THE Limpopo Province is known as the food bowl of Africa.
The South African province is an area rich with citrus and avocado industries but there’s an undercurrent of superstition that exists to this day.
I was a young cadet journalist when someone phoned the newspaper to say evil spirits had attacked local houses.
The issue? Meat placed on roof tops to dry in the sun was glowing green at night.
That must be a malevolent spirit some of the townsfolk said.
More educated people decided to test the meat and found the glow to be nothing more sinister than a reaction of bacteria to sunlight.
South Africa has one foot in reality and the other in superstition.
I was raised a Christian but we grew up knowing all about sangomas (witch doctors) and their ‘magic’.
Dad loves the story of the Inkanyamba, a snake in Zulu folklore that has a giant horse-like head.
It lives in waterfalls and lakes and eats the bodies of people who drown.
Dad thinks the folklore came about because people who can’t swim often drown, and the story is told to stop them going in or near water.
When I was a child, it was common for the hired help to live on the property in a small separate room with an ensuite.
Most staffed households in residential areas had one because during apartheid only white people were allowed in certain areas after dark.
I remember my parents making our helper Leanne, comfortable and clean servant quarters.
Her bed was raised up on bricks, each leg had one brick underneath it.
We knew why, it was to keep her safe from the tokoloshe.
As a child I never questioned the logic or reasoning because every African person’s bed I’d ever seen had bricks under the bed legs.
The tokoloshe is a mythological small, hairy goblin-like creature who climbs on top of someone while they are sleeping.
One of the ways to protect yourself from a tokoloshe is to raise your bed up using bricks.
Then there’s the people who are inspiring.
I once wrote a story about the ingenuity of a tribesman who wanted to visit his sister but had no form of transportation.
She lived an hour drive from his village so he made a plan to get there.
Months were spent collecting car and motorcycle parts, then many more months cobbling together a motorbike with a top speed of around 40km/hour.
With no helmet or driver’s licence, he began the journey riding slowly along the outer verge of a major highway.
That was when motorists started phoning the newspaper and describing what they were seeing.
While his invention was original, what made it remarkable was he had little to no education yet still managed to build a working motorcycle.
The traffic police told me they couldn’t let him continue because it was too dangerous for him.
They picked him up and took him and his motorcycle to the police station.
He wasn’t in trouble; the policemen gave him a helmet and then they took turns riding his ‘motorbike’ in the station’s forecourt.
We delivered him and his ‘motorbike’ to his sister and when we arrived people crowded around.
Many more took turns riding up and down the dry red mud dirt roads.
South Africa is breathtakingly beautiful but there’s a side to it that’s hidden and dark.
Australia has incredible beauty too but thankfully no tokoloshe or Inkanyamba because I love to swim and explaining bricks under bed legs to a realter would be awkward.
