Tokoloshe

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Names & Creature Profile

Tokoloshe, tikoloshe and thikoloshe are among the spellings used for a being whose body and behaviour vary across southern African accounts. The Dictionary of South African English gathers language forms, historical descriptions and figurative uses under one headword. English labels such as goblin and water-sprite offer rough comparisons; neither encompasses every use of the name. [2]

The two named speakers in Callaway’s 1868 collection give the creature a place among human activities. Umpengula Mbanda describes a pool-dwelling dancer. Unoko Masila supplies encounters involving milk, marriage and neighbours. Their small figures can be companions or intruders, and the stories turn on what happens when those relationships become visible. [1]

Tales & Encounters

Masila’s first recollection begins with work among cattle. As a child, he milks Uzilinkomo’s cows. Uzima, the owner’s wife, hands him a large calabash to fill. By the next morning it is empty, and the account attributes the missing milk to the Utikoloshe. Then Uzilinkomo’s son, Unscatshe, drinks straight from the cows while milking. The creature complains that it passes from cow to cow and finds nothing left. [1]

The account next describes the boy becoming deformed; Callaway glosses this as spinal curvature. That is a claim within the narrative, not an established cause of illness. The trouble then spreads through the work of the enclosure. Milking cords disappear. At night the creature releases the calves, which take all the milk. An emptied vessel has become a struggle over who can get food from the herd. [1]

Another woman Masila says he knew is preparing for a wedding dance. Her companions call for her, but she is still decorating herself with coloured earth, so they leave without her. Her husband waits nearby, already suspicious. When she comes out, the creature called Ugilikakqwa arrives, puts on an oribi-skin garment and rehearses its dance. The husband attacks with a spear, killing both the creature and his wife. He lays their bodies together on the path, wipes his weapon and goes to the dance. Returning guests find them and interpret the killing as a response to adultery. [1]

Umtshakazi’s encounter begins with a different marital difficulty: her husband has rejected her. Another woman proposes help, gives her coloured earth and fat, and directs her to prepare grain and go to the river. When Umtshakazi calls, the creature emerges. The sight frightens her, and she runs. It follows, demanding to know why she has summoned it only to flee. At her village people throw stones, driving it back to the pool. The sought-for intervention has become something she wants the community to repel. Callaway also records a longer name, glossed as one who dances with the river’s reeds.

Homeland & Tradition

Mbanda says that men of the Amakxosa, the book’s spelling for Xhosa people, told him about the being. He distinguishes their accounts from those of the Amazulu, or Zulu people, yet also mentions a fellow Zulu man who claimed to have seen it. The passage records both a regional boundary and a report crossing it. Mbanda does not say that he himself saw the creature. [1]

Callaway identifies Masila with the Amangwane and notes that he had lived among the Amakxosa. His stories consequently cannot be assigned a simple origin from the word Zulus on the book’s title page. The collector’s comments on dialect are further interpretations of how the material travelled. They preserve clues about speakers and language, but do not establish a single birthplace for every tokoloshe account. [1]

Appearance & Signs

Mbanda’s portrait is brief: short stature, hair and a home in a pool. Movement supplies another sign. When people dance, the creature dances too. Masila’s wedding account gives it a garment made from the skin of an oribi, a small antelope, and a practised imitation of the dancers it hopes to join. Costume and action reveal more than a catalogue of bodily features. [1]

Elsewhere, the first sign is scarcely a body at all. A husband entering his hut notices a small shadow passing out. The story withholds a fuller view until he returns by night. That difference between a dancer in company and something almost missed at a doorway gives the accounts very different beginnings. [1]

Nature & Powers

In Mbanda’s report, the creature can become a woman’s intimate companion and help carry firewood. He also reports men killing such beings. Domestic usefulness and sexual rivalry occupy the same account. [1]

Masila’s river encounter gives the visitor a voice and an objection: why summon it and then run away? His milk account gives it an appetite that conflicts with the household’s needs. [1]

Landscape & Associations

The pool is a point of return as well as emergence. Umtshakazi can reach it from her village, and the being she calls can follow her home. Mbanda’s firewood-carrying companion similarly joins work outside the settlement to domestic life. These are inhabited landscapes, crossed in the course of ordinary tasks. Water does not separate the creature from human society. [1]

The cattle enclosure gives two of Masila’s accounts their material stakes. In the milk story, disturbed routines threaten a supply of food. In the final account, marriage cattle pass back from one family to another. The same kind of setting supports different consequences: a household struggles to keep its milk, while another relationship ends in the movement of a herd. [1]

Meaning & Belief

Masila’s two stories of husbands deliberately end differently. One wife is killed and her body displayed; the other survives and is made to carry the dead creature before her relatives. Reducing both to a tale of a man exposing a monster would erase the women’s different fates. The public aftermath matters as much as the hidden encounter. [1]

