ahead of everyone, which turns out to amount to the same thing. The near-legendary Transkei inyanga Khotso Sethuntsa, who died in 1972 having sold the wealth-magic called ukuthwala to half the region and grown rich beyond explaining, was rumoured to keep one. He lived apart from the people around him and his closest relationships fell away. The wealth in these stories is always real. So is the funeral.

What makes the mamlambo strange is that Xhosa tradition already has generous water beings and does not confuse the two. The abantu bomlambo, the river people, live in a mirror world under the pools with their own cattle, and a person called to be an igqirha goes down into the water to meet an old woman who is human above the waist and fish below, hair loose down her back, and comes up a healer. That descent is announced, celebrated, sung about. The mamlambo is its exact inversion: hidden in a jar, locked in a back room, never mentioned. One of the clay modellers at Hogsback, who sells small unfired figures of river women to passing tourists, drew the line himself. There is the uMamlambo who is a snake, he said, the one people buy so that they can get rich, and there is the one from the river, and they are not the same. His own models sit no more than seventeen centimetres high in red clay, stippled with cheap white house paint to suggest scales, a tuft of animal hair pressed into the skull, sometimes under a knitted cap. Another modeller said he began making them after meeting one while fishing, having forgotten to throw a stone into the pool first and say kwelela, stay aside. He got away with a fright. People often do not.

Then in 1997 the newspapers found it. The Star and the Cape Argus carried reports from the Mzintlava River near Mount Ayliff of a creature twenty metres long with a horse’s head, the lower body of a fish, short legs, a snake’s neck and a green shine to it at night, and between January and April as many as nine deaths were laid at its door. The police said the river had come up in heavy rain, that the dead had drowned, and that the crabs had eaten the soft parts of their faces and throats. The name that stuck from that season was the Brain Sucker, which belongs to the newspapers rather than to the ethnography, and which describes a lake monster rather than the thing in the jar.

Its powers are all increase. Money multiplies, herds multiply, and none of it can be traced to any work the owner has done. It changes shape at will and it seduces on contact, and because it can be an ornament or a mouthful of beer it can be handed to somebody who never agreed to anything. Against that stands a set of limits as tight as a noose. It cannot be shared, displayed or explained, so the wealth it brings has to be enjoyed in isolation from the community that would otherwise make it mean something. It is jealous, and drives away rivals for its owner’s attention. It must be fed and it must come first. And it is very hard to put down: the man on the train did not open the trunk and reason with it, he planned to throw it into a river and get off at the next station.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Mamlambo?

The Mamlambo, or uMamlambo, is a wealth-giving familiar spirit in Xhosa and Zulu belief, most commonly described as a snake and associated with rivers. Its name comes from umlambo, meaning river, and is usually rendered as mother of the river. Unlike a deity, it is acquired deliberately by purchase or by a recipe, and it grants riches in exchange for the lives of the owner’s family.

What does the Mamlambo look like?

The Mamlambo has no fixed appearance. It is most often a large snake, but sources record it as a beautiful woman, a handsome man, a baby, a mermaid, a piece of jewellery, and even a scrap of leather that will not burn. A Xhosa writer in 1931 said its appearance depends entirely on individual fancy, and later ethnographers found the same variability across the Eastern Cape.

What does the Mamlambo take in return for wealth?

It takes the people its owner loves most. Accounts from Pondoland in the 1930s said possession led to the deaths of the owner’s wife, children and parents, and Bhaca sources said a parent in particular was the price of the money. Owners who avoid a literal sacrifice are still said to be required to put the Mamlambo ahead of everyone else, and to die early and alone.

How does someone get a Mamlambo?

Two routes are recorded. One is a recipe: herbs sealed in a bottle of sheep’s milk, buried in the manure of the cattle byre, from which a caterpillar-like creature emerges after some days. The other, far more commonly reported, is purchase, with migrant workers said to have bought it at the mines and carried it home in a trunk.

Is the Mamlambo the “Brain Sucker” of the Mzintlava River?

Only in the newspapers. In 1997 South African papers reported a twenty-metre creature with a horse’s head and a snake’s neck in the Mzintlava River near Mount Ayliff, blamed for as many as nine deaths, and the nickname Brain Sucker dates from that coverage. Police attributed the deaths to drowning during heavy rain and the injuries to river crabs. The Mamlambo of the ethnographic record is a household familiar rather than a lake monster.