The Tokoloshe

A living southern-African tradition of a malevolent night-sprite

In Nguni mythology the tokoloshe, also written tikoloshe, tokolotshe or thokolosi and sometimes called hili, is a dwarf-like water spirit that can make itself invisible by drinking water or swallowing a stone. It works harm on someone else's behalf. A person bent on revenge goes to a malevolent witch doctor and must promise the soul of a loved one without being allowed to choose which; the spirit makes that choice itself. Sent against its target, a tokoloshe may only frighten children, but it is credited with causing illness and death.

The best-known defence is the height of a bed. Bricks under each leg lift the sleeper out of its reach. A record in the USC Folklore Archives, from a man who grew up in Zimbabwe and lived most of his life in South Africa, calls the practice common knowledge in both countries and says even well educated people put a couple of bricks under the bed; the same record notes the tokoloshe is blamed when something in a house goes missing that its owner is sure was not lost. Pastors with an apostolic calling and traditional healers, the sangomas, are held to have the power to banish one.

An explanation for the belief goes back to how people once slept. In rondavels on the highveld, families lay on grass mats on the floor around a wood fire through sub-freezing winter nights. The fire used up the oxygen and left carbon monoxide in the hut, and those sleeping raised off the floor escaped the deaths that were blamed on a short man about hip high who stole life in the night.

The tokoloshe is also a fixture of popular culture and satire. It is a running gag in the South African comic strip Madam & Eve, the subject of John Kongos's pop hit Tokoloshe Man, later covered by Happy Mondays, and central to Gavin Hood's 1999 film A Reasonable Man. For many people across the region the belief is a lived one, and it is told here as their folklore.