Emily Zarka’s 2019 Monstrum account introduces a sangoma, Mzuvukile, a traditional healer and diviner, and stresses variation. It describes later beliefs in a powerful, partly human visitor, sometimes invisible, and in beds raised on bricks as protection. It also considers the harm surrounding blame and accusations. This contemporary account concerns living fears and interpretations; its composite portrait should not be read backwards as the fixed body of Mbanda’s dancer. [3]

Variants & Kindred Beings

Ugilikakqwa occurs within the Utikoloshe material. Nearby sections describe Isitshakamana and Abatwa under their own headings and through separate accounts. Their position in the same book does not make them alternative names for its river dancer. Callaway’s arrangement brings small beings together while retaining differences in their stories. [1]

The related household beings also reward close comparison. Domovoi can defend a household’s interests; the alux may receive continuing care from the family whose land it guards. Those relationships differ from a visitor whose appetite disrupts the milk supply. Shared settings do not require shared motives or a common origin. [1]

Historical Record

Henry Callaway was a missionary, collector and translator. His Nursery Tales, Traditions, and Histories of the Zulus appeared in parts, beginning in 1866, before the 1868 volume. The Utikoloshe section occupies pages 349–352, with parallel language text, named speakers and explanatory notes. The English narratives read here are his translations; the recorded voices reach the reader through that editorial work. [1]

Callaway’s preface describes a collection growing while it was being printed. Readers of early parts brought further accounts and suggested better versions. His own racial hierarchy and language of cultural advancement belong to the colonial setting of the work. That framing should not be mistaken for the speakers’ explanation of their stories. Nor does the publication date tell us when the narratives began to circulate. [1]

The dictionary’s quotations begin earlier, with Stephen Kay’s 1833 use of tikaloshi. They continue through differing portraits in books and newspapers, then extend into figurative insults and a verb for bewitching. These excerpts trace changes in printed usage; they are not a series of independently verified sightings. The word has travelled beyond the creature’s appearance in a story. [2]

Later Retellings & Reception

Darryl Stephen Nel’s 2018 thesis abstract follows the tokoloshe into music videos and speculative fiction. The musical examples, drawn from South Africa’s Zef culture, are Die Antwoord’s “Evil Boy” and Jack Parow’s “Hosh Tokolosh.” He also examines Diane Awerbuck’s short story “Leatherman” and the novels Tokoloshe Song by Andrew Salomon and Apocalypse Now Now by Charlie Human. Nel links these works with post-apartheid identity, cultural borrowing and the persistence of the past. The consulted abstract outlines that argument; it does not supply a close reading of each work’s plot. [4]

Religious reinterpretation follows another route. Leonardo Vasconcelos de Castro Moreira’s 2024 study examines the Brazilian Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, which entered South Africa in 1992. Drawing on Paul Freston’s earlier research, he describes a pastor promising to exorcise a tokoloshe. Moreira treats this as the church’s incorporation of local beings into its demonology. The example concerns a particular missionary setting and a mediated report, not an intrinsic Christian identity shared by all the earlier accounts. [5]

Evidence & Open Questions

Mbanda distinguishes what he heard from what another man claimed to see. Masila gives remembered people, household actions and narrated consequences. Callaway adds translation and interpretation. Those different contributions make it possible to trace a story without treating every sentence as eyewitness evidence, or the collector’s explanation as the speaker’s own. [1]

In the final account, the bundle reaches its audience before anyone explains it. The wife refuses to open it; the husband cuts the cord; the relatives return the cattle. Speech falls away, but the relationship has changed. The story leaves the reader with a consequence carried out in public, after a beginning almost too slight to notice: a small shadow passing through a doorway. [1]

Sources & Manuscript Notes

Callaway’s translated accounts provide the principal narratives. The dictionary follows the name’s printed uses; Monstrum offers contemporary interpretation. Moreira examines religious adaptation. Nel is represented by the consulted thesis abstract, with no claim that its full argument or the creative works were read. [1][2][3][5][4]

Nursery Tales, Traditions, and Histories of the Zulus ↗
Henry Callaway, collector and translator; Umpengula Mbanda and Unoko Masila, named speakers · Springvale Mission Station / Internet Archive · 1868
Printed 349–352, complete English Utikoloshe accounts and notes; preface on collection and publication
The English translation and collector’s notes were consulted. The original-language text was not independently translated.
Checked 2026-10-11
Tokoloshe: Dictionary of South African English ↗
Dictionary Unit for South African English · Dictionary Unit for South African English
Entry e07240
Historical quotations were read within the dictionary; their original publications were not separately examined.
Checked 2026-10-09
Blame the Tokoloshe! South Africa’s Most Notorious Goblin (ASL) ↗
Emily Zarka · PBS / Monstrum · 2019-11-13

Artwork

Illuminated folios

Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.

A short hairy humanlike figure raises a foot in a dance-like posture beside a moonlit reed pool, within a charcoal botanical woodcut frame. — Original small hairy riverbank figure in a dance-like posture, selecting Umpengula Mbanda’s scoped account in Callaway’s 1868 collection. The scene does not prescribe universal Tokoloshe anatomy or reproduce a modern bedroom motif.

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