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A lot has been written and said about baboons that take to the wheel while truck drivers sleep

David Mungoshi Shelling the Nuts
Some will accuse me of a morbid fascination with the macabre. However, if someone does do that, it would not be totally unexpected. It is obviously the fashionable thing to do to appear to be a hard core sceptic where experiences other than what we are accustomed to feature.

What we must do increasingly and a lot more readily is to give credence to our own indigenous knowledge systems (IKS). This is unavoidable since IKS are at the very root of tradition and tradition is not always divorced from empiricism.

According to Susan Materer and her colleagues (2001), the first and most major characteristic of the IKS is that they are composed of knowledge from previous generations. In other words, each generation passes on something unique to itself to generations that come after them. Furthermore, in defining IKS, Materer and her colleagues make the following observations:

“Knowledge is derived from experiences and observations, both from current and past generations. This knowledge base is transcribed and understood by participants through actions such as production methods, verbally through sayings and myths, or by cultural events, which are unique to the community and the environment.”

It is clear from our working definition together with Materer and others that in each community, the language base guarantees cultural acceptance and identity and also ensures that participants relate to all events and experiences on the basis of this common world view. Accordingly, knowledge systems cannot be defined merely on the grounds of a certain tribal or ethnic background.

Locality comes into it as well. Modern examples of this phenomenon include what is experienced in the cities and towns where there is a cultural mix of people from a wide range of places, and there is also, therefore quite a bit of relatively unknown happenings in the context of that environment.

My father-in-law told me that one day, an older man sent him to collect something from under the pillow on his bed. Since he was the youngest person there, it became his lot to do errands. On this particular day, what he saw and experienced belied all explanation.

As he lifted the pillow to fetch the object he had been asked to collect he had to stifle the scream forming in his throat when he saw what was under the pillow. For there under the pillow was a fat fellow, very much the snake.

It began to even as its hooded eyes studied him. He let the pillow fall back and sprang out to safety. The man who had sent him asked him what the matter was and when my father-in-law told him what he had just seen, the man cackled and chuckled and said men ought to be stronger than that.

Taking my father-in-law by the hand, he led him back in and when he lifted the pillow there was nothing under it except a piece of dry shrivelled bark. My father-in-law’s discomfiture, it seemed, was a source of mirth for the old man.

My father-in-law told me that it was this incident that made the almost mortal magical combat between the magicians of the Pharaoh in Egypt and Moses believable for him. How often are we told that fact is stranger than fiction?

What my father-in-law told me still sounds incredulous today. A bit of history here will probably help. In about 1830, the Makololo, a Sotho-speaking army from the Bafokeng region of South Africa under the leadership of a warrior king called Sebetwane crossed the Zambezi into Barotseland where they settled after conquering the Lozi.

The Makololo were overthrown in a Lozi revolt in 1864. While the Lozi history speaks of invasion, temporary domination and overthrow, there does seem to have been a lasting blending with the Makololo invaders as evidenced by the fact that the language imported by the Makololo, became mutually intelligible with many words and idioms of the Siluyana language of the Luyi (the original language of the people of Barotseland), and endured beyond the overthrow of the Makololo. Now that we have got that safely out of the way, it should be easier to appreciate the story that my father-in-law told me. Indeed, it is a misnomer to call what my father-in-law told me a story.

He swore that it was for real and throughout his life after a certain experience he carried evidence of his other-worldly experiences. I never ever heard my father-in-law say that he had ever lived in either Lesotho or Barotseland. Yet he spoke perfect Lozi. His tone and nuances were perfect, as was his diction.

His story was that on one occasion during a time in which he was sharing a small room with three other men in a place euphemistically known as “kofobhoyi” (the four-boy apartments) he had a very strange experience.

He said a Lozi-speaking man from Barotseland did things to him that he could neither understand nor explain and he was seriously ill for quite some time. When finally he got treated and was restored to good health by a travelling herbalist, lo and behold, a most wondrous thing had happened!

To his utter amazement and that of everyone else, he found that he could speak Lozi without ever having gone through any tuition in it. And right up to the end of his life he spoke the language and was able to converse with the Sotho-speaking visitors that called upon our neighbours in the semi-detached unit that we shared in one of the poorer parts of town in the City of Kings.

I have thus far not been able to come up with a linguistic theory to explain the phenomenon.Perhaps other people can. The small mining centres are host to a lot of unbelievable stuff, so to speak. Take this one. Twenty-four hours a day the escalator in a certain mine functioned without ever stopping.

A certain man whose claim to fame was largely anchored on his antics. The man loved his beer but was, nevertheless, given the responsibility of operating the machine and helping with the change of shifts.

The problem was that people often saw him in the beer garden when he was supposed to be on duty underground at the mine. And whenever someone was bold enough to try and ascertain what was going on, the man laughed and said that down at the mine it was business as usual. One must obviously wonder how this man could possibly be in two different places at the same time — at the pub and/or on duty at the mine.

The Western world embellishes its non-empirical phenomena or superstitions with fancy labels, but in effect, accepts as a given the phenomenon of familiars, for example. According to this belief, some people have the misfortune of sometimes being accompanied wherever they go by what are known as familiars.

A familiar is a ghostly figure that is actually seen by others sitting or standing next to someone. I am not suggesting that our own experiences gain legitimacy only when mentioned in the same breath as beliefs from other peoples. The idea is to expose the cynical double standards of the West. Anyway, as the Bible says, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” (Matthew 6:34).

Let us continue with our catalogue of unfamiliar experiences, which to some will always seem to be far-fetched. Let us take the case of baboons that drive buses and trucks. How possible is this? Ask any cross-border travellers who often hitch rides with long-distance truckers and they will tell you chilling tales of drivers who tell you in the quiet of the night not to worry if you should see anything strange along the journey.

Having said this, they promptly fall asleep on the bunk bed and a baboon becomes your chauffeur. Baboons are also sent by aggrieved men whose wives are seduced by others or who are promised a girl from a family in exchange for regular supplies of labour or preferably food supplies only to be double-crossed in the end.

In such cases, a baboon walks into a homestead and makes himself comfortable on a chair or bench or whatever is available. The message is always understood. My father told me of a great aunt of ours in the family who had to leave her matrimonial home and her only son under these circumstances. I knew her son (before he passed on) and his son after him.

But perhaps the strangest of these occurrences is the gourd nicely-adorned with beads that many traditional healers sometimes had. The gourd could move of its own accord and talk like a human being. It could also report to its owner, word-for-word, anything that anyone said in his absence, and even mimic the speakers’ voices. I am sure that other people have knowledge of similar things and incidences. If so, kindly e-mail me at [email protected].