LIGHTNING MYTHS AND BELIEFS IN SOUTH

AFRICA: THEIR EFFECT ON PERSONAL SAFETY

Estelle Trengove

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment,

University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the
requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Johannesburg, 2012
Declaration

I declare that this thesis is my own unaided work. It is being submitted for the
Degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg. It has not been submitted before for any degree or
examination to any other University.

……………………………………………………………………………

Signed this ……….. day of …………….., ……………

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For Wim, Markus and Daniël

3
Abstract

Every year, lightning kills and injures people and animals and damages
property in South Africa. Rural people who work outdoors tending the land or
herding animals are particularly vulnerable to lightning strikes. A lightning
awareness effort might help to reduce the annual number of lightning deaths
in South Africa. This thesis describes an attempt at understanding southern
African traditional myths and beliefs related to lightning and to examine how
these could inform lightning awareness and education. Lightning awareness
efforts in other countries are assessed in terms of their suitability with respect
to South Africa. Finally, a model for a mobile lightning warning and aware-
ness is proposed based on the current African mobile culture. Mobile
telephones have created a revolution in communications in Africa. Millions of
people living in rural areas never had any infrastructure: no fixed-line tele-
phone infrastructure, not even electrical power, hence no computer
communications, but mobile telephones and the short message service
(SMS) have changed that. The proposal suggests leveraging the exponential
growth of a mobile culture in Africa and gives a high-level outline of what
such a system might look like.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisors Professor Ian Jandrell and Professor

Isabel Hofmeyr. Prof. Jandrell provided the spark that lead to this project, his
enthusiasm kept it going and he generously made research group funding
available for it. Prof Hofmeyr unstintingly gave me her time, encouragement
and guidance through the Humanities terrain that is so unfamiliar to an
engineer – without her, I could never have finished this work.

Thank you to Mankoko Mabusela for interpreting in Mokopane and for tran-
scribing and translating all the interview material, Sicebi Phungula for
interpreting in Hlabisa and Gabriel Khumalo for doing some initial translating.

This research was made possible by the funding and support of the following
organisations for the High Voltage and Lightning EMC Research Groups:

• CBI-Electric for direct support and funding the Chair of Lightning at the
University of the Witwatersrand;

• Eskom through the Tertiary Education Support Programme (TESP);

• The National Research Foundation (NRF);

• The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) for Technology and Human
Resources for Industry Programme (THRIP) funding.

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Contents

Declaration ............................................................................................................. 2

Abstract .................................................................................................................. 4

Acknowledgements ................................................................................................ 5

Contents ................................................................................................................. 6

List of Figures ......................................................................................................... 8

List of Tables ........................................................................................................ 10

Appendices........................................................................................................... 11

1 Introduction ............................................................................................. 12

1.1 Lightning occurrence patterns in South Africa ............................................. 14

1.2 Statistics on deaths and injuries due to lightning ........................................ 16

1.3 Engineering codes of conduct ..................................................................... 19

1.4 Indigenous knowledge systems .................................................................. 20

1.5 Concluding remarks .................................................................................... 21

2 Methodology ............................................................................................ 22

2.1 Quantitative versus qualitative methodologies ............................................ 22

2.2 Mixed methods and a grounded theory approach - the methodology used for
this study .............................................................................................................. 24

2.3 Data collection procedures .......................................................................... 27

2.4 Engineering design methodology ................................................................ 37

3 Some South African lightning myths and beliefs ..................................... 39

3.1 Witchcraft and Muthi.................................................................................... 39

3.2 The Lightning Tree ...................................................................................... 61

3.3 The Lightning Bird ....................................................................................... 65

3.4 The Lightning Snake ................................................................................... 70

3.5 Lightning symbolism in praise poetry .......................................................... 71

3.6 Lightning in Afrikaans poetry ....................................................................... 75

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 3.7 A tyre on the roof ......................................................................................... 76

3.8 Mirrors and lightning .................................................................................... 76

3.9 Mobile telephones attract lightning .............................................................. 77

3.10 Sitting indoors quietly ................................................................................ 78

3.11 Ball lightning .............................................................................................. 79

4 Lightning awareness ............................................................................... 80

4.1 Mechanisms of lightning injury .................................................................... 80

4.2 Basic information that a lightning awareness campaign should address .... 83

4.3 Lightning awareness campaigns in other countries .................................... 84

4.4 Critique from the South African point of view .............................................. 85

4.5 Lightning warning systems .......................................................................... 86

4.6 Categorization of myths and beliefs according to risk ................................. 87

5 Using mobile telephones for lightning education and awareness: a

proposal ........................................................................................................ 91

5.1 The emerging mobile culture in Africa ......................................................... 92

5.2 A possible model ......................................................................................... 94

5.3 Legal restrictions in South Africa ................................................................. 95

6 Conclusion .............................................................................................. 97

References ................................................................................................. 100

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List of Figures

Figure 1.1: Image of the total number of lightning flashes detected by a

lightning imaging sensor aboard a satellite, recorded between January
1998 and November 2010 (Global Hydrology and Climate Center, 2011).
The greyed-out areas indicate areas not covered by the lightning
imaging sensor. ..................................................................................... 15

Figure 1.2: Lightning ground flash density map based on data collected by
the South African Lightning Detection Network for the period 2006-2008
(Jandrell, 2009) ...................................................................................... 16

Figure 1.3: Daily Sun (Ramotekoa, 2010) report on goats killed by lightning 19

Figure 2.1: Mixed methods study design ...................................................... 25

Figure 2.2: Qualitative methodology used for this study .............................. 26

Figure 2.3: A typical engineering design process ......................................... 37

Figure 3.1: Respoonse to "Are ther people who can control lightning?" ....... 52

Figure 3.2: A stall at the Mthubathuba muthi market .................................... 54

Figure 3.3: Umsuzwane (JSTOR, 2005) ....................................................... 54

Figure 3.4: Heaven-herd with his muthi horns .............................................. 57

Figure 3.5: The basic physics of a cloud-to-ground lightning strike .............. 59

Figure 3.6: Khomani San house built under a large boscia albitrunca ......... 61

Figure 3.7: Charts showing the soil resistivity under boscia albitrunca and
40m away from tree ............................................................................... 64

Figure 3.8: The lightning bird speaks to Magena .......................................... 66

Figure 3.9: Photograph by Yu-Chieh Liu of a lightning flash that looks like a
bird ......................................................................................................... 69

Figure 3.10: Clay models of the inkanyamba. Photograph reproduced with

the permission of Felicity Wood ............................................................. 70

Figure 3.11: A man outside his house with tyres on the roof to protect against
lightning ................................................................................................. 75
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Figure 3.12: Do mirrors attract lightning? ..................................................... 77

Figure 3.13: Is it dangerous to talk on a cell phone during a lightning storm?

............................................................................................................... 78

Figure 4.1: Injury due to a direct lightning strike ........................................... 81

Figure 4.2: Death or injury due to a touch voltage ........................................ 81

Figure 4.3: Harm due to a side flash ............................................................. 81

Figure 4.4: Step potential .............................................................................. 82

Figure 4.5: Upward streamers ...................................................................... 82

Figure 4.6: Questionnaire: Would it be safe under a tree in a thunderstorm?

............................................................................................................... 89

Figure 5.1: Components of an SMS warning system ................................... 94

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List of Tables

Table 4.1: Risks associated with myths and beliefs ..................................... 88

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Appendices

Appendix A ................................................................................................. 116

Appendix B ................................................................................................. 118

Appendix C ................................................................................................. 127

Appendix D ................................................................................................. 129

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1 Introduction
Lightning kills many people in South Africa every year. Reports in the lay
press indicate that in January 2011 alone, 17 people were killed by lightning
in the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga.

Research around the world shows that people who are outdoors during a
lightning storm face the highest risk of being killed or injured by lightning.
South Africa has a large rural population, with many people involved in
subsistence farming and it is those people, who work outdoors tending the
land or herding livestock, who are most vulnerable. Even indoors, rural
people are at greater risk since most live in houses that have no lightning
protection systems and many do not even have reinforcing steel, metal
plumbing or electrical wiring that can provide a path for a lightning current to
ground (Gomes, 2006), (Cooray, 2007), (Cooper, 2010). In addition, many
rural homes either have thatched roofs or newspaper to insulate the roof,
both of which can easily be set alight by lightning.

Focusing on lightning fatalities, however, hides the true extent of the problem
because lightning injures more people than it kills – a ratio of ten injuries for
every lightning death seems to be a commonly used rule of thumb (Rakov,
2003), (Cooper, 2010). Lightning also destroys livestock and property.

One way of addressing the problem would be to provide lightning awareness

education that reaches the maximum possible number of people with infor-
mation regarding personal safety during an electrical storm. The worldwide
need for lightning awareness campaigns is well established in the literature
(Holle, 2008), (Lengyel, 2010), (Ab Kadir, 2010), (Jandrell, 2009), (Eriksson,
1986), (Dlamini, 2009). Indeed, the decline in the number of lightning deaths
in the United States has been partly attributed to the effectiveness of light-
ning awareness campaigns (Holle, 2008), (Lengyel, 2010).

Jandrell (2009), Eriksson (1986) and Dlamini (2009) have pointed out the
need for lightning education in southern Africa, but to date this has not
happened.

South Africa has a very diverse population and people from different cultural
backgrounds have different traditions and beliefs. It would, therefore, be
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important within the South African context, to gain an understanding of the
myths and beliefs regarding lightning, because lightning education should
take cognisance of this knowledge.

A project was initiated in 2009 to attempt to understand traditional myths and

beliefs related to lightning. It was innovative as it required working at the
interface between the humanities, science and engineering. It brings together
an interest in indigenous knowledge systems and a curiosity about whether
these could inform strategies for increasing the safety of rural communities.

This thesis resulted from the project and addresses the following research
questions:

• What are the common myths and beliefs surrounding lightning in different
areas in South Africa?
• How do the myths and beliefs that make people either more or less
vulnerable to being killed or injured by lightning?
• What role should these myths and beliefs play in a lightning awareness
safety campaign?
• What form should a lightning awareness campaign take in South Africa?

All the questions contribute to the investigation of the central hypothesis that
underlies this work, namely that people’s perceptions and unquestioned
traditional beliefs about lightning, combined with a lack of information, could
affect their risk of being killed or injured during a thunderstorm. Hence this
thesis considers both traditional beliefs and a possible approach to create
lightning awareness. This thesis considers the hypothesis by breaking it
down into the following steps:

1. Finding and recording common beliefs from a wide variety of data

sources;
2. Evaluating whether the beliefs increase or decrease people’s risk of being
killed or injured by lightning;
3. Considering whether it would be useful to address the common beliefs
and perceptions in a lightning awareness or education effort;
4. It concludes by proposing a lightning awareness model that would be
useful and effective in South Africa.
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The material is arranged to provide some general background in Chapter 1,
which will establish the need for a lightning awareness campaign in South
Africa by looking at lightning occurrence patterns and lightning death statis-
tics, as well as the motivation provided by engineering codes of practice.
Chapter 2 documents the methodology that was used to gain some insight
into lightning myths and beliefs in South Africa and gives examples of each
method that was used. In Chapter 3, some of the common myths and beliefs
are recounted. Chapter 4 examines lightning awareness campaigns in other
countries and gives a critique of how well suited each would be in South
Africa. The chapter concludes with an assessment of whether the beliefs
discussed in Chapter 4 contribute to risk with respect to lightning injury.
Chapter 5 makes a proposal about possible ways of approaching a lightning
awareness campaign here, followed by some general conclusions in Chapter
6.

1.1 Lightning occurrence patterns in South Africa

There are about five million cloud-to-ground lightning flashes per year around
the world (Evert, 2005). Satellites equipped with technology that can detect
optical and radio frequency radiation emitted by lightning, have made a large
volume of data about lightning activity available in the past three decades
(Rakov, 2003). About 40 countries have lightning detection networks and the
data from these networks continue to be of interest to the lightning research
community. Evidence of this is provided by a number of papers in the Inter-
national Conference on Lightning Protection (ICLP) in Vienna in September
2012, for example, research using alternative methods of lightning stroke
detection to verify the accuracy of lightning detection networks (Mata et al,
2012), (Naccarato et al, 2012), (Lu et al, 2012), (Saito et al, 2012).

The information collected by lightning location systems can be used to

establish how much lightning there is in South Africa compared to other
countries and to determine which areas in South Africa are most vulnerable.

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Figure 1.1: Image of the total number of lightning flashes detected by a lightning imaging
sensor aboard a satellite, recorded between January 1998 and November 2010 (Global
Hydrology and Climate Center, 2011). The greyed-out areas indicate areas not covered by
the lightning imaging sensor.
A satellite image of the total number of lightning flashes compiled by NASA
(National Aeronautics and Space Administration) over a 13-year period
between January 1998 and November 2010 is shown in Figure 1.1 (Global
Hydrology and Climate Center, 2011). The data was obtained from NASA’s
Lightning Imaging Sensor, which detects both cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-
ground lightning in a particular band around the equator. Researchers have
found that the flash rate reaches a maximum value at the equator and drops
off as the latitude increases (Cooray, 2003), thus the grayed-out areas not
covered by satellite detection in Figure 1.1 are likely to experience less
lightning flashes than the latitudes that are covered. Figure 1.1 shows that
South Africa is subject to a high lightning flash rate, with large areas receiv-
ing between 3500 and 5000 flashes. These flash rates are ranked second,
third and fourth on the image’s flash scale, which is surpassed by very few
countries in the world.

Locally, South Africa’s lightning ground flash density information for the
period between 1975 and 1986 was collected by the Council for Scientific
and Industrial Research (CSIR), but more recently, the South African Weath-
er Service (SAWS) implemented the Southern African Lightning Detection
Network (SALDN), that consists of 20 lightning location stations (Jandrell,
2009).
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Figure 1.2: Lightning ground flash density map based on data collected by the South African
Lightning Detection Network for the period 2006-2008 (Jandrell, 2009)
The SALDN map in Figure 1.2 shows that the areas in South Africa with the
highest lightning ground flash density Ng (flashes per kilometer squared per
year) are Gauteng, the Drakensberg and the interior of KwaZulu-Natal. In a
substantial area, the ground flash density exceeds 12 Ng km--2 year--1. Since
Gauteng is densely populated, this poses a non-trivial risk to personal safety.

1.2 Statistics on deaths and injuries due to lightning

Lightning is one of the major causes of weather-related deaths (Ab Kadir,

2010). In the United States for example, it is second only to floods as the
natural hazard that kills the most people (Cooray, 2007), (Carte, 2002).

South Africa does not have a repository of data on the number of deaths and
injuries due to lightning, but this is consistent with the same frustration expe-
rienced by lightning injury researchers around the world (Ab Kadir, 2010).
Blumenthal (2005) and Meel (2007) both comment on the scarcity of data on
lightning fatalities in South African medical literature.

Internationally, statistics indicate that people engaged in outdoor activities

are most vulnerable to be killed or injured as a result of a lightning strike
(Rakov, 2003), (Ab Kadir, 2010), (Meel, 2007), (Zhang, 2010). Using data
from medico-legal laboratories, Blumenthal (2007) found that during the
period 2001 – 2004, lightning killed 52 people in Gauteng province – all of

16
them were outdoors. Data from the United States indicates that 30% of
people killed by lightning were working outdoors (Rakov, 2003). This means
that rural people who work outdoors tending the land or herding livestock are
most susceptible. Indeed, the annual lightning death rate in the United States
has declined steadily since the 1930’s, which is partly attributed to a de-
crease of the rural population in general and, in particular, a decrease in
people involved in agricultural labour (Holle, 2008).

South Africa still has a substantial rural population. The total population of
South Africa is estimated to be 49.99 million (Statistics South Africa, 2010),
of which 43.7% live in rural areas (Versteeg, 2010). The country has a large
agricultural sector that employs farm workers and many rural people are
involved in subsistence farming. There are thus many people who could
potentially be at risk during lightning storms.

Lightning death and injury statistics are often based on reports in the lay
press, namely on-line and print newspapers.

There are, however, two problems with using the lay press as a source of
information. Firstly, the press relies on its news gathering network and the
public for information. If a lightning death occurs in a remote rural village in
South Africa, as has been reported for Asia (Ab Kadir, 2010), the news might
never reach the newspapers. Secondly, news items compete for space in the
news media, so even if the press does have information about a lightning
death, it might be crowded out by another item, deemed to be more important
or newsworthy (Cooper, 2010).

It is thus clear that the lay press cannot be relied on as a consistent source of
information, but it does provide a glimpse into the extent of the problem,
although the actual number is likely to be higher due to the problems associ-
ated with using data from the lay press.

Statistics from the South African on-line lay press and other sources have
been collated and sifted for repetitions and are shown in Table 1 in Appendix
A. The information indicates that 135 people were killed by lightning between
1 January 2009 and 31 January 2011. Given the tendency that lightning
deaths are underreported in the lay press, it is safe to say that at least 135

17
people died of lightning related deaths during that period, but the exact
number would be greater than that.

Holle (2008) uses a rate of fatalities per million people to compare lightning
deaths in different countries. He reports a current rate of about 0.3 deaths
per year per million people in Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan and the
United States. Using the data in Table 1 of Appendix A, South Africa has
lightning fatality rate of at least 1.01 per million people per year, more than
three times the rate in the developed countries described by Holle. There is
thus much room for improvement.

