Why Are South Africans Afraid of Tokoloshes?

In 1974 Ursula Le Guin began a talk entitled “Why are Americans afraid of dragons?” by recounting the experience of an unnamed friend who had visited the children’s room of a large public library in search of The Hobbit. To her horror, a librarian told her firmly that the book could only be found in the adult section as the staff “didn’t feel that escapism was good for children” (Le Guin 31). Le Guin then went on to suggest that this response was indicative of “something that goes very deep in the American character: a moral disapproval of fantasy, a disapproval so intense, and often so aggressive, that I cannot help but see it as arising, fundamentally, from fear” (31).

Thirty or more years later, any curious reader visiting the metaphorical children’s room of the library of South African literature and noting the conspicuous lack of fantasy novels on the shelves for older children might be forgiven for wondering if moral disapproval of fantasy is not even more characteristic of the South African psyche today than it ever was of the American one. Dragons are available to older South African children in imported novels but tokoloshes, small, hairy beings known for their sexual appetites and ability to abduct human children, are not. This paper will attempt to consider why so little fantasy for older children makes use of South Africa’s rich mythological heritage and speculate about whether the situation may be about to change. Of course, when probing an absence, that lacuna itself may sometimes force one to speculate rather than analyze. The material that follows is therefore, at times, unashamedly personal and reflective rather than empirically verifiable, but I believe it raises questions that need to be asked if the underlying assumptions of the South African children’s book world are ever to be properly examined.

Two factors make the dearth of South African fantasy for young readers in the nine to fifteen age group perhaps more surprising than the views expressed by Le Guin’s librarian some forty years ago. The first is the recent explosion of international interest in fantasy literature following the enormous financial and popular success of J. K. Rowlings’s Harry Potter series; more than sixty million copies of the first six books in the series had been sold even prior to the record-breaking release of the final volume Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in July 2007 (Rossouw 9). The second is the substantial number of collections of African and pseudo-African folktales available for younger children in the average South African bookshop.

Of course, the publication of African folktales in translation has a long and, by local standards, profitable history in South Africa dating back to W. H. I. Bleek’s Reynard the Fox in South Africa or, Hottentot Fables and Tales first published in 1864. Indeed, as Elwyn Jenkins points out “so intrinsic a part of South African children’s literature have translated folktales become that writers are now producing new, original stories in the style of San and African models” (9). Traditional folktales and their derivatives are thus readily available and apparently eagerly purchased by both middle-class white parents anxious to expose their children, who are growing up in a post-apartheid context, to African culture and by newly prosperous black parents wishing to affirm traditional cultural values that are becoming increasingly alien to their children’s predominately urban lifestyles. For these reasons too, works purporting to contain or be based on indigenous folklore are regularly prescribed for use in local schools and approved for purchase by both school and municipal libraries, all factors vitally important in a country where it is estimated that only some two to five per cent of the population is able or willing to buy books for the home (Jenkins 3).

Given the relative ease with which the Zulu trickster, Hlakanyana, is allowed to rub dust jackets with the big bad wolf and Matong and his ox to compete in the open market with their European cousins, Cinderella and her fairy godmother, one might expect to...