Umdhlebi

The bark comes away in dead flakes, and under the flakes a newer layer is already pushing through, so the trunk looks like something shedding a skin it has outgrown. The leaves are dark, glossy and so hard that they snap instead of bending. Break one and the break weeps thick white juice with a smell in it. A man who had stood in front of such a tree in Zululand summed it up for a missionary in one burst: “What a villainous-looking tree! nasty, rough, ugly!”

What made it worth writing down was not its looks. The umdhlebi was said to kill whatever approached it. Not by thorn, not by fruit eaten in error, but simply by proximity. The sequence given for a person caught by it was a splitting headache, eyes gone red with blood, then delirium, then death. Sometimes the delirium was skipped and the death arrived on its own.

Picture the ground it liked: barren, stony, glaring, the kind of slope that holds heat into the evening. A tree of that size ought to be the best shade for a mile. Nothing lies down in it. There are no cattle tracks converging on the trunk, no worn hollow where goats have sheltered, and the fertile land in the valley below carries no homestead at all, because nobody wants to live within reach of it.

There was a way to deal with it, and the way was narrow. Only a few people in Zululand were reckoned able to collect the tree’s fruit, and they would not come at it from any direction but windward. Before the gathering, a goat or a sheep was tied to the tree or close beside it, an offering to the demon in the wood. Then the collectors moved in with the breeze at their backs and picked up pods from the dirt. Fallen fruit only. Nothing plucked, nothing cut, nothing taken from the living branch.

That last rule carries the logic of the whole belief. The fruit of the umdhlebi was itself the antidote to the umdhlebi, so the tree was understood to hold both the wound and its cure, and the reason the fallen pods were safe to lift was that lifting them did the tree no injury. Among healers the corresponding idea is that the plant turns deadly when it is harmed. Cut it and you have made an enemy. Wait for it to drop something and you have made a bargain.

The name is old enough to have puzzled the people trying to trace it in 1882. One correspondent went looking for umdhlebe in Döhne’s Zulu dictionary, failed to find it, and guessed at a derivation from hlaba, a root Döhne glossed as having to do with the giving of pain. He also pointed anyone curious toward the fourth part of Bishop Henry Callaway’s collection of Zulu religious testimony, gathered in isiZulu in the 1860s from Zulu speakers, where the tree already appears in local accounts and where it is stated plainly that there are several kinds of umdhlebe and not one kind only, some of them small. That squares with the two forms described to the missionary: one a tree with large leaves and peeling bark, the other a shrub with smaller leaves whose bark stays put.

The version that reached English readers, though, came through a single letter. In November 1882 the Kew botanist William Thiselton-Dyer passed a note to Nature from the Reverend Dr G. W. Parker, a missionary working in Madagascar, who had the description at second hand from someone who had been in Zululand. Thiselton-Dyer printed it with an admission and a warning: Kew could throw no light on the thing at all, and the story put him in mind of the old myth of the upas of Java, the tree that supposedly sterilised the air of a whole valley. Nobody ever brought back a specimen. Every luridly detailed account of the umdhlebi in English descends from those few paragraphs, and some of the detail that now circulates, including ground littered with the bones of animals, is not in them.

Strip the letter away and something real is still standing there. Euphorbia cupularis, once classed as Synadenium cupulare, carries the name umdlebe in isiZulu and dead-man’s tree in English, and it grows exactly where the story puts it, on rocky outcrops and dry sandy ground through KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga, southern Limpopo, Eswatini and Mozambique. It reaches three or four metres, many-stemmed and rounded, its fleshy leaves bunched at the ends of the branchlets with red stalks and purple veins on the underside. Its second English name is the crying tree, for the white latex that runs freely from any cut. The latex blisters skin, and it gives off a vapour that stings; contact with the eye can do lasting damage. The same leaves, dried, are inhaled against headache, catarrh, influenza and asthma, and the latex goes onto wounds and into aching teeth, which is a fair summary of how poison usually works in a pharmacy.

The living beliefs around it have not gone quiet either. It is said to call out with a cry like a snake in order to draw animals and people close, and to drop birds out of the air above it. Bringing any part of it into a homestead is hedged with restriction and requires ritual and cleansing first. It belongs, in Zulu terms, to the bad end of the medicine trade: an ingredient of umbhulelo, the trap laid for an enemy, so that being caught in possession of it marks a person out as the sort who works that way. There is a story that soldiers of Shaka died from the tree after his rival Dingane made use of it, which no evidence supports and which shows how large a shadow the plant throws.

Its powers, then, are all of one piece: an untouched killing radius, a poison carried on the air rather than in the bite, a voice used as a lure, and a resident demon that has to be paid. Against that stands a short list of limits, and every one of them is about position. The umdhlebi cannot move. It cannot follow anyone downwind. It can be approached with the wind in your favour, appeased with a tethered animal, and answered with its own fallen fruit. And it can be cut down, which is what happened to the well-known specimen by the Tugela bridge, while another stands on a hillside near the coast behind an electric fence, so that people who want to see the dead-man’s tree can go and look at it without dying.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Umdhlebi?

The Umdhlebi is a deadly tree of Zulu folklore from Zululand, in what is now KwaZulu-Natal, said to poison any living creature that comes close to it. The poisoning was described as beginning with severe headache and bloodshot eyes, moving into delirium and ending in death, sometimes with no delirium at all. Two forms were reported, a tree with large leaves and flaking bark and a smaller shrub whose bark does not peel.

Is the Umdhlebi a real tree?

The name belongs to a real plant, Euphorbia cupularis, called umdlebe in isiZulu and dead-man’s tree in English, which grows on rocky and sandy ground in KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga, southern Limpopo, Eswatini and Mozambique. Its milky latex genuinely blisters skin, gives off an irritating vapour and can damage the eyes. No specimen matching the lethal-at-a-distance tree of the 1882 account has ever been produced.

How could anyone survive the Umdhlebi?

Only a few people in Zululand were held capable of gathering its fruit, and they approached only from the windward side so the tree’s exhalation blew away from them. A goat or a sheep was tied to or near the tree first, as an offering to the demon believed to live in it. They collected only fallen pods, never fruit taken from the branch.

What is the antidote to the Umdhlebi’s poison?

The tree’s own fruit was said to be the antidote to its poison, which is why the fruit was worth the risk of collecting. The rule that only fallen pods could be taken fits a wider belief that the plant becomes dangerous when it is injured, so gathering what it has already dropped costs the collector nothing.

Where did the Umdhlebi story come from?

The English account rests on a letter printed in Nature in November 1882, sent by the Reverend Dr G. W. Parker, a missionary in Madagascar, who had the description at second hand from someone who had seen the tree in Zululand. The Kew botanist who passed it on said openly that Kew could make nothing of it and that it recalled the old myth of the upas tree of Java. Zulu accounts of the umdhlebe are older than that letter and appear in Henry Callaway’s collection of Zulu religious testimony from the 1860s.

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