The problem of the news media underreporting lightning deaths is com-

pounded when considering other damage caused by lightning. There are no
records of how many people are injured by lightning strikes, but there could
potentially be a large number of people who are affected. It seems that, as a
general rule of thumb, about 10 people are injured for every person killed (Ab
Kadir, 2010), (Holle, 2008). This statistic is borne out by a news report on 27
November 2010 (Myburgh, 2010) of an incident in Pongola, KwaZulu-Natal: a
local crèche held a year-end party in a marquee tent. The tent was struck by
lightning and six people were killed, more than 60 injured and admitted to
hospital.

Besides killing and injuring people, lightning also kills livestock and game and
destroys property. If human deaths and injuries are underreported, it stands
to reason that such incidents are even more substantially underreported.
There are, however, press reports that confirm that this is not pure conjec-
ture. In November 2010, 47 head of cattle were killed by lightning in the
village of GaMatlala, in Limpopo (Matlala, 2010). For the villagers, this was a
disaster - the headman of the village is quoted as saying that “stock farming
is our only means of survival”. The Daily Sun reported lightning killing 15 of a
man’s 32 goats in January 2010 (Ramotekoa, 2010). The report, shown in
Figure 1.3, included a photograph of the dead goats. In February 2011,
lightning killed a male lion on a game farm in the Free State province (Van
Der Merwe, 2011). The lion was used for breeding and was reported to have
a value of R400 000.

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 Figure 1.3: Daily Sun (Ramotekoa, 2010) report on goats killed by lightning

1.3 Engineering codes of conduct

The question might be raised as to why engineers should make any effort to
understand local myths and beliefs about lightning and the answer lies in
professional ethics and codes of conduct to which engineers subscribe.

The Rules of Conduct for Registered Persons of the Engineering Council of

South Africa (ECSA) (Government Gazette, 2006) are used for illustrative
purposes, but many engineering codes of conduct worldwide contain similar
clauses. ECSA is the statutory body that regulates registration as a Profes-
sional Engineer. A code of conduct can be described as a set of rules that
prescribes how the members of a profession are to conduct themselves in
matters pertaining to their professional lives. ECSA’s Rules of Conduct for
Registered Persons are entrenched in South Africa’s legislation in the South
African Engineering Profession Act 46 of 2000 (Engineering Council of South
Africa, 2010), so everybody registered as a professional engineer by ECSA is
bound by it.

The Rules are introduced by a paragraph stating that their purpose is,
amongst other things, to ensure that registered professional engineers
(Government Gazette, 2006):

• “apply their knowledge and skill in the interest of humanity and the envi-
ronment”;

19
• “respect the interests of their fellow beings”.

Furthermore Rule 3(3)(a) states that engineers “must have due regard to
public safety, public health and the public interest generally”.

It is evident from these sections of the Rules of Conduct for Registered

Persons that engineers should care about and take into consideration the
local beliefs when they interact with communities. In a country with a homo-
geneous population, this would not be such an issue. In a country like South
Africa, however, there is large diversity of groups with different languages
and cultural identities. The challenge to engineers introducing technology into
an area is to understand and accommodate such local views.

1.4 Indigenous knowledge systems

A second motivation for this work comes from a growing interest in South
Africa in so-called indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) – this can be seen
from the journal Idilinga – African Journal of Indigenous Knowledge Systems,
that is dedicated to IKS and has been published twice per year since 2002,
as well as South Africa’s National Research Foundation, that includes indig-
enous knowledge in the research that it funds (National Research
Foundation, 2012:9). In its strategic plan, the National Research Foundation
(NRF) describes its mandate as promoting and supporting research “… in all
fields of science and technology, including indigenous knowledge…”. Indige-
nous knowledge in Africa is a way of doing things and of thinking about
things that developed over a long time as people learned to adapt to the
environments where they were living (Moji, 2009).

The distinction between IKS and myths is that IKS is a term that is used to
describe traditional ways of doing and thinking that could add value to current
endeavours, whereas myths are any traditional beliefs.

One of the directions in the interest in indigenous knowledge systems seeks

to incorporate local traditional ways of thinking and doing into learning and
teaching and to exploit it in commercial projects. A recent example is the
commercialisation of dieting products containing hoodia. Hoodia is a plant
that was used by the San to control their appetites during periods when food
was scarce.
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The Department of Basic Education (DBE) is seeking to promote indigenous
knowledge by including it in the school curricula, where it might contribute to
the understanding of concepts in the curriculum. The DBE defines Indige-
nous Knowledge Systems as knowledge that communities used (or might still
be using) and passed on from one generation to the next (Department of
Basic Education, 2012a:7). In the Curriculum and Assessment Policy docu-
ments for Grade 10 – 12 for both Life Sciences and Physical Sciences
(Department of Basic Education, 2012a), (Department of Basic Education,
2012b) the need for including indigenous knowledge is mentioned. The
curriculum cites the physics example of using friction to make fire. Pabale
(2006) and Maselwa (2004) used different methodologies to investigate
whether local lightning beliefs could be incorporated into school physics
lessons on electrostatics.

By interacting with communities, engineers might learn something of interest

by subjecting their indigenous knowledge regarding lightning to scientific
scrutiny or, alternatively, to spread lightning safety awareness by leveraging
indigenous knowledge that promotes safe behaviour during an electric storm.

1.5 Concluding remarks

This chapter has made a case that there are many lightning deaths in South
Africa annually and that there is a need for a lightning awareness. The
chapter has also laid out the underlying hypothesis of the thesis, namely that
the things that people believe about lightning and their lack of information
could affect their chances of being killed or injured during an electric storm. It
has also outlined the steps that were followed to investigate this hypothesis.

21
2 Methodology
In Ian McEwan’s novel Solar, the antihero of the story is Prof Michael Beard,
a winner of the Nobel prize in Physics. When Beard meets a Humanities
lecturer who says that he is interested in the narrative that climate change
has generated, Beard thinks that “People who kept on about narrative tended
to have a squiffy view of reality, believing all versions of it to be of equal
value.” Although the novel is written in a tongue-in-cheek way, it does point to
a two real problems, namely:

• The wide divergence of humanities and social sciences viewpoints on

one hand, and science and engineering viewpoints on the other hand;

• The tendency of scientists and engineers to dismiss interpretations

that fall outside of scientific methodologies.

The challenge of this study was for a researcher with an engineering back-
ground to collect data from outside the field of science and engineering and
to use methodologies that are unfamiliar to engineers. This section gives an
overview of the methodologies that were used in this study to gain insight into
lightning-related myths and beliefs and provides details of the data collection
procedures employed. To gain an understanding of these myths and beliefs,
engineers have to venture into fields that are unfamiliar to them, such as
literature, oral tradition, anthropology and interviewing.

2.1 Quantitative versus qualitative methodologies

In science and engineering, research mostly tends to be quantitative in

nature: the researcher postulates a hypothesis, devises an experiment that
will test it, takes measurements and analyses the measurements to deter-
mine whether or not the hypothesis was correct. The type of data or
measurements that are collected, can be analysed and evaluated in an
objective, dispassionate way. Key issues are data reliability and sufficiency,
i.e. what is the margin of error in the measurements and is there enough data
to give a representative sample with respect to the hypothesis?

In humanities and social sciences, on the other hand, a large volume of

research is qualitative. Denzin and Lincoln (2005) define qualitative research

22
as: “…study[ing] things in their natural setting, attempting to make sense of,
or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them.”
(Denzin et al, 2005:3). Corbin and Strauss define it as: “A process of examin-
ing and interpreting data in order to elicit meaning, gain understanding, and
develop empirical knowledge.” (Corbin et al, 2008:1). Creswell(1998:15)
describes it as “an inquiry process of understanding based on distinct meth-
odological traditions of inquiry that explore a social or human problem. The
researcher builds a complex, holistic picture, analyzes words, reports de-
tailed views of informants, and conducts the study in a natural setting.”

The methods that are used in qualitative research include case study, inter-
viewing, observing participants, collecting and analyzing documents, artifacts
or audiovisual material (Corbin, 2008), (Creswell, 1998). Contrary to the
scientific method, which strives for objective numeric data, qualitative re-
searchers are interested in understanding how people experience things and
make sense of phenomena. The observations and interpretations of the
researcher are also important, therefore this chapter outlines how the re-
search question developed and was shaped and changed as the research
progressed.

A useful metaphor for qualitative research in general and this study in par-
ticular, is that of the researcher as a quilt maker (Denzin et al, 2005), who
uses whatever bits and pieces of material (s)he can find and stitches them
together to create a new picture that gives a fresh perspective. In this project,
information on people’s perceptions of lightning were collected and assem-
bled to shed light on whether the things that people believe put them at
greater risk of lightning injury.

Charmaz (2007) speaks of collecting rich data for qualitative research. In this
study, the data is given richness through the use of many different sources,
namely interviews, literature in the form of short stories and praise poetry,
and oral tradition.

Another important difference is that quantitative researchers start off with a

theory and then construct an experiment that will either prove or disprove the
theory. Alternatively, they start with an observation and then develop a theory

23
to generalize the observed behavior. Qualitative researchers, on the other
hand, do explorative research, that asks: “What is going on here?” rather
than seeking evidence to answer a specific question. Grounded theory,
proposed by Glaser and Strauss (1967), is an example of explorative re-
search: the researcher systematically collects and analyses rich data to come
up with a theory (Glaser et al, 1967), (Creswell, 1998), (Charmaz, 2005).

In this study, both qualitative and quantitative approaches are of value, thus
the methodology used was a mixed methods methodology, as described in
Section 2.2.

2.2 Mixed methods and a grounded theory approach - the

methodology used for this study

The approach adopted for this study is a pragmatic one that acknowledges
that both qualitative and quantitative research can contribute to a better
understanding of lightning myths and beliefs in southern Africa, hence the
methodology used for this study is a mixed methods methodology. Pragma-
tism means that you do what works for your specific study and both
subjective and objective knowledge are valued (Creswell, 2007). Morse
(1991) pinpointed the greatest advantage of mixed methods when she said
that smart researchers have the versatility to choose from many research
methods, but of course the researcher must make sure that the choice of the
repertoire of methods is carefully motivated.

There has been a growing interest in mixed methods over the past twenty
years, where mixed methods researchers integrate both qualitative and
quantitative approaches in a single study (Barnes, 2011). Creswell suggests
that in a mixed methods study, metaphysical concepts like truth and reality
should be abandoned (Creswell, 2007:27), therefore the researcher does not
have to be bound by either a positivist or a constructionist worldview.

The mixed methods design followed in this project is a triangulation design,

where one type of data is used to validate or expand the other data type
(Creswell, 2007), (Barnes, 2011).

When using mixed methods in a study, the researcher must decide:

24
• Whether the qualitative and quantitative parts of a study are sequential or
concurrent. In sequential research, the collection of one data types cannot
proceed until the other has been completed (Barnes, 2011), (Morse,
1991), (Creswell, 2007).

• Whether the qualitative and quantitative parts of the study are equally
weighted or not (Barnes, 2011), (Morse, 1991), (Creswell, 2007).

For this study, the qualitative and quantitative data collection can occur
simultaneously and the qualitative data is more heavily weighted, as one
does not rely on the other. The qualitative data comprises the collection and
analysis of references in the oral tradition, literature and interviews. The
survey questionnaire is the quantitative part of the study and it is used to
demonstrate that the myths and beliefs are not unique to a few individuals,,
but represent the beliefs of a larger section of the population.

Graphically, the research design is shown in Figure 2.1.

Figure 2.1: Mixed methods study design

The qualitative part of the study was conducted using a grounded theory
methodology as described by Charmaz (2006). In grounded theory, a theory
is developed based on the data. Sometimes, as happened in this study, data
is collected based on an initial research question, but analyzing the data
suggests a new direction.

The research process used in this study is shown graphically in Figure 2.2. It
starts with the definition of a research question. In this case, the initial re-
search question was: How do South African lightning myths and beliefs relate
to the physics of lightning as understood empirically by engineers and scien-
tists today? To test lightning myths against current physical knowledge, the
25
first step is to track down the myths and beliefs. The first iteration of data
collection, therefore, involved casting the net widely to identify a range of
potential sources of folktales, myths and legends.

Figure 2.2: Qualitative methodology used for this study

There is no collection or volume bringing together all the South African
lightning stories and certainly no work that has systematically researched the
stories in a qualitative way.

Using the major secondary sources1 and expert opinion, I identified oral
tradition, oral narratives and poetry as my initial source. I supplemented
these with both academic collections of myth and folktales (Berglund, 1976),
(Werner, 1933), (Schapera, 1971) and with popular renditions of folktales
such as Bourke (circa 1948) and Cantrell’s (1978) collections and Phyllis
Savory’s volumes of folktales written in English, such as the Zulu Fireside
Tales (Savory, 1963) and African Fireside Tales (Savory, 1982).

As the research progressed, I extended the sources to include contemporary

material in the form of literature and newspaper texts from the popular South
African tabloid, the Daily Sun, as well as interviews from a range of sites.

The data collection procedures are described in detail in paragraph 2.3.

1
As regards the secondary sources that I used in mapping the field, I relied on Finnegan
(1970) and White (1982), major commentators on African oral literature and southern African
praise poetry respectively. I also drew on the scholarship of Hofmeyr (1993) and Vansina
(1985) and older African anthropological studies by Werner (1933) and Krige (1936). Arising
from these, I identified two major sources of oral tradition, namely the Bleek and Lloyd
archive and the texts written by Bishop Henry Callaway, both discussed in paragraph 2.3.1
and in Chapter 3.
26
The myths, tales and beliefs documented during data collection, are dis-
cussed in Chapter 3, with commentaries with respect to the current empirical
understanding of the physics of lightning.

Early on in the study, it became apparent that nothing of substance would

come of the initial research question, since most of the myths are unrelated
to the current scientific understanding of lightning. As described by Charmaz
(2006), the data suggested a shift in the research direction. Since there
seemed to be no connection between the physics of lightning, the data
suggested a more fruitful research question would be: How do commonly
held myths or beliefs either increase or decrease people’s risk of being killed
or injured by lightning? A secondary question that would arise from this
analysis would be whether this information could be incorporated in a local
lightning education initiative, either to warn against dangerous behaviour or
to encourage safe behaviour.

Data was analysed to find and group together common themes. Only themes
that occurred in several sources were pursued in this study. There are beliefs
that only occur in one source, and those were not included in the study. An
example of such an eccentric belief is the Daily Sun story (Sigwela, 2009) of
Mazwabantu Jonas, who breeds and sells tortoises, because he believes that
they have magical powers, including the ability to prevent lightning from
striking a house. Since this belief in tortoises as lightning protection was not
encountered in any other source, it was not included in the study.

2.3 Data collection procedures

Any research project must involve rigorous data collection procedures (Cre-
swell, 1998). Rigorous data collection procedures normally entail collecting
multiple forms of data and evolving appropriate methods of analysing them.
This section discusses the different data sources that I used for the study,
namely oral traditions, praise poetry, contemporary literature, tabloids and
interviews undertaken in Johannesburg and during field work visits to three
different sites. The field work consisted of visits to the Khomani San in
Witdraai in Northern Cape, two visits to Hlabisa in KwaZulu-Natal and a visit
to three villages in the Mokopane area in Limpopo. Each trip, was between 2

27
and 4 days in the field. Each trip was well planned in advance in collaboration
with somebody with well-established contacts in each of the communities
visited.

In this section, the data sources are divided into three categories narrative
and poetic sources, interview sources and media sources.

2.3.1 Narrative and poetic sources

I have classified oral tradition, praise poetry and contemporary literature as

narrative and poetic sources. Each type of source is discussed individually,
together with the methods of analysis used in each case.

Oral tradition

A rich oral tradition existed in indigenous communities in Africa long before

the skill of writing was introduced by Christian missionaries and other literate
Europeans that came into contact with them. Missionaries were expected to
learn the language and habits of the groups they were sent to convert and to
report back regularly to their home communities (Delius, 2001).

Many misconceptions existed in the past about the oral tradition. One such a
misconception was that African oral stories were part of a primitive stage of
cultural development in the evolution towards a written culture (Finnegan,
1970). Oral stories were regarded as primitive, traditional and communal,
folktales handed down from one generation to the next. That was changed by
Finnegan’s (1970) work that recognized oral tradition as literature, of which
the performance was an important element: storytellers were artists that
introduced individual variations in style, content and language and they used
tone, gestures, music and interaction with their audiences.

In considering stories taken from the oral tradition, it is therefore important to

recognize that if the transcribed tales seem simple, it is because they lack the
artistic element of performance. It is also important to remember that each
story is the work of an individual artist - they are not, as Krige (1936) de-
scribed them, general folklore. Within these constraints, however, transcribed
and translated oral literature can still make a contribution to our understand-

28
ing of how lightning was viewed by analyzing lightning imagery used in oral
literature.

In selecting sources on oral tradition, I chose two collections that are recog-
nised as the leading sources in southern Africa, namely the Bleek and Lloyd
archive (Centre for Curating the Archive, 2011), (Bleek, 2007) and Henry
Callaway’s work (Callaway, 1886a & 1886b) .

The Bleek and Lloyd (Bleek, 2007) archive of San stories, translated into
English, was originally published in 1911. The importance of the Bleek and
Lloyd archive is demonstrated by the ongoing scholarly engagement with it,
such as the work of Deacon (1996), Lewis-Williams (2000), Hewitt (2001),
Wessels (2010), a conference entitled The Courage of ||kabbo held in Cape
Town in 2011 that brought together many leading academics working on the
archive and an exhibition by artist and academic Pippa Skotnes entitled The
courage of ||kabbo: Landscape to Literature.

