The Tokoloshe — Oldways

He is small — perhaps knee-height — and he is hairier than any creature ought to be, with a forehead that slopes into the brows of a rat and a belly that swells out like a clay pot. He is the Tokoloshe, and in the household belief of rural and urban Southern Africa, from the KwaZulu-Natal lowlands to the mine compounds of the Witwatersrand, he is one of the most feared of all the spirits that walk at night.

The Tokoloshe is not a ghost. He is not an ancestor. He is an idlozi raised into service — a spirit that can be called up, bound, and pointed at a chosen victim. The word itself is sometimes said to come from the Xhosa uthikoloshe, sometimes from the Zulu uTokoloshe, but in the mouths of the people he has been with for centuries he is simply “the little one who is sent.”

Description and Habits

The Tokoloshe is usually described as a man, or a homunculus, of about the size of a small child, but the proportions are always wrong. The head is too large; the arms are too long; the legs are short and bowed. The whole body is covered in coarse, matted hair, often described as the colour of iron filings. The eyes are red. The hands end in claws, and the feet point backwards, so that his tracks lead away from the scene of his crime.

He is nocturnal. In nearly every story, he is sent out at night, sometimes riding on the wind, sometimes slipping under a door, but most famously — and this is the detail that every South African grows up hearing — slipping in at floor level. For this reason, the traditional defence against the Tokoloshe is the raised bed. The legs of the bed are set into tins of water, or onto bricks, or onto a foundation of stone at least a hand’s breadth high. He cannot climb. The detail is so widespread that even in middle-class Johannesburg homes in the twentieth century, the custom of the raised bed lingered on, long after the family had stopped believing in the spirit itself.

He has other habits. He drinks. He eats. He sometimes has sexual relations with the wives of the men he has been set to harm. He is sent most often against rivals in love, in business, or in inheritance, and his victims die in the night of a sudden illness that the doctor cannot quite name.

The Making of a Tokoloshe

The Tokoloshe is not, like the jinn of the desert, an independent being. He is a creature, a familiar, an idlozi tied to a particular person. The making of one is the work of a sangoma — a diviner in the service of the ancestors — or, in older stories, a witch (in the older sense, a person who uses the powers of the night).

The method is well known. The sangoma takes a bead — often a blue bead, sometimes a bead of bone or of glass — and buries it in the sand of a riverbed or a kraal. With each bead buried, the spirit grows stronger, and a small, hairy man is said to be seen near the spot at dusk. The full making may take up to nine days, during which the sangoma must observe strict taboos: no salt, no sexual intercourse, no contact with the dead.

When the work is complete, the spirit is bound to its maker. It must do his bidding. But the bond is dangerous, because a Tokoloshe that is mishandled, or whose maker dies, will turn on its former master. The stories of Tokoloshe turning on the very men who raised them are among the most popular cautionary tales of the countryside.

The Tokoloshe and Witchcraft

In the traditional Southern African village, the Tokoloshe is closely linked to jealousy. A young man who is preferred by a girl whose older suitor has already claimed her may be visited by a Tokoloshe in the night. A second wife, who suspects that her husband’s first wife is making her childless, may go to the isangoma to have one raised against her rival. A man whose brother has been favoured in the inheritance of the cattle may pay the witch of the next hill to send one to his brother’s house.

The Tokoloshe is, in this sense, the figure through which the dark side of family life is acted out. He is the visible instrument of an invisible envy, and the isangoma who is said to be able to send one is also the figure through whom the village examines its own worst feelings. To accuse another of raising a Tokoloshe has, in many parts of Southern Africa, the same social weight as an accusation of witchcraft — and in the second half of the twentieth century, this led directly to a small industry of Tokoloshe-related court cases and political accusations.

The Tokoloshe in Modern South Africa

The Tokoloshe has not faded with modernity. If anything, he has become sharper. From the 1990s onwards, South African political cartoonists took the Tokoloshe up as one of the great images of satire. In the satirical newspaper Mail & Guardian and the cartoon pages of the Sunday Times, the Tokoloshe — small, hairy, red-eyed, with his clawed hands — has been used to embody the corrupt official, the back-stabber in the party caucus, and the broker of shady deals. The image works because it is both funny and serious: the political Tokoloshe is a metaphor for the man who does the dirty work, the underling whose hands are dirty while his master’s are clean.

In cinema, the Tokoloshe has been the subject of the 1980s cult horror film The Tokoloshe, and of a 2020 South African horror of the same name set in a psychiatric hospital. In the Cape Town theatre of the 2010s, the Tokoloshe has been a recurring figure in the work of playwrights such as Mthuthuzeli November, who uses the spirit as a way of talking about the long aftermath of apartheid violence.

The figure has also become an internet meme, particularly in the WhatsApp groups of Southern African teenagers, where the Tokoloshe stands in for the messenger of bad news, the bringer of impossible bills, and the small, mocking presence at the foot of every bed.

Tokoloshe in the Wider World of Small Spirits

The Tokoloshe is one of a worldwide family of small, mischievous household spirits. In the Celtic-speaking world, the leprechaun of Irish tradition shares the Tokoloshe’s stature, his cunning, and his appearance at inconvenient times. In the German-speaking lands, the kobold — also small, hairy, and active at night — is the household familiar sent to do his master’s bidding. In Japan, the zashiki-warashi of the Tōhoku countryside is a child-spirit who haunts the upper rooms of old houses.

None of these are quite the same. The leprechaun keeps his gold; the kobold may be helpful as well as harmful; the zashiki-warashi is a child. The Tokoloshe is more dangerous than any of them, and more pointedly personal: he is a weapon, made to order, and sent against a named victim. He is the dark side of the family, brought into the house by the family itself.

Sources and Further Reading

Callaway, Henry. Nursery Tales, Traditions, and Histories of the Zulus. Trübner & Co., 1868. The first major English collection of Zulu folk material, including early accounts of the Tokoloshe.
Callaway, Godfrey. The Religious System of the Amazulu. Trübner & Co., 1884.
Hammond-Tooke, W. D. The Roots of Black South Africa. Jonathan Ball, 1993.
Berglund, Axel-Ivar. Zulu Thought-Patterns and Symbolism. Hurst, 1976.
Niehaus, Isak, with Hund, John, and Du Toit, Fanie. If You Lick the Honey, You Might Get Stung: The Magic of the Zulu World of Ancestors. Penguin, 2013.