The Bleek and Lloyd archive consists of work done by Dr Wilhelm Bleek and
his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd. Some of the translated stories from the archive
were published in Specimans of Bushman Folklore (Bleek, 2007) Most of
what we know today about the language and culture of the original San
hunter-gatherers who lived in the Kalahari, was recorded by Dr Bleek, a
German linguist, who came to South Africa in 1855 to compile a Zulu gram-
mar (Lewis-Williams, 2000).

Bleek was interested in the San and heard that there were some San prison-
ers in Cape Town and on Robben Island. He started interviewing some of the
San prisoners and later got permission to employ some who were unfit for
hard labour in his house, where they taught him their language and he
recorded and translated their tales. His sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd and, later, his
daughter Dorothea Bleek, continued with his work on the San, which com-
prises about 12 000 pages of handwritten notes.

The Centre for Curating the Archive at the University of Cape Town has
digitised Bleek and Lloyd’s collection of notebooks and has created a search
index that makes it possible to search them using a large number of search
terms (Centre for Curating the Archive, 2011). For this study, I used the

29
search index of the digitised version of the archive, using lightning, thunder
and rain as a search terms – only those parts referenced in the search index
were considered, so examining the digitized notebooks could possibly reveal
other stories about thunder and lightning.

The San stories entitled ‡kagara and !haunu, who fought each other with
lightning and The Thunderstorm form part of the Specimens of Bushman
Folklore (Bleek, 2007) collection and have been included in this study.

The story of ‡kagara and !haunu is relevant in the context of lightning myths
and beliefs in Southern Africa in the sense that it refers to beings who are
able to control lightning. One of the reasons why this research project is
relevant is that there are many people in South Africa today who believe that
witches have the power to control lightning so that it selectively kills or injures
livestock and people or destroys houses (Harnischfeger, 2003). Any attempt
to help communities become safer from lightning, will have to incorporate this
view of the world.

Another important source is the writing of Bishop Henry Callaway, a Christian

missionary working among the Zulu people, (Callaway, 1868a). Henry Calla-
way wrote down and translated numerous stories and oral tradition regarding
religion and beliefs told to him by Zulu informants (Callaway 1868a and
1868b). He qualified as a medical doctor, but he had always felt that he had a
calling to serve in the Church. He offered to come to South Africa as a mis-
sionary for the Church of England. He and his wife arrived in Durban in 1854,
when he was 37 years old (Benham, 1896). He was convinced that mission-
ary work in South Africa was not very effective due to the missionaries’
speaking only poor Zulu. Initially, he spent up to 10 hours per day learning
Zulu. He decided that he wanted to live among the Zulu people where they
lived in the rural areas, not among those that worked in the towns for the
colonialists.

He moved inland to a farm called Springvale in 1858, where he taught, had a

surgery and held church services for the people living in villages in the
surrounding area. He started writing down oral literature as told to him to
improve his Zulu. He wrote in a letter (Benham, 1896:76): “I have been very

30
busy lately writing accounts from the mouth of different [Zulus], of their
habits, traditions, belief, etc. Some of these are extremely interesting… My
object in writing those ‘dictation lessons’, was simply with the view of improv-
ing my knowledge of their language; now I continue not only with that view,
but for the intrinsic value of the information itself.” This work resulted in one
of the major sources of Zulu oral literature.

For texts from the oral tradition, I have focused on narrative units that contain
a high level of repetition, indicating that they have been around for a long
time (Vansina, 1985) or units of the narrative that are repeated across sever-
al data sources.

Praise poetry

A form of oral tradition that is still alive in South Africa today is praise poetry.
Many South Africans will still remember the praise singer at the presidential
inauguration of Nelson Mandela on 10 May 1994. He was Zolani Mkiva, a
traditional Xhosa oral poet, from a family of recognized iimbongi (Xhosa oral
poets) and he performed an oral praise poem at the inauguration (Kaschula,
1997).

Praise poetry was selected as a data source, because in her important work
on oral literature in Africa, Finnegan (1970:111) identifies panegyric as “one
of the most developed and elaborate poetic genres in Africa”. She describes
South African praise poetry (1970:121) as “one of the most specialized and
complex forms of poetry to be found in Africa.”

Finnegan (1970:121-122) describes praise poetry as intense and containing

dramatic descriptions, often using allusion and metaphor in elaborate praises
of distinguished people.

There are a number of subgenres of praise poetry, ranging from praises for
the clan, the chief and war heroes, to singing your own praises or praising a
peer and even domestic and wild animals (Peek, 2004). Praise poems in
many southern African indigenous languages have been recorded.

Lightning often features as an image of power in praise poetry, for example in

this passage describing a warrior (Damane, 1974:232):

31
 The bravery of Fako is incomparable,

He may be likened to the lightning, the Koena

The sorcerer’s lightning for the soldiers.

The tropes used in praise poetry give one a sense if the different ways in
which lightning is regarded in different communities.

White (1982) identifies several collections as making an important contribu-

tion to praise poetry as a field of study, namely Schapera’s Tswana
collection, Damane and Sanders volume of Sotho praise poems, the Zulu
poems collected by Cope and Hodza and Fortune’s Shona poetry. These
collections were therefore selected as the sources for finding lightning imag-
es.

Contemporary Literature

Literature can sometimes give clues about local myths and beliefs. A tech-
nique used by some African writers is to incorporate oral traditions and
literary forms into their texts. One early and famous example of this trend is
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The novel is set in eastern Nigeria and
draws on a range of Igbo verbal art forms – narratives, proverbs, riddles,
praise songs. This technique not only provides a nuanced and textured
sense of the Igbo community, but also makes its philosophical, religious and
epistemological systems apparent to the reader.

One source used in this study is southern African literary texts that use this
technique. Drawing on overviews of the literature, like Gray (2002) as well as
expert opinion, appropriate literary texts were located.

An example of literature providing a clue about local myths and beliefs about
lightning is a short story entitled The Day Mabata-bata Exploded, by Mozam-
bican writer Mia Couto (1986). In the story, a cattle herd sees how a bright
flash kills one of his cows and immediately attributes it to the “lightning bird”.

A short story by Phaswane Mpe is analysed in detail in Chapter 3, using both

a close textual reading and the historical context in which the story is set.

Two Afrikaans poems have been included in the contemporary literature.

They do not contribute to any of identified myths, but they give an insight into
32
diametrically opposing views of lightning. They were included because I know
them well from school Afrikaans lessons.

The method used for the contemporary literature is a close textual, drawing
on recognized protocols of the discipline (Warren, 1959), (Scholes, 1966).
Applying these techniques, I was able to excavate the full range of meanings
that the stories attach to lightning.

Interviewing

The techniques of both unstructured and structured interviewing were used in

this study to gain insight into local myths and beliefs about lightning.

Unstructured interviews are directed conversations with individuals with

relevant experiences that allow the researcher to explore a specific topic in
depth (Charmaz, 2006). Unstructured interviews give researchers the free-
dom to explore interesting avenues that might emerge during a conversation.

The advantages of an interview is that it is flexible and it can be used with

people with low levels of literacy, whereas the disadvantages are that it is
difficult to exclude interviewer bias, leading questions could be asked and it is
expensive and time-consuming (McMillan, 2001).

Structured interviews can take the form of questionnaires and face-to-face

interviews that follow a fixed set of questions. Questionnaires are convenient
for gathering a large amount of data that can be represented in a format that
is more familiar to engineers in charts and graphs. Questionnaires have the
advantage that they can be anonymous, the questions are standard and it is
economical, but the disadvantages are that questions can be ambiguous and
the researcher does to have the opportunity to probe and clarify solutions
(McMillan, 2001). In this study, questionnaires were used, but no structured
interviews were conducted.

Ethics clearance was obtained for both structured and unstructured inter-
views from the Human Research Ethics Committee (non-medical) of the
University of the Witwatersrand (protocol number H1 10226). For ethical
reasons, participants in both structured and unstructured interviews will not
be identified. All participants were told of the purpose of the study and were
informed that their participation was voluntary.
33
Although I have not used unstructured interviewing as a research method
previously, it was a method with which I felt very comfortable, since I worked
as a journalist for seven years before studying engineering and interviews
are an integral part of journalism.

For this study, most of the interview participants were sangomas. A sangoma
is a clairvoyant who communicates with ancestral spirits, amongst other
things to diagnose illnesses. The experiences and stories of sangomas were
considered relevant for this project since part of their training is to learn about
tribal history, mythology and rituals (Hund, 2003).

Interviews were done in three rural areas during field work trips. Two of the
areas in which interviews were conducted, were selected based on discus-
sions with people who work closely with those communities. The founder of
an HIV/AIDS program in KwaZulu-Natal, recommended a young man who
lives in the Hlabisa area and works part-time for the HIV/AIDS project. He
knew the area and the people well and set up a number of interviews. He
also acted as a translator during the interviews.

In the Northern Cape, three people who are involved in community upliftment
projects with the Khomani San, set up interviews with members of the
Witdraai Khomani San community. No translator was needed for this field-
work as the Khomani San are all first-language Afrikaans speakers – only
one of the remaining elders could still speak the community’s original San
language.

The third community was a Pedi village in the vicinity of Mokopane in Limpo-
po. Interviews were arranged by an engineering student that came from the
village and still regards it as her home. She identified suitable elders and
sangomas in three villages in the area and acted as my guide and translator.

A final set of interviews was done with final year engineering students. The
aim was to determine whether the views of people with an education in basic
sciences and engineering and living an urban lifestyle, differed from those in
rural communities. No translator was used since all the interview participants
were fluent English speakers.

34
The method that was used for the data was that interviews were recorded.
The recordings were translated and transcribed by student assistants. The
transcriptions were reviewed and statements on perceptions about lightning
and precautions that people take during electric storms were recorded and
classified. A sample of a transcription and a translation are given in Appendix
B.

Two sets of structured interviews were conducted at the University of the

Witwatersrand, one with a first year mining engineering class and another
with a first year group of electrical engineering students.

The questionnaires completed by the electrical engineering students were

not used in this study, as the group was large and unruly. They sat close to
each other on long benches and there I observed much conversation, joking
and collusion in responding to the questionnaire.

The conditions for administering the questionnaire to the mining engineering

students, however, were ideal, since the students were in a drawing hall,
where they were seated at individual desks. It was possible to supervise
strictly and to ensure that there was no talking or comparing of answers while
they were completing the questionnaire. 172 students completed the ques-
tionnaire. For admission to the Faculty of Engineering at Wits University,
students are required to meet a minimum requirement in Physics and Math-
ematics in their Matric final examinations, so this group could be regarded as
representative of school-leavers with a Maths and Physics background.

All the questions in the questionnaire were structured so that respondents

could tick one of three boxes labeled Yes, No and Don’t know. Results from
the questionnaire were analysed in a spreadsheet and represented in pie
charts. The questionnaire and the analysis spreadsheet are shown in Appen-
dix C. This information constitutes the quantitative data used in the study.

Media sources

Contrary to fears around the world regarding the decline of printed newspa-
pers, the tabloid newspaper the Daily Sun has taken South Africa by storm
with a circulation of 494 875 and a readership of 3 831 000
(www.dailysun.co.za, 2011).
35
Wasserman (2010) writes that the tabloids gave the poor majority of South
Africans a print media outlet for the first time following the end of apartheid
that expressed their opinions and views. The tabloids in general, and the high
circulation Daily Sun in particular could therefore be potential source of
current popular myths and beliefs, therefore these newspapers were included
in the study as cultural texts. During the period July 2010 to April 2011 every
day’s newspaper was browsed and units of narrative that had been repeated
in other sources were identified. There are references to several stories from
the Daily Sun in Chapter 3.

For other texts from the oral tradition and tabloids, I have focused on narra-
tive units that contain a high level of repetition, indicating that they have been
around for a long time (Vansina, 1985) or units of the narrative that are
repeated across several data sources.

Media sources were also used to compile Table 1 in Appendix A, that lists
reports of lightning deaths for the period from 1 January 2009 until 31 Janu-
ary 2011. The Daily Sun and Volksblad both have on-line archives of all
stories that were published, so a complete search was done on both publica-
tions for the period. Archived copies of the Daily Dispatch were checked in
the public library, but this method is not as reliable as an online search. The
Volksblad and the Daily Dispatch were selected because they are smaller
regional newspapers that serve the Bloemfontein and Eastern Cape areas
respectively. The thinking was that a smaller, regional newspaper would be
more likely to carry local reports of lightning deaths than the larger national
newspapers.

IOL News and news24 are websites that contain a selection of stories from
the print versions from the Independent Group and Media 24 newspaper
stables respectively and online searches were done on both sites.

Other media sources include Beeld, Sunday Times and Daily Maverick, but
the nature of data from these sources is random stories upon which I stum-
bled.

36
2.4 Engineering design methodology

In spite of the marked differences between qualitative and quantitative re-

search, the methodology used for this study should not strike engineers as
very odd, since it closely resembles a typical engineering methodology that
stops at the design phase without proceeding to implementation, and in
particular the initial stages of a software development methodology.

D etailed
R equirements P reliminary des ign Implemen‐ T es ting
Analys is
engineering ideas (s ynthes is ) tation

Figure 2.3: A typical engineering design process

As shown in Figure 2.3, a typical engineering design process consists of a
requirements engineering phase, which involves doing research to gain an
understanding of the problem. From this information, a number of preliminary
ideas are developed that could present solutions to the problem. It is good
engineering practice to consider a number of alternative possible solutions,
rather than just generating a single idea and pursuing it. In the analysis
phase, all the ideas are investigated for feasibility and the best solution is
selected, based on sound reasoning. A detailed design of the chosen solu-
tion may include a mathematical model, but almost always comprises a
graphical representation, such as detailed construction drawings, or in the
case of a software project, a use-case model, that represents core blocks of
functionality of the proposed system and all external agents that interact with
it.

The data collection process used in this study closely resembles the re-
quirements elicitation phase of a software development project, as described
in most standard software engineering textbooks, like those by Van Vliet
(2008) and Pressman (2004). In a software development project, the devel-
opment team’s field of expertise is software development, but a team
typically designs and builds a product that must operate in an environment
outside its area of expertise. A team skilled in software development would,
for example, have to build software to automate the operation of radiation
therapy equipment or a university student admission system or the processes
in a chemical plant. In order to develop effective software, the team member
37
responsible for the requirements elicitation needs to immerse him/herself in
the client’s universe of discourse and build a rich picture of that universe, just
as rich data is required by qualitative research approaches.

38
3 Some South African lightning myths and beliefs
This section describes and analyses the myths and beliefs that were docu-
mented in the course of this research project. Only those myths and beliefs
that occurred in more than one of the sources (described in Section 2) have
been included. This does not purport to be an exhaustive account of all
southern African lightning myths and beliefs, but they were the most common
ones in different sources.

3.1 Witchcraft and Muthi

Nobel peace prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu coined the phrase
“rainbow nation” to describe the mix of cultures and languages that make up
the South African nation. Within this diverse society, there are many who
believe that witches can control lightning. Harnischfeger states that: “Almost
every Zulu, Xhosa or Venda person in South Africa knows that witches have
the power to send lightning, kill livestock or burn houses, including the inhab-
itants” (Harnischfeger, 2003:46). It is significant that Harnischfeger uses the
word know because unlike matters of faith, where there can be room for
doubt and debate, knowing means that it is a certainty, a fact, in that person’s
universe. The use of traditional medicine or muthi is considered to be the
only antidote to lightning sent by a witch.

Witchcraft is, however, not an uncontroversial topic in South Africa. Some

people do not believe that witchcraft and magic exist and a small minority
group of adherents of paganism regards witches as agents of good rather
than evil. An article in a weekly newspaper (Mogakane, 2010) demonstrates
the chasm between different belief systems. It reported that the national
coordinator of the Traditional Healers’ Organisation, Phepsile Maseko,
blamed muthi murders on “heartless witches”. A muthi murder is when
somebody is murdered so that the body parts can be used in traditional
medicine. The director of the South African Pagan Rights Alliance accused
Maseko of defaming witches. Maseko’s responded: “Publicly calling yourself
a witch in South Africa smacks of white privilege. In a village or township,
you’d be dead even before completing your proclamation.” This section

39
focuses on past and current South African beliefs with respect to lightning,
witchcraft and traditional medicine.

3.1.1 Background on witches and witchcraft in South Africa today

A sangoma is a shaman or clairvoyant who communicates with ancestral

spirits, amongst other things to diagnose illnesses. The experiences of
sangoma are relevant to this study, since part of their training is to learn
about tribal history, mythology and rituals (Hund, 2003), (Reeder, 2011) and
they can thus be regarded as custodians of local beliefs and traditions.
Inyanga is a traditional healer that heals people using medicine (muthi) made
from different parts of plants and animal2. Traditional herbalists use plants to
heal illnesses.

Sangoma, inyanga and herbalists are sometimes erroneously referred to as

witchdoctors by people whose cultures do not encompass clairvoyance.
Sangomas use clairvoyance and magic to help people and to protect them
against evil. To channel communications from their ancestral spirits, they
often throw bones and interpret messages from the ancestors from the way
in which the bones fall. Sometimes a sangoma is used to diagnose an illness
by consulting the ancestors and throwing the bones. An inyanga or herbalist
then prepares medicine based on the sangoma’s diagnosis. Many sangomas
do both: they diagnose using clairvoyance and make the traditional medicine
for the clients too.

In many southern African cultures like the Zulu and Pedi traditions, witches,
on the other hand, use their magic for evil (Delius, 2001), (Berglund, 1976).
Witches can be men or women. They work in secret and use potions and
concoctions to kill their victims, but they can also control lightning to kill their
victims or damage their property. When somebody dies in a way that leads
the community to suspect that it was the work of a witch, a sangoma is often
consulted to try to identify the witch. The witch is then driven from the com-
munity or even killed.
2
Isangoma, inyanga and umuthi are terms from the Zulu language. For the
sake of clarity, the Zulu terms will be used throughout, even when discussing
other groups, like the Pedi, that use different words in the Pedi language for
the same concepts.
40
The spread of Christianity has, however, affected communities’ views of
magic and clairvoyance, as churches branded such practices as heathen. In
interviews3 conducted in Mapela, a Pedi village in Limpopo province, four
traditional healers said that many people in the area publicly disavowed
traditional healing due to their Christian faith, but nevertheless visited them
secretly under cover of darkness during the night.

The biography of sangoma Elliot Ndlovu (Reeder, 2011) describes how

Ndlovu’s aunt, No Mawashi was called to become a traditional healer, but
rejected the calling because her Christian faith lead to a rejection of her Zulu
spiritual beliefs.

Initially, traditional courts dealt with accusations of witchcraft, until the gov-
ernment implemented the South African Suppression of Witchcraft Act in
1957. The act makes it illegal to:

• accuse somebody of being a witch or of using witchcraft to cause harm;

• say that you have used or know how to use witchcraft to cause harm;
• employ somebody to find a witch;
• act on the advice of a witch in a way that is calculated to cause harm;
• use witchcraft to find something that has been stolen or lost.

Witch killings unfortunately do not belong to South Africa’s distant past.

According to police reports, 312 people were killed in witchcraft-related
violence in Limpopo between 1985 and 1995 (Harnischfeger, 2003).

3.1.2 Current beliefs related to lightning and witchcraft

A review of the South African tabloid Daily Sun shows that belief in witchcraft
is alive and well in South Africa today.

Daily Sun stories regularly mention witchcraft, often employing exclamation

marks and bold typeface. A front page story in February 2010, for example,
has a headline that reads “The most evil muthi of all” (Sobuwa, 2010). The

3
Interviews were conducted in accordance with the ethics clearance protocol
number H1 10226 of the University of the Witwatersrand’s Human Research
Ethics Committee.

41
story tells of a family that had already lost two sons when they got a sango-
ma to help them. The sangoma found evil muthi consisting of the skins of a
snake and a lizard and the jaws of a porcupine buried in a corner of their
shack. He is quoted as saying: “The person who is bewitching you wanted all
of you dead…”.

In August 2010, the front page lead story of the Daily Sun reported on a
village in Mpumalanga province that offers a safe haven to people who have
had to flee their homes due to accusations of witchcraft. About 600 people
live in the village called Ebatsakatsini, which means Place of Witches (Afri-
can Eye News Service, 2010).

These are just selected examples to illustrate that witchcraft and bewitching
potions are real to many South Africans today.

In their research with school goers, Pabale (2006) in Limpopo and Maselwa
(2004) in the Eastern Cape both found most pupils believed that witches
could control lightning.

The KwaZulu-Natal Member of the Executive Council (MEC) for co-operative

governance and traditional affairs, Nomsa Dube, visited a village where
seven people were killed by lightning in January 2011. After the visit, Ms
Dube was ridiculed in the local press for saying: “We will do an investigation
and talk to the department of science and technology on what is the cause of
the lightning.” (SAPA, 2011), (Khumalo, 2011). Commenting on the state-
ment, well-known columnist Fred Khumalo (2011) said that Dube’s statement
“…betrays a sense of someone who is desperate to create a mythology of
something sinister.” The implication is that the MEC seems to believe that the
lightning might have been caused by witchcraft. This is hardly surprising,
given the background sketched here of a country in which many people
believe that witches can control lightning and send it to harm people. In the
daily newspaper Sowetan, a reader wrote in a letter that the MEC’s igno-
rance was embarrassing and that to suggest investigating a natural disaster
was foolish (Wa Mokoena, 2011).

42
Interviews were conducted with sangomas as part of this project. In Hlabisa,
a rural town in KwaZulu-Natal, five interviews4 were conducted with tradition-
al healers. Four of the five said that there are two kinds of lightning: natural
lightning and man-made lightning.

In other parts of southern Africa, lightning is associated with witchcraft too.

Dlamini (2009) states that culturally, Swazis believe that lightning is caused
either by witchcraft or the wrath of a god or gods. Swaziland is a small land-
locked kingdom in southern Africa.

It would be a mistake to think that belief in witchcraft and man-made lightning

is confined to the rural areas or to people who are not well educated. In
interviews with three final-year electrical engineering students at the Universi-
ty of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, all from Zulu families, all three
asserted that there are two kinds of lightning: natural lightning and man-made
lightning. Their conviction that there is such a thing as man-made lightning is
so firm, that it would not be strong enough to say they believe it exists – they
know it exists.

From a Eurocentric, evolutionist point of view, a belief in witchcraft is often

seen as belonging to a more primitive, undeveloped society. However, it is
important to understand that in southern Africa, believing in witchcraft and
being modern, literate and educated, are not mutually exclusive. This is a
point made by Finnegan in her seminal work on oral literature in Africa
(Finnegan, 1970) when she explains that oral literature is not a step in the
evolution towards a written tradition – the two can and do coexist.

3.1.3 ‡kagara and !haunu

The connection between witchcraft and lightning is illuminated by the San

story about two men, ‡kagara and !haunu5, who fight each other by directing

4
Interviews were conducted in accordance with the ethics clearance protocol
number H1 10226 of the University of the Witwatersrand’s Human Research
Ethics Committee.
5
The use of the symbols ‡ and ! in the names ‡kagara and !haunu is ex-
plained in the preface to Specimens of Bushman Folklore (Bleek, 1968).
Spoken San comprised a number of click sounds that were not used in any
written language at the time, so symbols were used to represent them. The ‡
43
lightning bolts and using them as weapons (Bleek, 1968). The story of
‡kagara and !haunu forms part of the Bleek and Lloyd collection (see section
in Chapter 2 on oral tradition). Although the San have nearly disappeared,
with only small groups left in the Northern Cape, Botswana and Namibia,
different groups were often in contact with each other and themes and stories
passed from one group to another (Biesele, 1993). In particular, some bits of
San beliefs are said to have become part of the cultures of other African
groups like the Nguni of the Drakensberg region of KwaZulu-Natal (Reeder,
2011). It is possible that a belief in witches that can control lightning, could
have filtered through to other groups that came into contact with the San.

In this story, ‡kagara fetches his younger sister from her husband !haunu, to
take her back to her parents. !haunu follows them. ‡kagara tries to hurry his
sister along and in the process, roughly touches the burden that she is
carrying. When !haunu sees ‡kagara touching his possessions in that way,
he starts to bleed from the nose and throws a lightning bolt at ‡kagara – the
tale says that he “stealthily lightened at his brother-in-law” (Bleek, 1968).
‡kagara manages to fend off his brother-in-law’s lightning and a lightning
duel ensues, which only ends when ‡kagara resorts to using “black light-
ning”, which picks !haunu up and throws him down a small distance away,
where he dies.

A footnote in Bleek’s notes explains that black lightning is the lightning that
kills. His San raconteur said that you do not see black lightning coming: “…it
resembles a gun, we are merely startled by the clouds’ thundering, while the
other man lies, shriveled up lies.”

He concluded the story by saying that his grandmother used to say that it
was ‡kagara and !haunu whenever there were heavy clouds and lightning in
the East.

Comments on and interpretation of the tale:

symbol denotes a palatal click, made by pressing the tip of the tongue to the
front of the palate, where it meets the gums, and withdrawing it quickly. The !
symbol indicates a cerebral click, made by curling the tip of the tongue
against the roof of the palate and withdrawing it quickly.
44
The most striking feature of the story is the way in which ‡kagara and !haunu
are able to direct lightning bolts, so that they can use them as weapons. The
reference to !haunu’s nose bleeding just prior to harnessing the lightning is
significant, because in his detailed and internationally acknowledged analysis
of southern African rock art, David Lewis-Williams explains that a nose bleed
was a sign that a San shaman was entering into a trance state (Lewis-
Williams, 2002). One of the ways in which San shamans would enter into a
trance state was through the ritual of dance. The San women would form a
circle around a fire, singing and clapping rhythmically. The men would form
an outer circle and would stamp to the rhythm. The shamans “induce an
altered state of consciousness by intense concentration, audio-driving,
prolonged rhythmic movement, and hyperventilation (Lewis-Williams 2002,
p141). The belief was that the spirit of a shaman in a trance, traveled in the
spirit realms above and below the earth to gain special insights there. They
also learned things unknown to ordinary people by possessing or becoming
animals. Some San rock paintings show people with antelope heads, that
have partially transformed into an animal. There were some shamans who
could heal, and others who were rainmakers.

In the story of ‡kagara and !haunu, Deacon interprets the reference to

!haunu’s nose bleeding as an explicit reference to trance state (Deacon,
1996). It is in a trance state that !haunu is able to control lightning. Biesele
says: “Often a concrete detail, merely mentioned in passing, is enough to
give a social clue with enormous ramifications”. Thus this single mention of
people controlling lightning, does not necessarily indicate that it was an
insignificant opinion in San society. Hewitt (2001) confirms the view that the
San stories were often educational and were a repository of the community’s
knowledge, including explanations of customs and beliefs.

The social clue that can be obtained from this story is that it may have been a
commonly held view that people could enter a trance state and control
lightning.

None of the community members interviewed in the pilot study made any
reference to the story of ‡kagara and !haunu. It is possible that the story was

45
lost from their culture as a result of the persecutions and displacements to
which the San people were subjected.

The tale is, however, relevant in the context of lightning myths and beliefs in
Southern Africa in the sense that it refers to people that are able to control
lightning.

A historian is interested in whether the purpose of an oral tale is to recount

something that happened in the past (Vansina, 1985), but from the perspec-
tive of popular beliefs, it is only important whether the story was commonly
told and whether it reflects some commonly held beliefs or values. According
to Vansina, an oral communication is significant in the community in which it
is told, otherwise it would not have been communicated in the first place.

If one reads the transcription of the story, there are many repeated phrases,
for example “while !haunu lay thundering; he thundered there”, “Then he
stealthily lightened at his younger sister’s husband with black lightening, he,
lightening…”and “he had rubbed them (i.e. himself and his younger sister)
with buchu, buchu, buchu, buchu…”. In these sections, the words thunder-
ing, lightening and buchu are repeated. This is an indication that it was a
story that was told often over time, as an oral rendition of a story typically has
more redundancy built into it to convey its message than a written story
(Vansina, 1985).

3.1.4 Brooding Clouds as a study of current beliefs related to

witchcraft and lightning

Phaswane Mpe is a South African writer best known for his only novel Wel-
come to our Hillbrow. He died in 2004 at the age of 34. His story Brooding
Clouds (Mpe, 2008) forms part of a collection of short stories and poems of
the same name, which was published posthumously. The story is analysed
here, as it offers some interesting insights into the complexity of current
South African beliefs regarding lightning and witchcraft. Mpe wrote the story
while he was still a student, but was reluctant to publish it, because shortly
after completing it, his own mother was injured in a lightning strike and he
thought that to publish it would “be like tempting fate” (www.artsmart.co.za,
2011).

46
The story is set in Tiragalong, a small rural village in Limpopo province.
Makgolo is an old woman who has been accused by the village youth of
using witchcraft to send the lightning that killed Tshepo. She sits in her hut
and waits for the youths, the comrades, to come and burn her to death for
being a witch.

The historical context for the story can be understood from Delius’ detailed
account (Delius, 1996) of the revolt of 1986 in Sekhukhuneland, part of
present day Limpopo province. Delius describes the rapid formation and
growth of youth movements in villages in the mid 1980’s aimed at spreading
political awareness while the apartheid government was still in place. They
called themselves the comrades. They organized rallies that moved through
villages singing and chanting. They revolted against the local government
system run by chiefs and against the schooling system, resulting in major
disruptions of schooling. Delius writes: “In the context of the collapse of the
legitimacy of local forms of authority and national revolt, the youth took
control in the villages.” (Delius, 1996: p203). Groups of young people de-
manded food and money from villagers and hijacked minibus taxis to move
around. They also set up so-called peoples’ courts that dispensed justice to
their elders for offences ranging from “speaking ill of the organization” to
serious crimes like rape.

Against this backdrop, the youth in the villages identified the issue of witch-
craft as a problem. They had grown up in homes where witches were blamed
for all kinds of disasters, like the illness, anomalous death or disappearance
of children (Niehaus, 2005). The actions of the youth had led to tension
between themselves and the older generation, but on the issue of witchcraft
they agreed that it would lead to a better society if witches could be eradicat-
ed. Delius gives a detailed account of four incidents in which somebody was
killed or injured by lightning, the youth subsequently identified the witch who
was responsible and killed him/her either by barricading them in their huts
and setting them alight, or by necklacing them: putting a tyre around their
necks, dousing them in petrol and setting them alight.

The links between the recent history of Limpopo province and Phaswane
Mpe’s story are clear:
47
• Both occur in villages in Limpopo;

• The village youths call themselves the Comrades;

• Somebody is killed by lightning and it is suspected to be the work of a

witch;

• A diviner is consulted and based on this information a witch is identified

and killed.

Mpe describes the songs that the comrades sing as “songs that freedom
fighters used to sing in the apartheid era”, (Mpe, 2008:8), so it is set in the
post-apartheid era, yet the short story closely mirrors events from the 1980’s.
Perhaps this implies that people living in rural villages are stuck in the past or
maybe he is just using an extreme example similar to past atrocities to draw
attention to practices that continue. Either way, Mpe’s story must be seen as
a commentary or reflection on current beliefs regarding witchcraft in general
and the link between witchcraft and lightning in particular.

The name of Mpe’s village, Tiragalong, means place of the grandfa-

thers/ancestors - perhaps it also indicates a place stuck in the past.

The description of landscape presages the death and destruction in the story.
The land is prematurely dying from drought – Mpe writes: “It is autumn, but
this year the fields show no sign of life. Mealie plants are grey – grey like
ash” and the livestock are “merely a collection of bones”. Similarly, Makgolo
has died inside even before the mob kills her – her eyes are vacant and she
seems unaware that the fire in her fireplace has gone out. The only thought
that fills her head is: “They say I am a witch…” and she understands that in a
rural village in Limpopo, that is a death sentence.

Makgolo is a childless widow and was deserted by her husband for “years
and years”. She took care of herself and had a relationship with Kereng, who
“in addition to looking after his large family, did whatever manly deed was
necessary in Makgolo’s compound.” The whispers of witchcraft only start
when Makgolo’s absconded husband returns and falls sick after a few days.
Makgolo refuses to take him to a herbalist and, within two weeks, he dies.
Shortly afterwards, Kereng also dies and these unexplained circumstances

48
are enough to turn a rumour of witchcraft into a fact. By the time the success-
ful young student Tshepo is killed by lightning, the “witch” Makgolo is
naturally blamed. To confirm their suspicion, the comrades consult diviners in
other villages and the verdict is that Tshepo was bewitched by “an old wom-
an to the east of his homestead”. The vague message confirms the
comrades’ preconceived idea. The community fears the comrades, so no-
body speaks out in defense of Makgolo.

Two issues are raised in the story that are confirmed in other sources and in
the interviews that formed part of this study and are dealt with more fully
elsewhere:

• Jealousy is regarded as a common motive for resorting to witchcraft and

in this story. The comrades suspect the childless Makgolo of being jeal-
ous of Tshepo’s mother for having a talented, successful child.

• When lightning strikes Tshepo, there are clouds, but no rain. In inter-
views, more than one participant seemed to associate weather conditions
where there was lightning but no rain, with witchcraft.

Children in the village used to love listening to Makgolo’s stories – “stories of

witchcraft and ordinary lives, of poverty and abundance, of wars and peace”.
It is clear that her stories are fiction, as they almost always start with: “Long,
long ago, when stones were still soft and edible and trees could walk…”. This
fits in with scholarship that attribute storytelling in the oral tradition to women,
whilst historical storytelling was more of a male domain (Hofmeyr, 2001).
These creative tales are juxtaposed to the mindless mob of comrades, that
takes some unexplained events, spins a rumour of witchcraft around them
and then accepts their own rumour as a fact.

The story has a strong feminist line. Makgolo is depicted as strong, wise,
compassionate and creative. She is described as “open-handed” toward the
children who came to listen to her stories. Tshepo’s mother is also depicted
as wise and caring. This is juxtaposed by the sexist attitudes of men in the
village. Rumours started that Makgolo had bewitched her long absent hus-
band when she refused to observe the protocols of patriarchy when he
returned. Elsewhere in the story, Tshepo also behaves in a chauvinist man-

49
ner, determined not to cry in front of his mother because “… he was not
circumcised for nothing. …But there he was now, his tears betraying him
before a woman.”

Gender division played an important role in southern African societies – men

were in charge of the cattle and women were responsible for planting and
harvesting of food. Since cattle constituted a form of “storable wealth” (Hof-
meyr, 1993:27), women could never accumulate wealth. As a result, they
remained dependant and subordinate and were expected to be obedient
wives. In contrast to their subordinate status in society, however, many
households in rural villages in South Africa are headed by women, since the
men migrate to the cities to earn money. Delius explains the tension that this
created as follows (Delius 1996: p203 – 203): “… young men, who had been
raised to expect to exercise control over women, instead found themselves in
social limbo and unable to assert either male or adult authority. … This
context ensured that some youths rounding up witches reveled in the exer-
cise of power and the opportunity to enforce both respect from their elders
and authority over women.”

Events in the story fit this description: Makgolo is an old woman and the
comrades are historically predominantly young men (Delius 1996). The
description makes it clear that the mob revels in the exercise of power over
the old woman. Their self-righteous triumph rings from the repeated phrase:
“Witchcraft shall be no more!”.

Makgolo also fits Pelgrim’s (Pelgrim, 2003:4) description of people who are
often targeted in witch hunts, namely “… the practice of witch-purging is
mostly aimed at the most vulnerable members sections of society, i.e. wom-
en, elderly people, and those that display exceptional behaviour”.

The lens of the story is zoomed in on the victim Makgolo, who is described in
some detail. When describing the comrades, however, the narrator zooms
out and all we are shown is a depersonalized group of youths – we do not
know their names, backgrounds, personalities, likes or dislikes. It is only at
the end of the story, when the mob scatters after killing Makgolo, that the

50
narrator focuses in and shows the reader two of the comrades in more detail.
The story concludes with this conversation:

“”Was she really a witch? Did she send lightning to strike Tshepo?”

“Who knows?” is all Sammy can offer.”

There can be little doubt that Mpe harshly judges the mob killing described in
his story. When describing the drought-stricken landscape, he says: “…when
harvest time knocks on the doors of the villagers, there shall be nothing to
reap.” And so, the mob also has nothing to reap after sowing death: they
have to flee from the police and, as the faceless crowd disintegrates into
individuals, the bravado of the mob has disappeared and Sammy and Pro-
fessor display disgust and doubt about what they have done. The mob’s
thoughtlessness is indicated by them singing freedom songs in “bad isiZulu”,
a language with which they themselves are unfamiliar. They are being swept
along by songs that they do not even understand properly, songs about
bringing democracy to South Africa - ironic, because they are behaving in an
autocratic way.

Mpe does not judge all that is traditional, but he rejects that which is done
unthinkingly. He does not reject ideas that witchcraft exists, or that it is valid
to consult with a “bone thrower”, but he condemns the way in which a group
of people made a decision based on rumour, without following a process with
proper checks and balances that ended somebody’s life. Mpe’s open-
mindedness toward traditional values are apparent in his decision to abandon
his doctorate in the final weeks of his life – he planned to become appren-
ticed to a traditional healer (McGregor, 2004).

The story demonstrates the complexity that the South African traditional
belief in witchcraft adds to death or injury due to lightning, namely the identi-
fication and persecution of witches. It illustrates how fraught the issue of
identifying a witch can be: the diviner provides information that is vague
enough to fit in with the preconceived notions of the young men who want to
blame a witch for a lightning death. The story engages with tradition and
demonstrates how traditional ideas (like those about a lightning death) can
be taken up in very different ways.

51
 The young men see tradition in a narrow way. The story endorses those who
engage creatively with tradition, like Makgolo and her storytelling. The story
Don't Yes
know itself takes up 28%
the idea of lightning on different levels – both as a widely held
31%
belief in rural societies, as a structural literary device, as a way of comment-
ing on social issues and problems, like mob rule. The ideas of lightning form
a powerful myth that Mpe engages with in his story, rather like a European
No
writer might engage
41%with myths of Adam and Eve or Odysseus. The use of
the myth in the story points to the continued sway that it holds in a society,
ure 3.1: Responses to “Are there people who can control lightning?”
even if the writer himself doesn't subscribe to the belief.

3.1.5 Stories of lightning and witchcraft encountered in interviews

During interviews conducted for this project, several interviewees told stories
about somebody killed by lightning that was sent by a witch. The following
are extracts, each from a different interview:

• A boy in Hlabisa stole a witchdoctor’s car. The witchdoctor told him that
he would strike him with lightning and that is exactly what happened.
• A boy’s father had two wives. The boy was the second wife’s youngest
child and he would one day inherit all his father’s possessions. The first
wife was jealous that her son would not inherit anything, so she sent
lightning that killed the boy while he was herding his father’s cattle in the
fields and she also sent lightning that destroyed their house.
• In Mokopane, a house was struck by lightning and burnt down. People
said that the lightning had been sent by a witch, so everybody in the street
gave some money to consult a traditional healer to find out who the witch
was, but they never found out. She said: “Whoever knew the truth, died

52
 with it.”

In a questionnaire given to a group of first year Mining Engineering students,

one of the questions was: “Can a person with particular abilities make light-
ning strike a house?”

Respondents could tick one of three boxes labeled Yes, No and Don’t know.
As shown in Figure 3.1, 28% of the students believe that somebody with
special abilities could send lightning to strike a particular house. Although
they do not form a majority, it is still a significant number in a class of engi-
neering students that required good marks in Maths and Physics for
admission to Mining Engineering.

3.1.6 Current beliefs regarding Muthi to protect against lightning

Muthi is the Zulu word for traditional medicine, made from a variety of materi-
als, but mainly parts of plants, like bark, bulbs, roots and leaves, as well as
animal fat and other animal parts.

There is a thriving muthi street market in the KwaZulu-Natal town of Mthu-

bathuba, where herbalists sell the ingredients for traditional medicines. The
wares of one of the stalls are shown in Figure 3.2. In conversations with three
herbalists at the market, all of them said that they could make medicine to
protect their clients against both sent and natural lightning. The medicine to
protect against natural lightning and man-made lightning are different. The
recipe of one of the herbalists for general lightning protection muthi’ is given
in Appendix D.

Muthi markets are not just a rural phenomenon - in Johannesburg, there is a

large muthi market in the city centre and in Diagonal Street, there is a well-
known muthi shop that has been there for many years.

Each of the five traditional healers interviewed in Hlabisa had their own
recipe for muthi to protect homes against lightning. The muthi is made from
animal bones and different parts of plants. Other ingredients of different
mixtures were burnt and ground rubber from a tyre, a common household
disinfectant and sea water. The muthi is buried in the ground, typically in four
places around the house.

53
Two of the sangomas used a plant called umsuzwane (Lippia javanica),
shown in Figure 3.3. It is a small, fragrant plant that is part of the same family
as mint. They plant the umsuzwane around their homes. One of the sango-
mas said that if you rub your body and head with the leaves it will protect you
against lightning.

Figure 3.3: Umsuzwane (JSTOR, 2005)

Figure 3.2: A stall at the Mthubathuba muthi

market
Umsuzwane is also used for coughs, colds, influenza and headaches (Hutch-
ings, 2007). Hutchings also reported that it is used in funeral rites and as an
insect repellant. It is used to prevent odours in toilets, with corpses and with
meat that could not be stored in a refrigerator and started to smell.

In a biography, the sangoma Elliot Ndlovu (Reeder, 2011) says that two
plants, namely Clivia and cycads, picked in the light of the full moon, can be
used as protection against witchcraft, evil and lightning.

Bishop Henry Callaway reported that the Zulu heaven doctors would dig
where lightning struck the ground where they would find “something resem-
bling an assegai” (Callaway 1886a:381) which they would use in muthi (an
assegai is a traditional Zulu fighting spear). This is interesting, because it

54
clearly refers to fulgurites, that sometimes form when lightning strikes the
ground and melts sand to form a glass-like formation.

3.1.7 Adrian Boshier’s lightning muthi

Adrian Boshier was trained as a ngaka or traditional doctor in Limpopo. In his

account of Boshier’s life, Lyall Watson (1983) tells a story that illustrates the
belief that some people can control lightning and that the one with the most
powerful traditional doctor, will triumph. The story tells of a feud between two
families in Makgabeng valley. One of the families employed Rakumaku to
cast a spell to send lightning to the village of their opponent Phuti. A week
later, lightning struck and killed all the goats in Phuti’s kraal. Lightning also
struck his cattle kraal. Phuti asked Boshier to help, so Boshier made a muthi
using every plant that was said to have some connection with lightning and
put it in a big snail shell. He took the muthi and preformed a ritual at Phuthi’s
home, while Rakumaku and many villagers watched. Boshier was a skilled
snake handler and used a venomous snake in his ritual. When he held the
snake close to Rakumaku’s face, Rakumaku fled, signaling the superiority of
Boshier’s magic.

3.1.8 Controlling the weather

Southern Africa is an area where crops can fail due to droughts, resulting in
food shortages and hardship for rural people that depend on subsistence
farming. It is therefore not surprising that many rainmaking traditions and
rites have been recorded there. Anthropologist Isaac Schapera devoted a
whole book to the rainmaking rituals of the Kgatla people (Schapera, 1971),
which is one of the Tswana tribes in Botswana. In fieldwork done between
1929 and 1932, Schapera the Kgatla believed that the chief had the power to
both make and to withhold rain. Before Christianity was introduced, they
regarded the chief as an intermediary who had to intercede with the ances-
tors to ask for rain on behalf of the tribe.

The San also believed that some of their shamans were rainmakers. Rain-
makers would typically go to a spring, capture a rain animal and lead it
across the veld where rain was needed, before killing it (Hewitt, 2001).
Several examples of rock art show rain animals or rain bulls.
55
The best-known rain-making tradition in South Africa today, is that of the rain-
queen Modjadji, of the Balobedu tribe, which spans about 150 rural villages
in Limpopo province. The Bolabedu clan is a matriarchal kingdom, where the
crown and the secrets of making rain are passed down from mother to
daughter. The queen performs an annual rainmaking ceremony, but the tribe
is quite secretive and it is difficult to gain access to the Queen’s kraal and to
the Queen herself. According to tradition, the queen is not allowed to marry,
but lives with a number of “wives” in her kraal. The wives’ children are re-
garded as the Queen’s children. To continue the matriarchal line, a council of
elders chooses a suitable man with whom she is to have a child.

Queen Makobo Modjadji VI became the rain queen in April 2003 after the
death of her grandmother, Queen Mokope Modjadji V (Khangale, 2005),
(Nkosi, 2010). Queen Modjadji VI died at the age of 27 in 2005. Her daughter
Masalanabo was only three months old when Queen Modjadji VI died (Louw,
2005) and thus too young to assume the throne. Since 2005, there has been
no rain queen and the late queen’s brother has assumed leadership of the
Balobedu people.

In addition to the rainmakers, however, another category of people is said to

have the power to control weather, namely the ability to control lightning.
Some of the old texts refer to heaven herds, that could chase lightning away.
Whereas witches send lightning bolts to harm people and their possessions,
a heaven herd is somebody who can control the weather to the benefit of
their communities.

A whole section of Bishop Henry Callaway’s book (1886a), is devoted to

heaven herds. The task of a heaven herd is to protect the village where (s)he
lives against lightning and hail. The text contains an explanation of why they
are called heaven herds. Their job is like that of a cattle herd, as described
by one of Callaway’s informants: “…if he goes into the cattle pen with his
weapons and is silent, the cattle cannot go out; but by whistling the cattle
understand that he tells them to go out of the pen. And the herd that herds
the lightning does the same as the herder of the cattle; he does as he does
by whistling; he says, ‘Tshui-i-i. Depart, and go yonder; do not come here
again.’” (1970:384).
56
 According to Berglund (Berglund, 1976), men who have had a close encoun-
ter with lightning are believed suitable to become heaven herds. A heaven
herd uses tools and medicines in rituals to drive away storms and lightning.
Heaven herds and herbalists can prepare various types of medicine to ward
off lightning. Some medicines are made from black stone that comes from
places frequently struck by lightning. Another method of protection is to
smear a stick with sheep’s fat and medicine and to poke the stick into the

Figure 3.4: Heaven-herd with his muthi horns

thatch of a hut.

Werner (1933) also refers to the belief that heaven herds are able to turn
away hail and lightning by “scolding” the heavens. She and Berglund both
describe a ritual of how a person becomes a heaven herd – a trained heaven
herd makes incisions all over the trainee’s body and rubs medicine into them.

There are still people in South Africa today who claim that they can control
the weather. One of the interview participants, an traditional healer in Hla-
bisa, said that he was able to control lightning and make it change direction.
When a storm approaches, he fills two antelope horns, shown in Figure 3.4,
with black muthi made from stones, bones and plant roots and stems. He
57
stands on the hilltop and uses the horns to change the course of the light-
ning. He said: “When I see the lightning coming, I point (sic) the other
direction so that it does not strike my neighborhood but strikes somewhere
else. In that way I am able to protect myself, my family and my entire neigh-
borhood.”

Sangoma Elliot Ndlovu (Reeder, 2011) is described as chewing a particular

leaf and spitting it into the wind while reprimanding a storm. He too chases
the storms away to protect his area against hail and lightning that could
damage crops and homes in his area.

3.1.9 Evaluation of witchcraft, muthi and heaven herds

The basic physics of lightning is well-understood and has been confirmed by

a variety of experiments, including photography with very high-speed camer-
as. There are three types of lightning, namely cloud-to-cloud (inter-cloud),
intra-cloud (within a cloud) and cloud-to-ground lightning. Only cloud-to-
ground lightning is considered here. Cloud-to-ground lightning can be catego-
rised as downward negative, downward positive, upward negative or upward
positive lightning (Rakov et al, 2003). Of these, negative downward lightning
is the most common, accounting for 90% of lightning flashes (Uman, 1987).
At a very high level of abstraction, the basic physics of lightning can be
explained as follows:

• A thundercloud forms when positively charged icy bits are separated from
negatively charged water droplets. This creates an electric dipole in the
thundercloud (Uman, 1987);
• A preliminary breakdown of charge within the cloud creates the conditions
necessary for the formation of a downward stepped leader (Uman, 1987),
indicated in Figure 3.5. The downward leader is a charged channel that
moves towards the ground (Rakov et al, 2003) and can have an electric
potential of more than 107 V (Uman, 1987);
• In response to the downward leader, an opposing charge accumulates on
the ground. Higher electric fields are associated with tall objects, like tow-
ers, and at sharp edges, like the corners of buildings. This electric field

58
 increases until an upward leader, shown in Figure 3.5, is formed. This is
the first step of the attachment process;
• The attachment process is completed when the upward and downward
leaders meet. An electric current from the earth to the cloud, called the
return stroke, neutralizes the downward leader’s charge;

• The return stroke heats the channel, creating radiation that results in a
visible lightning flash. The return stroke also creates pressure that ex-
pands the channel, creating a shock wave that accounts for the sound of
thunder (Rakov et al, 2003);

Two of the world’s leading experts on lightning, Christian Bouquegneau and

Vladimir Rakov state unambiguously in their book that “no method would
allow one to inhibit occurrence of lightning discharges from thunderclouds”

ure 3.5: The basic physics of a cloud-to-ground lightning strike

(Bouquegneau, 2010). This implies that not only would it be impossible to

prevent lightning from striking the earth, but it would also be impossible to
divert lightning to prevent it from striking another place. One must conclude,
therefore, that it is physically impossible for a heaven herd or sangoma to
chase away lightning that would otherwise have struck their village or home-
59
stead. There are two possible explanations for the apparent success of
heaven herds. Firstly, there might be topographical or meteorological quirks
in the particular geographical areas where the heaven herds work, that make
a lightning strike there unlikely. The alternative explanation is that the heaven
herds possess an intuitive understanding or indigenous knowledge to predict
the weather. They could appear to be chasing away the lightning, but their
knowledge of the weather would allow them to know that the lightning storm
was moving away. The old ethnographies (Werner, 1933), (Berglund, 1976)
give accounts of new heaven herds being trained and initiated by experi-
enced heaven herds. The training might have been the opportunity for
passing on indigenous weather predicting knowledge.

In terms of the current understanding of lightning physics, however, standing

outdoors on top of a hill during a lightning storm would be considered very
dangerous.

The belief that witches can create man-made lightning that differs from
natural lightning, is something that is impossible to disprove. Lightning is said
to be sent by witches for evil purposes, but nobody would ever confess to
being a witch or to being able to send lightning, because they would run the
risk of being killed or driven out of their community.

One of the details that was included in several of the interviews and conver-
sations conducted in the course of this research, was that lightning must
have been sent by a witch, because it struck and killed somebody even
though it was not raining, or the clouds were far away, or it was a sunny day
and it suddenly became a dark electric storm, for example a person in Hla-
bisa said: “It was sunny that day, but it suddenly changed. The clouds were
black and it started to rain and the lightning pointed to VM (name omitted to
preserve anonymity). He lied (sic) down. That was the end of his life.’

Lightning, however, often occurs at the perimeters of storm systems, so

lightning can strike while the storm is still approaching or when the storm has
already passed. At a tree plantation in South Africa, a worker working in the
sapling plantation was killed by lightning even though the storm was 25 km
away (Jandrell, 2012). It is therefore possible, that lightning ascribed to

60
 witches, that appears to be a supernatural bolt from the blue, is simply
natural lightning traveling over a long distance or occurring at the edge of a
storm cloud.

3.2 The Lightning Tree

Many people in southern Africa that believe that a specific trees offer protec-
tion against lightning strikes, so if you shelter under those types of trees,
lightning will not strike you.

The Khomani San in the Northern Cape are the descendants of the original
hunters and gatherers that lived in the Kalahari. They were evicted from their
ancestral land soon after the formation of the Kalahari Gemsbok National
Park in 1931 (McLennan-Dodd, 2004) (now the Kgalagadi Transfrontier

Figure 3.6: Khomani San house built under a large boscia albitrunca

Park).

Colonialism and apartheid scattered the San people and all but destroyed
their language and culture (Holden, 2007). At present, one of the remaining
groups of Khomani San lives at Witdraai and Blinkwater, just outside the
Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park.

61
The most striking feature of the interviews and conversations conducted
during a field trip to the Northern Cape was the firm conviction that the witgat
tree is never struck by lightning. The witgat tree is the boscia albitrunca, also
called a Shepherd’s Bush. When asked what people would do if they were
out in the veld and they were caught in a lightning storm, all agreed that if
there were a witgat tree nearby, they would shelter under it, as it is never
struck by lightning. One of the members of the community built his house
under a witgat tree, as shown in Figure 3.6.

Mutshiyalo and Siebert mention different groups in southern Africa attribute

the ability to protect against lightning to the boscia albitrunca, as well as the
ziziphus mucronata and gardenia volkensii (Mutshinyalo, 2010). Dlamini
(2009) reports that the Swazi people believe that several species of trees
repel lightning and they would thus shelter under those kinds of trees during
an electric storm. He specifically mentions the sausage tree kigelia africana
and the Cape plane tree ochna arborea.

In his biography of Adrian Boshier, an Englishman who was trained as a

Sotho ngaka, (a traditional healer and diviner, Lyall Watson (1983) describes
Boshier collecting herbs for a ceremony, including mafiroane or baboon tail,
which was said to protect against lightning.

Evaluation of the Lightning Tree myth

An investigation was done to establish whether there might be any scientific

foundation for their view that the boscia albitrunca is never struck by light-
ning.

One of the reasons why the boscia albitrunca might be less susceptible to
lightning might be as simple as its natural distribution. Driving through the
arid Northern Cape landscape of rolling dunes, it is evident that the most
commonly occurring tree is the acacia erioloba or Camel Thorn tree. In
general, the Camel Thorn trees observed during the field trip were tall trees
that grew to heights of more than 6 meters, whereas the boscia albitrunca
tended to be shorter, stockier trees. Driving or walking around, it is easy to
observe examples of Camel Thorn trees that appear to have been struck by

62
lightning. However, this would not be sufficient to explain why the witgat tree
is never struck by lightning.

The hydraulic lift effect might contribute to making the witgat tree less prone
to lightning strikes. Some tree species that grow in arid areas like the North-
ern Cape can survive minimal rainfall by sending roots so deep into the soil
that they can obtain water from the permanent water table. In the Kalahari, a
witgat tree has been known to have roots to a depth of 68m; a Camel Thorn
with roots to a depth of 60m has been observed (Canadell, 1996). In their
paper, Canadell et al briefly review the work done by others on the hydraulic
lift effect of deep roots. Hydraulic lift is a mechanism whereby deep roots
absorb water during the night from deep soil layers, which is then released
back into the soil by shallow roots, effectively re-hydrating the shallow soil
layers.

The mechanism most likely to cause injury or death to people and animals in
the vicinity of the tree would be a step potential (step potentials are described
more fully in Section 4). A step potential is a high voltage gradient in the
ground radiating from the point of strike (Carte, 2002). Soil resistivity plays an
important role in the magnitude of the step potentials around a point of
lightning impact. The lower the soil resistivity, the lower the step potentials
around the point of strike. Soil resistivity varies for different types of soil. It is
defined as the resistance between opposite faces of a one-meter cube of soil
(www.megger.com, 2009). Typically, the resistivity of sandy soil in arid areas
is much higher than that of clay soils (www.smeter.net, 2009). Soil resistivity
is very dependent on moisture content (Geldenhuys, 1990) – the more moist
the soil, the lower its resistivity.

One hypothesis is that the hydraulic lift effect of the root systems of the
boscia albitrunca might keep the surrounding soil moister than other soil in
the same area. If so, then it would be safer under a Shepherds’ Tree than in
the open veld. This hypothesis was tested by conducting soil resistivity tests
in the Kalahari. The experimental setup was as follows:

• The Wenner four-pin-method was used. This is a standard method of soil

resistivity measurement.

63
 Witgat tree 1 resis%vity
10000
Resis%vity [ ohm.m ]

1000
Witga*ree
100
40m Away
10 from tree
0.1 1 10 100
Electrode separa%on [m]

Witgat tree 2 resis%vity

10000
Resis%vity [ ohm.m ]

1000
Witga*ree

100 40m Away

from tree
10
0.1 1 10 100
Electrode separa%on [m]

Witgat tree 3 resis%vity

10000
Resis%vity [ ohm.m ]

1000
Witga*ree
100
40m Away
from tree
10
0.1 1 10 100
Electrode separa%on [m]

Figure 3.7: Charts showing the soil resistivity under boscia albitrunca and 40 m away from tree

• Soil resistivity is calculated using the equation ρ = 2πaR, where a is the

separation between adjacent electrodes of the soil resistivity measuring
instrument, π = 3.141593 and R is the resistance measured between elec-
trodes in Ω.

• A set of measurements were taken under several boscia albitrunca trees

and at a distance of 40m away from each tree. Three sets of measure-
ments are shown in Figure 3.7.
64
• Measurements were taken for electrode separations of 0.2m, 0.5m, 1m,
2m, 4m, 8m, 16m and 32m.

• Water was poured onto the electrodes to ensure a better connection in

the sandy soil.

A greater electrode separation implies a larger soil volume and thus a deeper
measurement. The measurements indicate that the soil resistivity drops off
sharply in deeper layers of soil. This probably indicates that deeper levels of
soil are moister.

It can be seen from the charts in Figure 3.7 that there is the soil resistivity
measurements taken beneath the boscia albitrunca and those taken 40m
away track each other approximately. However, the soil resistivity beneath
the boscia albitrunca does not appear to provide more protection against a
step potential in the event of a lightning strike than standing in the open veld.
Hence, one must conclude that it would be just as dangerous to shelter
beneath a boscia albitrunca during a lightning storm as it would be to shelter
beneath any other tree. This misconception places people at a great risk and
it should be addressed in any formal awareness effort.

3.3 The Lightning Bird

References to the lightning bird and lightning’s eggs (also implying that
lightning is a bird) are quite common.

Mozambique was ravaged by a civil war that started in the 1970’s and only
ended in the 1990’s. A legacy of that war was many areas were riddled with
land mines, which still render potential farmlands unusable today. In the short
story entitled The Day Mabata-bata Exploded, by Mozambican writer Mia
Couto (1986), a rural boy takes his family’s cattle out to a nearby hill to graze.
He sees how a bright flash kills one of his cows and immediately attributes it
to the “lightning bird”.

He is unaware that it was a land mine that killed his cow – he does not know
about land mines, but tales about the lightning bird are familiar to him and
therefore he confuses the detonation of a land mine with the lightning bird
appearing to him in a blinding flash.

65
 The Xhosa folktale called Badoli the Ox (Bourke, ±1948) is part of a collection
of southern African folktales recorded by Myles Bourke and contains a
charming illustration of the lightning bird by Stella Bailey. The volume is not

Figure 3.8: The lightning bird speaks to Magena

dated, but Google Books (http://books.google.co.za, 2012) indicates that it

was published in 1948, shown in Figure 3.8.

In the story, a young cattle herd called Magena, was out in the veld one day
herding his cattle and making oxen from clay, when the other herds warned
him that a big storm was coming and he should take his cattle home. He did
not heed their warning and carried on playing and suddenly the malevolent
storm was upon him. Magena could sing beautifully and play on his string
instrument called an uhadi. He felt very frightened and decided to sing a song

66
in which he begged the lightning bird to spare him and his cattle. The rain
bucketed down and the thunder and lightning were fierce. Lightning struck
the tree under which Magena was sheltering and suddenly the storm was
over. He heard a voice speaking to him, looked up and saw that it was the
lightning bird: its breast, eyes, beak, legs and talons were the colour of
flames, its back and neck were all the colours of the rainbow. The bird said
that he had intended to kill Magena, but liked his song so much that he
decided to spare him and his cattle. The bird also promised to give Magena
his own ox. It flew up, dove into the nearby river with a flash and a crash of
thunder and Badoli, the magical white ox, emerged from the water. The rest
of the story is about the adventures of Magena and his magical ox. The
story’s description of the lightning bird sounds very similar to that given by
Bishop Henry Callaway (1886:119) who wrote that it had a red bill, red legs,
bright and dazzling feathers and a short red tail.

In both Badoli the Ox and The Day Mabata-bata Exploded, the lightning bird
represents the destructive and deadly power of lightning. In Couto’s story, the
only thing the boy knows that can kill in a blinding flash, is lightning. In Badoli
the Ox, Magena knows that the lightning bird has the power to kill him and
his cattle, but it is his beautiful song that dissuades the bird from destroying
them.

One of Bishop Callaway’s informants describe the lightning bird as follows

(1886a:383) : “…its feathers glisten. A man may think that it is red; again he
sees that it is not so, it is green.” A man told Berglund that he has seen the
lightning bird and described it thus (Berglund, 1976:39): “The feathers were
white, burning. The beak and legs were red with fire and the tail was some-
thing else, like burning green or like the colour of the sky.”

Watson (1983) identifies the Scopus umbretta or hamerkop as the lightning

bird – followed by wind and rain and a herald of thunderstorms.

The Kgatla in Botswana believed that the lightning bird brought rain-bearing
clouds from the sea. Its feathers, flesh and dung were included in the ingre-
dients that were made into a paste and kept in a rain horn, to be used in
rainmaking ceremonies (Schapera, 1971). Schapera analysed one of the

67
lightning charms, said to be the dung of a battaleur eagle, but it turned out to
be chalk.

In Sotho and Tswana, the Milky Way is known as Molalatladi, which means
the resting place of the lightning bird (Watson, 1983), (Snedegar, 1995).

An interviewee in Mokopane said: “… the bird feeds on the chameleon that

would be on the tree. We do not know its name, we just call it lightning bird.”

The Zulus believe that lightning is fire brought to the earth by a bird, the
impundulu or a hen inyoni yezulu and it strikes the earth when the inyoni
yezulu wants to lay its eggs. There are various beliefs surrounding the eggs
of the lightning bird.

The Southern Rhodesia Native Affairs Department Annual (Nada) of 1924

(Mbizo, 1924) contains a story entitled “The Lightning Doctor”, which tells of a
tree that was struck by lightning. The local people believed that if a tree was
struck, it meant that the lightning has laid its eggs in the ground nearby, and
would return to fetch them, therefore a lightning doctor had to find the eggs
and destroy them. The lightning bird was called the isivolovolo, which is also
the name of the white-necked fish eagle. The lightning doctor found a nest
about two feet under the ground, with two eggs in it. The writer was skeptical
and suspected the lightning doctor of slipping the eggs into the nest, but the
eggs were doctored and thrown into a deep pool. The author said the inci-
dent had occurred 15 years earlier and lightning had not struck the place
again since.

In a footnote to the story, Nada editor Guy A Taylor wrote that he had an
earthernware egg, found while plowing. He showed it to people of the Batan-
ga and Baila tribes and everybody agreed that it was an egg laid by lightning.

The story of the lightning that will return to the same place to fetch its eggs, is
echoed in a story told by one of the Khomani San elders in an interview. She
said that when lightning strikes a tree, it breaks it to pieces with a small,
smooth bullet “and the weather will turn away, and it’s bullet is there. Then it
comes again, the cloud comes again. It comes to take it out…It comes to
take its bullet out. So that it can use it again.”

68
Figure 3.9: Photograph by Yu-Chieh Liu of a lightning flash that looks like a bird

Schonland (1950) devotes about two pages of his book The Flight of the
Thunderbolts to South African lightning myths. He writes that some South
African tribes believe that lightning is made by the thunder-bird Umpundulo.
He also writes that sometimes, witch-doctors have the duty of chasing away
storms and some witch-doctors are said to be able to control lightning.
Bouquegneau (2010) mentions that in some South African languages, the
phrase for being struck by lightning can be translated as being lacerated by
the thunderbird’s claws. He also mentions that in some South African tradi-
tions, lightning is personified as a magical bird.

Evaluation of the myths of the Lightning Bird

During her research on 3-dimensional modeling of lightning at the University

of the Witwatersrand, Yu-Chieh Liu used a high-speed camera to capture
images of lightning in Johannesburg. One of her pictures, shown in Figure
3.9, is a lightning flash that looks very much like a bird darting out of the sky
and striking the earth with its beak. It makes one realize why people might
characterize lightning as a bird.

69
 Personifying lightning as a bird or even believing that it is a bird, or a bird of
fire, seem to be ways of making sense of lightning by describing it in terms of
something familiar and understandable. The stories recounted here all make
it clear that although lightning is characterized as a bird, it is a frightening and
dangerous bird, hence these myths do not increase the believers’ risk with
regard to lightning, since they fear the lightning bird and would presumably
avoid an encounter with it.

re 3.10: Clay models of the inkanyamba. Photograph reproduced with the permission of
Felicity Wood

3.4 The Lightning Snake

In southern Africa, snakes have been associated with rain for a long time. In
semi-arid areas, snakes appear after it has rained and in San thought, cobras
and puffadders are associated with rain (Lewis-Williams, 2004).

In his book on Tswana rainmaking rites, Schapera (1971) gives a description

of the rain snake as huge, bigger than a python, with glittering eyes, that lived
in a cave. He recorded that the Kgatla people of Botswana believed if the
dung of the rain snake was burnt in a fire, then it would prevent lightning from
striking the town.

The inkanyamba is a mythical Zulu snake that lives in deep water pools
(Reeder, 2011), sometimes described as a snake with many heads. Two
Zulu interviewees said that when the inkanyamba wants to find a mate, it flies
through the sky in a malevolent storm cloud, accompanied by lightning.
When it sees a glinting pool, it dives down to see whether there is a mate in
the water. The inkanyamba could mistake a shiny corrugated tin roof for a
water pool and dive down from the sky hence many Zulus believe that one
should paint a corrugated tin roof.
70
A story that appeared in the Daily Sun (Magagula, 2010) describes how a
lightning storm, accompanied by a strong wind, ripped the roof off a school in
Vlaklaagte, in Mpumalanga province. One of the local villagers is quoted as
saying: “People here are starting to believe the Nkayamba, the River Snake,
is behind all this. I suspect that the river snake is very angry but we don’t
know what it wants.”

In an interview done in Johannesburg with a young Zulu woman, she said

that she could remember when she was a child, that some researchers came
to the rural village where she was living, to find the eggs of the lightning
snake. They found some eggs in a pool nearby and took them back with
them. When the lightning snake realized that somebody had taken its eggs, it
became very angry and vented its wrath in a terrible storm that destroyed
some houses and overturned a tractor.

The inkanyamba is also associated with tornadoes. In 1998, a tornado struck

the eastern Cape village of Hogsback and subsequently, the local Xhosa
artists started making clay models of the inkanyamba. Two of them are
shown in Figure 3.10.

Evaluation of lightning snake myths

As discussed in 1.3 regarding the lightning bird, personifying lightning as a

snake, does not increase the believers’ risk with regard to lightning, since
people fear the lightning snake and would presumably avoid an encounter
with it.

3.5 Lightning symbolism in praise poetry

Praise poetry is a traditional form of oral performance that is still practiced in

South Africa today. Praise poems are much more than exaggerated praises
for chiefs and other dignitaries – they also give an account of important
events and daily life during the rule of a particular chief (Jordan, 1973). There
are also several collections of praise poems that provide some insight into
the genre, even though they lack a performance’s spontaneity and the poet’s
ability to improvise.

71
The lightning imagery used in praise poetry illustrate the different ways in
which lightning is regarded by different people.

In Sotho, Tswana and Hlubi praise poems, one encounters lightning used as
a metaphor to express a chief’s power as a warrior in battle and the destruc-
tion caused by battles.

In 1880, Jonathan became chief of the Sotho royal family, but his brother
Joel disputed his chieftainship (Damane, 1974). The dispute escalated into a
war in which Jonathan defeated Joel and set fire to his village. A praise poet
twice used lightning as a metaphor to describe the burning of Joel’s village
(Damane, 1974:173-174, 179):

“ The extraordinary lightning of the Camp

Struck Qalo, it struck Sebothane

It was everywhere suddenly, it struck Mathokoane.

Burnt was the mountain, it was turned to ashes,

Burnt were the pegs at the back of the house,

Burnt were Hoatane and Kolojane!

The men from Masopha’s tried vainly to quench it,

To calm down the blaze, to calm down the flames,

The sorcery of burning grass in the winter:

Burnt were the people, burnt too were the horses,

Ablaze were the saddles too!”

“ The heavens of the chief’s son flashed,

Out they hurled their lightning:

Here on the plain of Mathakoane,

People have caught glittering flashes on the plain.”

In these two passages, the poet confers upon Jonathan a god-like power of
controlling the elements to smite his enemies. As described in the first sec-

72
tion of this chapter, many South Africans believe that there are witches that
can control lightning. The poet reinforces that belief by calling the fire ‘The
sorcery of burning grass…”

In a Tswana praise poem on the topic of the Boer campaign against Mo-
kopane in 1854, a warrior is described as (Schapera 1965:67):

“Lightning, brother of Nthwalwe and Seole,

lightning of Nthwalwe, strike the fallow fields,

strike the caves if the Mokopane tribe;”

Singing the praises of Ramono, who became chief of the Kgatla clan in 1903,
the poet said (Schapera, 1965:99-100):

“No one surpasses me, the forked lightning,

The lightning of Morekwe and Mapidiwe,

which strikes twice in one day,

and once struck repeatedly.

Having just struck at Marico,

and then struck at Lemonyana hill,

it next struck at Maratadiba….

….Not only today has it been striking;

the Kwena, too, tell of it.

They had looted at Mmotso,

the lightning followed behind them;

when they got to Mothlabatse,

it roused the valley with thunder,

it snatched up and showered hot embers upon them,

and threw some men into thorny hedges.”

73
The legendary Zulu king Shaka, probably the most famous warrior in South
African history, is also likened to a thunderstorm in his praises (Cope,Trevor
1968:100):

“The sky that rumbled, the sky of Mageba,

That thundered above Nomangci mountain,

It thundered behind the kraal at Kuqhobekeni and struck,

It took the shields of the Maphela and the Mankayiya…”He who points
with a stick

The Hlubi tribe, now dispersed, was one of the Nguni tribes. Mpangazitha,
the Hlubi chief during the time of the Shaka (Jordan, 1973) is described in a
praise poem as follows:

“He is the clearing-and-frowning skies,

A thunderer like the heavens above,

Ever smiting man, but never decried;”

In a Zulu praise poem to Henry Francis Fynn, his gun is described as follows
(Cope, 1968:194):

“He who points with a stick and thunder and lightning come forth…”

In contrast with this imagery of violence and destruction, Shona love poems
focus on the beauty of lightning, as can be seen from the following two
examples (Cope, 1968:38):

“Let your smile light up like lightning,

Beaming to tell me of your joy.

and (Cope, 1968:209):

“My dear one, close as a bead belt;

Whose gait is as the planting of ground-peas,

And whose laughter is like lightning in the rain.”

74
3.6 Lightning in Afrikaans poetry

Two very well-known Afrikaans poems treat lightning in two very different
ways. The poems illustrate the dual roles that lightning can play in people’s
lives in Southern Africa: on the one hand, it is the welcome herald of rain in
an area that is often plagued by drought, but on the other hand, lightning kills.

Eugène N. Marais wrote a poem entitled Die Dans van die Reën (The rain’s
dance). Marais uses the image of a woman coming to a wedding feast as a
metaphor for an approaching storm. Initially, she peeks shyly over the moun-
tain top, but as everybody welcomes her, she starts to dance confidently
across the plains. The lightning is her shiny bracelets and her sparkling
beads, a thing of beauty and glamour.

The poem O die pyn-gedagte (Oh the painful thought) by the poet Totius tells
the story of how his young daughter was struck by lightning, ran to him and
died in his arms. Totius uses the lightning as a metaphor for the searing pain
that rips through him at the loss of his child.

Figure 3.11: A man outside his house with tyres on the roof to protect against lightning

75
3.7 A tyre on the roof

Very many South Africans believe that if you put an old car tyre on the roof of
your house, it will protect the house against being struck by lightning – an
example is shown in Figure 3.11. When questioned, people do not know how
the tyre protects the house. Some say that the rubber absorbs the lightning.
Others say that just like a car’s tyres protect you when lightning strikes a car,
it protects the house in the same way. It is clear that the tyre on the roof is a
myth that people follow, believing that it works, but this demonstrates that
they have little understanding of the physics of lightning, since a tyre on the
roof cannot do anything to protect a dwelling against lightning.

Pabale (2006) and Maselwa (2004) found that parents commonly told their
children that a tyre on the roof protects against lightning.

A story in the tabloid Daily Sun (Sizani, 2009) perpetuates the myth that a
tyre on the roof will protect a house against lightning. The story was unrelat-
ed to any news event. It was entitled “They’re used to fight lightning”,
referring to tyres on roofs.

3.8 Mirrors and lightning

One of the most common misconceptions in South Africa is that mirrors

attract lightning. Many people of all the different cultural and language groups
have recollections of their grandmothers covering the mirrors during a thun-
derstorm.

Most of the interview participants said that they cover up the mirrors when
there is lightning. A few said that this was because a mirror could reflect the
lightning and the reflected lightning could kill you.

In a questionnaire administered to a group of first year Mining Engineering

students, one of the questions was: “Do mirrors attract lightning?” Respond-
ents could tick one of three boxes labeled Yes, No and Don’t know. As
shown in Figure 3.12, 65% of the 172 respondents believe that mirrors attract
lightning.

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In their research with school learners, Pabale (2006) in Limpopo and
Maselwa (2004) in the Eastern Cape both found most pupils believed that
they should cover the mirrors during a lightning storm.

There is no scientific rationale to the belief that mirrors attract lightning and
covering mirrors does not in any way protect a person against being injured
or killed by lightning.

Don't
know
13%

No
22%
Yes
65%

Figure 3.12: Do mirrors attract lightning?

3.9 Mobile telephones attract lightning

There is a common belief in South Africa that it is dangerous to speak on a

cellular (mobile) telephone during a lightning storm, because people think
that a cell phone attracts lightning. A sangoma interviewed in Hlabisa told two
stories to illustrate this belief. She said that during a thunderstorm, there was
a meeting of the Shembe Church in Hlabisa. There was a great flash of
lightning and then all the cell phones that had been on, were black and did
not work any more. She was not at the meeting, but heard this story and
believes it to be true.

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 Don't know
12%

No
17%

Yes
71%

Figure 3.13: Is it dangerous to talk on a cell phone during a lightning storm?

Her other story was that a woman was visiting them in 2009 and she stepped
outside to speak on her cell phone while a thunderstorm was approaching.
While speaking on the phone, she was struck by lightning and critically
injured. She died in hospital a while later.

Most of the other interview participants confirmed that they thought it danger-
ous to speak on a cell phone during a lightning storm.

In a questionnaire administered to a group of first year Mining Engineering

students, one of the questions was: “Is it dangerous to talk on a cell phone
during a lightning storm?” Respondents could tick one of three boxes labeled
Yes, No and Don’t know. As shown in Figure 3.13, the overwhelming belief is
that it is dangerous to speak on a mobile telephone during a lightning storm.

It is an unfounded myth that it is dangerous to speak on a mobile telephone

during a thunderstorm. The electromagnetic waves transmitted to and from a
cell phone do not cause ionization of the surrounding air and hence do not
create a preferential path for lightning.

3.10 Sitting indoors quietly

Some of people expressed the belief that the appropriate thing to do during a
lightning storm, is to stay indoors and be quiet until the storm passes. Some
believe that family members must stay on their beds for the duration of the
storm.

A Khomani San interview participant in Blinkwater said that when there is a

lightning storm, the whole family sits in the kooi (old-fashioned Afrikaans
78
word for a bed) until it passes. One of the tales in the Bleek and Lloyd collec-
tion of the San oral tradition supports this belief. In The Thunderstorm (Bleek,
2007), the narrator tells how he was playing a musical instrument called a
goura during a storm. He kept playing, even though his mother told him to
stop and he knew that he should not play during a storm.

There was a lightning flash and he said that saw that “that the rain had
intended to kill us, on account of my doings.”

Although being quite cannot make any difference to whether lightning strikes
or not, it is recommended that people stay indoors during a lightning storm.

3.11 Ball lightning

Four interviewees described having seen a ball of lightning coming into their
house.

One woman in Hlabisa said that there was a storm one night. She and
husband and two grandchildren were inside their thatched hut. Rainwater ran
into the house and the power was cut off. She saw something enter the
house “like a ball with different kinds of colours” and then she called out to
her granddaughter who was on the bed, but she had been killed.

Another explained that somebody was killed when lightning that looked like
“a white round-shaped thing” came in through the door. The third person
said: “Something like a ball entered the house and goes (sic) to the corner. It
burst and the house was on fire. That ball was pushed by lightning.”

Another woman in Mokopane said that she saw lightning strike a house on
her street one night: “After a short while there was a lightning strike and there
was a big ball of fire.”

In the leading textbook on lightning, Uman and Rakov (Rakov, 2003) state
that ball lightning is a well-documented phenomenon, but as yet, there is no
widely accepted theory how ball lightning occurs and it has never been
successfully simulated under laboratory conditions.

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4 Lightning awareness
Lightning awareness is an ongoing concern in the international lightning re-
search community.

There are two types of basic information that should form part of any attempt at
creating lightning awareness and education namely:

• The ways in which lightning can kill or injure a person, referred to as the
mechanisms of lightning injury;

• The steps that somebody can take to minimize the risk being hurt or killed.

This section sets out the different mechanisms of lightning injury and the infor-
mation that people should know to minimize the risk of death or injury. This is
followed by an analysis, where the myths and beliefs presented in the previous
section are categorized according to how they affect people’s risk of being killed
or injured by lightning. An analysis of whether or not it is appropriate to address
any of the myths and beliefs in future lightning awareness or education efforts is
presented. The section concludes with background on lightning awareness and
education efforts in other countries and a critique on the appropriateness of each
type of campaign for South African conditions.

4.1 Mechanisms of lightning injury

There are currently five generally accepted mechanisms of lightning death and
injury, namely a direct strike, a touch voltage, a side flash, a step potential and
upward streamers (Cooper, 2010), (Cooray, 2003), (Anderson, 2002), (Carte,
2002), (Dlamini, 2009), (Jandrell, 2009). Each mechanism will be explained in
some detail below.

4.1.1 Direct strike

Death or injury due to a direct strike, graphically represented in Figure 4.1,

occurs when a lightning stroke connects directly with a person. Due to the
potential difference between the point where lightning strikes the person and
his/her feet, current flows through the body into the earth. Although one might

80
imagine that this would be the greatest cause, it only accounts for 3 – 5% of
lightning injuries (Cooper, 2010).

Figure 4.1: Injury due to a direct lightning strike

4.1.2 Touch voltage

A touch voltage, as shown in Figure 4.2, occurs when lightning strikes an object
while a person is touching it. It is also called a touch potential or contact poten-
tial. If lightning strikes something like a telephone wire or an electrical conductor,
a person can be injured even if the lightning strikes quite far away but s(he) is
touching something connected to the point of strike, for example a landline
telephone or an electrical appliance.

Figure 4.2: Death or injury due to a touch voltage Figure 4.3: Harm due to a side flash

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4.1.3 Side flash

A side flash can harm somebody standing close to an object that is struck by
lightning. Part of the downward leader will keep traveling down to the ground
along that object, but part of it jumps to the nearby person and travels to ground
through the person, as shown in Figure 4.3.

Figure 4.4: Step potential Figure 4.5: Upward streamers

4.1.4 Step potential

When lightning strikes an object, for example a tree, the lightning current goes
into the earth. As the current spreads out through the earth, from a higher to a
lower concentration of negative charge, as shown in Figure 4.4, it could happen
that a person has one foot is placed in an area of higher charge than the other
foot. If the person’s body constitutes a path with lower resistance than the
ground, the lightning will travel through that body, as illustrated in Figure 4.4.
This also happens to animals, for example cattle and sheep – with lightning
current traveling through their bodies between their forelegs and hind legs. The
story in the tabloid Daily Sun, shown in Figure 1.3, reported that 15 goats were
killed in a lightning storm. This was most likely caused by step potentials.

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4.1.5 Upward leaders

During thunderstorm conditions, upward leader start to form from points on the
ground, attracted by the opposing charge of the cloud. A lightning flash occurs
when the downward leader and the upward leader connect and form a channel
for the lightning discharge. An upward leader could form from a person’s body,
typically from the top of the head of somebody standing upright, as shown in
Figure 4.5. Even if the upward and downward leaders never connect to com-
plete a full lightning strike, the upward leader can be so strong that a person
could still be hurt. That is what happened during a football match in 1998 be-
tween Moroka Swallows and Jomo Cosmos in Johannesburg (Anderson, 2002) -
lightning struck nearby and several players were injured by upward leaders.

4.2 Basic information that a lightning awareness campaign should

address

In South Africa, many people have limited literacy (see discussion in section 4.4)
and it is a society with many different languages, so the information in any
lightning campaign should be expressed as simply as possible. The following
content is suggested for lightning awareness and education purposes, written in
the kind of simple language that is recommended:

• When thunder roars, go indoors. You are safer indoors than outdoors.
Choose a sturdy permanent structure, not something open like a bus shelter
and not something temporary like a wooden guard hut.

• Use the 30-second rule: If you can count 30 seconds or less between seeing
the lightning flash and hearing thunder, you should go to a safe place.

• If you are outdoors, squat down to keep your height as small as possible.
Make your contact with the ground as small as possible, so do not lie down
on the ground.

• Don’t touch metal objects like electric wires, fences, or plugged-in electrical
appliances like a washing machine.

• Don’t take a bath or shower, wash dishes or wash your hands.

83
• Don’t lie down on the ground.

• Don’t talk on a landline telephone, like a Telkom phone.

• If you use a fire for cooking, put it out.

• Don’t stand under or near a tree (Holle, 2012).

• You are safe in a car, taxi or bus as long as you keep the windows closed.

4.3 Lightning awareness campaigns in other countries

This section deals with lightning awareness campaigns that have been conduct-
ed in other countries and critiques them from the point of view of whether the
approaches would be appropriate in South Africa or not.

In the United States, the decrease in the number of lightning deaths over the
past ten years, is partly attributed to the work done to increase lightning safety
awareness (Cooper 2010), (Lengyel, 2010). In the United States, there is a lot of
information available on lightning safety on the web pages of the National
Weather Service at http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/ and it has promoted an
annual national Lightning Safety Week, that has been running annually since
2000. One of the photographs on the events page of the Lightning Safety Week
shows a regional television news channel weatherman
(www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov, 2012) talking about lightning safety.

In Sri Lanka, school programs were used to create lightning awareness. A report
lists five workshops that were held at schools during 2005 (Gomes et al, 2005),
attended by a total of 930 learners and 28 teachers.

In Bangladesh, school teachers were given lectures on lightning awareness, but

in the rural areas with low literacy rates, folk songs, theatre, dance and story-
telling were used (Gomes et al, 2011), as well as printed material like brochures,
newspaper articles and, occasionally, billboards.

Lightning safety awareness has also been addressed in the following ways
(Cooper, 2010):

84
• Street theatre has been used in Bangladesh;

• Community education in Nepal;

• Educating soccer coaches in countries where soccer is popular.

4.4 Critique from the South African point of view

Gomes et al (2006) propose a model for lightning awareness in third world

countries based on literacy levels. They suggest that in areas where the literacy
is above 90%, the internet can be used as one of the ways of creating lightning
safety awareness.

In southern Africa, however, an internet-based model would not be appropriate

for these reasons:

• The literacy rate of South Africa is not necessarily a good indicator. The
literacy rate is 93% (Statistics SA, 2010). This figure is based on completing
school up to Grade 7, which does not take into account the disparities in ed-
ucation during Apartheid (Posel, 2011). The democratically elected
government, that has been in power in South Africa since 1994, unfortunately
has not succeeded in rectifying the disparities and corruption in regional gov-
ernment is also proving to be an obstacle. Every year the media abound with
stories about school that do not have books, desks and chairs for learners.
On 17 May 2012, the Limpopo Department of Education was ordered by the
High Court to provide textbooks to learners – they had not yet received text-
books for the school year that started in January 2012.

• Increasingly, schooling is becoming an unreliable barometer of actual ability.

In the School of Electrical and Information Engineering at Wits University, it
has been found that students’ final school marks are not a good indicator of
success at university. Similarly, schooling up to Grade 7 might no longer be a
reliable indicator of literacy.

• Literacy is not a good indicator of access to information technology in Africa.

An internet-based campaign would not reach the millions of people living in

85
 rural areas, since the majority are not connected to the world wide web
(Johnson, 2011).

• The South African Weather Service (SAWS) is moving increasingly towards

a business model of users paying for weather information, hence it is unlikely
that SAWS would invest money in this type of public service.

Regarding lectures at schools, a more cost effective way of reaching a large

audience would be to direct one’s efforts at incorporating lightning education and
safety into the national or regional school curricula, instead of targeting a small
number of individual schools, spread out over a large geographical area.

Similarly, public performances like song, drama and story-telling, would only
reach small groups of people. Furthermore, many rural villages in South Africa
are spread out over a large geographical area, with small clusters of houses,
sometimes quite far from each other, making it difficult to attract a large percent-
age of the population to an event.

Billboard displays could make an impact, particularly if one could obtain the
financial support of a large corporation that has a public service policy.

4.5 Lightning warning systems

There are many types of lightning warning systems in existence already. Only a
few examples will be mentioned here.

The South African Weather Service (www.weathersa.co.za, 2012)) provides an

SMS service that notifies users of unusual weather and storms and provides
provincial storm tracking. The service, however, is only available to subscribers,
with the cheapest option costing R40 per month (approximately US$4.80 per
month). This may seem inexpensive, but in impoverished communities that are
hardest hit by lightning deaths in South Africa, this is unaffordable.

Smart phone apps (applications) for example WeatherBug, provides real-time

warnings of thunderstorms and lightning strikes. In South Africa, however, smart
phones are limited to the privileged class. A service that would bridge the digital
divide to be available to all classes, would have to be SMS-based – SMS is an

86
acronym for short message service, which is a message that comprises text
only, and contains no pictures, video clips or sound.

In the United States, a Wireless Emergency Alerts service is to be launched in

2012 (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2012). Extreme
weather warnings will be sent automatically to the mobile phones of subscribers
of participating networks. The service will be free, geographically targeted and
although they are text-like, messages will use a technology different to SMS
technology so that they will not be subject to congestion and delays on the
mobile network (www.ctia.org, 2012). Exactly this kind of service would be ideal
for South Africa. It would require the participation of a weather forecasting
service and the three major local mobile networks, Vodacom, MTN and Cell C. It
would also require the United States consortium that is responsible for the
Wireless Emergency Alerts to be willing to share the technology that they are
using to send the alerts.

There are a number of portable lightning detectors that have been developed,
for example using a narrowband receiver tuned to 1MHz, proposed by Mäkelä et
al (2009) and electric field mills (López et al, 2012). Investigating such methods
is beyond the scope of this work, but would provide a promising avenue of
research for future work.

4.6 Categorization of myths and beliefs according to risk

One of the research questions that this thesis attempts to address, is how
people’s myths and beliefs about lightning in southern Africa affects their risk of
death or injury during an electric storm. The most prevalent myths and beliefs
were presented in the Chapter 3. In this section the myths will be analysed in
terms of the risk associated with each one and the likelihood of each risk occur-
ring, as well as an evaluation of whether it should be addressed in a lightning
awareness effort. Both the risk and the likelihood have been categorized as
high, medium or low. The findings are summarized in Table 4.1.

87
Witchcraft:

The belief that witches can send lightning to selectively kill people or destroy
their property poses a high risk to anybody suspected of being a witch. There is
a moderate risk of this occurring due to a fairly common view that witches should
be killed, drawn from various sources in Chapter 3. The rationale is that the
belief is quite widespread in southern Africa and those at risk are people who
are accused of being witches.

Table 4.1: Risks associated with myths and beliefs

Myth/Belief Risk Likelihood Lightning awareness

factor

Witchcraft High Medium Steer clear

Use of muthi Medium Medium Encourage people to take

additional precautions

Heaven herd High Low Steer clear

The lightning tree High Low Warn in awareness material

The lightning bird Low Low No action needed

The lightning snake Low Low No action needed

Covering mirrors Low Medium Harmless: no action needed

A tyre on the roof Medium Medium Warn in awareness material

Sitting indoors Low Low Encourage this

quietly

Cell phones Low High Harmless: no action needed

There is a fundamental division between the paradigms of people who believe in

witchcraft and those that do not. People with this worldview, however, accept
that there is also natural lightning. A lightning awareness program should ad-

88
dress education and safety with regard to natural lightning and should steer
clear of beliefs around man-made, sent lightning.

Muthi:

The risk associated with using muthi to protect a person or dwelling against
lightning, is categorized as medium, as it might give somebody a false sense of
safety. The likelihood is categorized as medium, since it seems as if the use of
muthi is quite widespread and people who believe in witchcraft are very likely to
use muthi. It would be advisable to encourage people to take other precautions
too, like staying indoors and there would be no point in trying to dissuade people
from using muthi in addition to taking other safety steps.

Heaven herds:

The risk of being struck by lightning while standing on a hilltop, outdoors during
a thunderstorm, is high. However, being a heaven herd is regarded as a special
calling and there seem to be very few heaven herds, hence the likelihood is low.
Since heaven herds believe that it is a calling and a part of their worldview, it
would be pointless (and would probably be considered offensive) for an aware-
ness effort to attempt to address this belief.

The lightning tree:

Believing that you are safe under any tree during a lightning storm, is extremely
dangerous. The likelihood of this occurring, however, is very low since this belief
seems to be restricted to particular areas and groups, like the Khomani San in
the Northern Cape.

Don't Yes
know 5%
2%

No
93%

Figure 4.6: Questionnaire: Would it be safe under a tree in a thunderstorm?

89
Mining engineering students completed a questionnaire in which one of the
questions was: “Would sheltering under a tree during a storm protect you
against lightning?” Respondents could tick one of three boxes labeled Yes, No
and Don’t know. Figure 4.6 shows that an overwhelming majority of the 172
respondents know that it would not be safe under a tree during an electric storm.

A warning that sheltering under a tree during a thunderstorm, should be included

in any lightning education effort. This would serve the dual purpose of warning
those groups that think that it is safe under certain trees and it would create
awareness under the general population that shelter under trees when it is
raining.

The lightning bird and the lightning snake:

The myths of the lightning bird are more common in the old ethnographical
studies and are not so common any more. The myths regarding the lightning
snake are also quite uncommon, so in both cases the likelihood is low. The risk
connected to both myths is also very low, since the bird and the snake are
depicted as dangerous and to be avoided, hence no information in this regard
need be included in a lightning awareness program.

Covering mirrors and avoiding cell phone use:

Although it seems to be very common practices to cover mirrors and to avoid

using a cell phone during a thunderstorm, they are both harmless and hence it is
not necessary to do anything to dispel these habits.

Putting a tyre on the roof:

There is a medium risk associated with putting a tyre on the roof as lightning
protection, as this practice offers no protection and might give people a false
sense of safety during a thunderstorm. In rural areas, this is quite a common
practice and lightning awareness information should dispel this myth.

Sitting quietly indoors:

This belief was not articulated by many people, so the likelihood is low, but it is a
behaviour that should be encouraged.
90
5 Using mobile telephones for lightning education and
awareness: a proposal
Mobile telephones have transformed and revolutionised communication in
Africa in a way that is radically different to the impact that they have had in
the developed world. Not only have mobile phones changed Africa, but
Africans have appropriated the technology by finding innovative ways of using
it, with a large focus on low-cost usage and texting. This emergence of a
pervasive mobile phone and texting culture in Africa might provide an oppor-
tunity to disseminate lightning awareness information and weather warnings
in areas where it could reduce the number of annual lightning fatalities. For
users in the developed world, a mobile phone merely supplements the effi-
cient and ubiquitous fixed-line telephone and internet communication
infrastructures. In Africa, however, millions of people living in rural areas have
never had any infrastructure: no fixed-line telephone infrastructure, not even
electrical power, hence no computer communications.

There is a need for a lightning awareness and education campaign in South

Africa (Jandrell, 2009), since there are still many lightning deaths annually.
Reports in the lay press indicate that there were 84 lightning fatalities in
South Africa between January 2009 and November 2010 (Trengove, 2011).
Wide news coverage was given to an incident in January 2010 when lightning
struck a marquee tent in Pongola, killing 7 people and injuring 40.

Although the need has been identified, there is no strategy in place yet for a
lightning awareness or education drive. This section provides a first attempt
at a proposal for the format that it could take by leveraging the exponential
growth of a mobile culture in Africa by designing a mobile telephone text-
based service in Africa that can provide both a lightning warning and a light-
ning awareness/education system.

Rural communities in Africa face the highest risk of death or injury as a result
of lightning. Typically, these communities have been difficult to reach, but

91
mobile phones could change that. In the course of research on Southern
African lightning myths and beliefs (Trengove, 2011), the pervasiveness of
mobile telephones, even in remote rural areas, became evident. An interview
was done with a traditional healer living in a simple thatched hut, with no
furniture except two animal skins on the floor, but she had a mobile tele-
phone.

5.1 The emerging mobile culture in Africa

Mobile telephone services have made telecommunication accessible to many

people in Africa in areas where there is no fixed-line infrastructure and vast
distances made communication difficult. Southwood describes Africa before
the advent of mobile phones as a place of “…a lot of walking and not much
talking” (Southwood, 2008).

During his 2011 state of the nation address, the South African president,
Jacob Zuma responded to a message posted on his Facebook page by Portia
Busisiwe Mrwetyana. Her message expressed her dissatisfaction about the
inequalities in Bekkersdal, where an informal settlement which has no ser-
vices, lies alongside a suburb across the road with all amenities. She asked:
“What I wanna know is why treat us differently, but we give you the same
vote, WHY?” (Zuma, 2011). Ms Mrwetyana serves as a good illustration of the
African culture of texting – although she has no electricity, telephone line or
running water in her house, she was able to communicate with the President
via a text message sent from her mobile phone.

Mobile phones are used differently in Africa. The majority of subscribers have
pre-paid contracts, i.e. some credit is bought upfront, rather than post-paid,
where a user is debited at the end of the month for calls made (Southwood,
2008). In many townships, there are shops (sometimes called point shops)
that offer mobile network “public phones” where customers can phone on a

92
pay-per-call basis. People often share mobile phones, using different SIM
(subscriber identity model) cards in one device (Chiumbu, 2012).

Many users just keep a small amount of credit on their mobile contract and
use the phone mainly for flashing (Wasserman, 2011), (Chiumbu, 2012), (De
Bruijn, 2009). Flashing is a way of indicating that you want somebody to
phone you: you dial the other person’s number, let it ring once or twice, but
you hanging up before the other person answers. The other person’s mobile
phone will display a text message indicating a missed call from you. This is a
way to convey a message to the other person to phone you, without you
having to pay the airtime costs of speaking on the phone or sending a text
message. Chiumbu (2012) explains that the practice of flashing lead to such
congestion on the mobile networks that network companies introduced the
please-call-me, a free SMS (short message service) that asks the recipient to
call you. The please-call-me messages contain sponsored advertisements,
that make the service profitable to the mobile network companies.

Mobile phones are used for checking market prices, political activism, trans-
ferring money, public health messages, communicating with customers of
small businesses, (Southwood, 2008), (Wasserman, 2011), and social justice
movements use them to organize and mobilize people (Chiumbu, 2012)
predominantly through the use of text messages.

The proliferation of mobile phones in Africa has been phenomenal. In South

Africa, 87% of the population owns a mobile phone and for 450 000 of these
users, the mobile phones is their primary form of access to the internet (Was-
serman, 2011), (Chiumbu, 2012).

Wasserman reports that from 2003 to 2008 there was an increase of 550% in
the number of mobile subscribers in Africa, representing more 350 million
connected people (Wasserman, 2011). It has been predicted that by 2012,
only 10% of Africa’s population will not own a mobile phone (Kreutz, 2010).

93
Figure 5.1: Components of an SMS warning system

5.2 A possible model

This section examines a way in which texting on mobile phones is used in

Africa and suggests that this method might be adapted to disseminate light-
ning warnings and safety information.

There are examples in the literature on the proliferation of mobile phones and
the use of bulk SMS services in Africa that can serve as models. Front-
lineSMS is as an example of such a service – it is open-source software that
allows an organization to send bulk SMSs with just a laptop and a mobile
phone – no internet connection is needed as the service uses the GSM
(Global System for Mobile Communications) network
(http://www.frontlinesms.com/the-software/, 2012). The creator of Front-
lineSMS, Ken Banks (Banks, 2010) describes how an NGO (non-
governmental organisation) delivers healthcare to 250 000 rural Malawians
with just a laptop, 100 recycled mobile phones and FrontlineSMS. In Afghani-
stan, it is used to send security alerts to the fieldworkers of a local NGO.
FrontlineSMS is used by most social justice movements in Africa (Chiumbu,
2012).

Figure 5.1 shows a block diagram of how such an SMS lightning warning and
awareness service could work. The data server would contain the weather

94
forecasting data, which will constantly be updated by a weather forecasting
service. The application will convert the data into lightning warning infor-
mation. Weather warnings could also contain lightning education messages,
for example advising readers to go indoors or to avoid sheltering under a tree
during a lightning storm. The application could be based on the open-source
FrontlineSMS software. Mobile networks contain a Home Location Register
(HLR) and a Visitor Location Register (VLR), where the HLR maintains the
detailed information on subscribers and the VLR contains the last known
geographical location of the subscriber (Hanrahan, 2012). In this context,
subscribers include contract and pay-as-you-go users. The VLR is updated
approximately every 6 seconds.

A lightning warning and education system based on this model, would only be
feasible if the local mobile service providers agreed to participate. Since the
networks can track the geographical locations of subscribers, warnings could
target users in the particular area where a thunderstorm is approaching. A
system that sends out warnings countrywide instead of targeting specific
areas would be pointless and its messages are likely to be ignored as spam
SMS’s by users. Many services that send information via text messages,
require users to subscribe to the service. Providing a service to subscribers
only, would defeat the purpose of delivering a general public service and
would create a barrier to receiving the warnings. Perhaps lightning text mes-
sages could be sponsored by including advertisements, as was done in the
case of please-call-me text messages.

5.3 Legal restrictions in South Africa

A South African lightning warning service would have to obtain either the
cooperation or permission of the South African Weather Service (SAWS). The
South African parliament is currently considering a draft amendment to the
South African Weather Service Act of 2001 (Vegter, 2012), (Modise, 2012). In
terms of the amendment, anybody who issues a “severe weather or air

95
pollution-related warning” without the South African Weather Service’s
(SAWS) permission, could face a fine of up to R10-million (US $1.28-million)
or a maximum of 10 years imprisonment.

The act does not specify what constitutes a “severe weather warning,” but
lightning warnings could possibly be construed as falling in that category.
That would have to be investigated.

Alternatively, permission should be sought from SAWS or perhaps a service

could be set up in co-operation with SAWS, but the SAWS business model of
charging for weather information, makes this seem unlikely. The notion of a
single entity having a monopoly on weather information is very undesirable
and it would be worthwhile to lobby against the draft amendment.

At present, the author is unaware of similar restrictions elsewhere in Africa,

but that would have to be investigated.

96
6 Conclusion
The aim of this work was to investigate the hypothesis of the thesis that the
things that people believe about lightning could affect their chances of being
killed or injured during an electric storm.

A number of myths and beliefs were documented and discussed and the risk
associated with each was evaluated. They fall into four categories:

1. Some are harmless and do not affect people’s safety, like the myths of
the lightning bird and the inkanyamba.

2. Two of the beliefs could lull people into a false sense that they are pro-
tected against lightning, namely that the use of muthi and putting a tyre
on the roof of a dwelling will protect a person against being struck by
lightning. Lightning awareness material should explicitly encourage
people to take additional precautions during a thunderstorm.

3. There is a high risk associated with two of the beliefs, namely that
witches can harness lightning to kill others or to destroy their property
and that heaven herds can chase lightning away.

The belief in witchcraft poses a danger to those accused of being

witches. Heaven herds endanger themselves by being outdoors during
a thunderstorm. Both of these issues, however, are evidence of a
worldview that is very different to the current understanding of the
physics of lightning in the broad lightning research community. It is im-
portant to respect their view. A lightning awareness program should
not attempt to convince them otherwise and should make it clear that it
is addressing only natural lightning.

4. The belief that you would be safe under a particular tree during a thun-
derstorm has a high risk associated with it and should be addressed in
a lightning awareness or education program.

97
Lightning awareness efforts in other countries were evaluated from the South
African perspective. A well-known lightning safety slogan is: “When thunder
roars, go indoors.” In South Africa, however, people in rural areas are often
killed by lightning while in their houses. It is more likely to happen in areas
where there is no electrical, water or sewerage reticulation or where dwellings
are constructed in a flimsy way, for example the many thousands of corrugat-
ed iron shacks in informal settlements. This raises a concern that should be
addressed in future work, namely whether the slogan “When thunder roars,
go indoors” is appropriate in South Africa and, if not, what are the safe alter-
natives. Future work could also be done to design an inexpensive and easy-
to-assemble kit that could give some protection to a small dwelling against
lightning.

As the research into lightning myths and beliefs unfolded, it became apparent
that the growing mobile telephone and texting culture might present a useful
opportunity for providing lightning warnings and education.

The advantages of using mobile phone texting for lightning warnings and
education, are that:

• It would reach a large number of people;

• It would reach rural people;

• It would bridge the digital divide by providing the same service to rich and
poor;

• Existing mobile telephone infrastructure could be used;

• If the cooperation of the mobile networks could be enlisted, lightning

warning messages could be geographically targeted;

• The technology needed to set up a texting service need not be expensive.

A high level design for such a system was proposed.

98
Future work could comprise creating a prototype of a lightning warning sys-
tem for mobile networks and collaborating with other disciplines to ensure that
the interface of the system is easy to use and to understand irrespective of
literacy levels, language and culture.

The disadvantage is that the system, even if relatively inexpensive, would

require funding and the collaboration of the major mobile network companies.
It is likely to be difficult to obtain funding since the number of people killed by
lightning is relatively small compared, for example, to the number of deaths
due to AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) or road fatalities in
South Africa. The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), an HIV/AIDS activist
organization, puts the number of AIDS deaths in South Africa in 2011 at 400
000 (Treatment Action Campaign, 2012). In the six-week summer holiday
season from 1 December 2011 until 11 January 2012, a total of 1475 people
were killed in fatal car crashes on South Africa’s roads (Road Traffic Man-
agement Corporation, 2012).

An attitude often encountered in the course of this project is one of “Why

worry about it when the number of deaths is so small?”. For everybody work-
ing in the area of lightning protection, however, even one lightning death per
year is one too many.

99
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Van Vliet, H. (2008) “Software Engineering: Principles and Practice’, John
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115
Appendix A
1
Table1: Press reports of lightning deaths in South Africa: Jan 2009 - Jan 2011

Number
of
Publication date deaths Places of occurance
03/04‐01‐2009 4 Emalangeni reserve (KZN)
05‐01‐2009 5 Kwamashu (KZN)
09‐01‐2009 1 Petrusville (Freestate)
09‐01‐2009 3 Lusikisiki (EC)
11‐01‐2009 1 Bhamshela (KZN)
02‐02‐2009 3 Majabe Village (EC)
19‐02‐2009 1 Dundee (KZN)
16‐03‐2009 2 Mthatha (EC)
01‐10‐2009 1 Mvimvane (EC)
30‐10‐2009 1 Dobsonville (Gauteng)
24‐11‐2009 3 Flagstaff (EC)
26‐11‐2009 2 Elliotdale (EC)
26‐11‐2009 2 Mquandile (EC)
26‐11‐2009 1 Enqcobo (EC)
26‐11‐2009 14 Transkei (EC)
28‐11‐2009 2 Mqandule (EC)
28‐11‐2009 1 Nqobo (EC)
28‐11‐2009 2 Eiliotdale (EC)
28‐11‐2009 1 Dumsi (EC)
02‐12‐2009 1 Vereeniging (Gauteng)
03‐12‐2009 1 Vaaldriehoek (MPL)
16‐12‐2009 1 Willowvale (EC)
26‐12‐2009 1 Mamalidi West (Gauteng)
10‐01‐2010 1 Nkwenkwana Village (EC)
10‐01‐2010 1 Mthatha (EC)
11‐01‐2010 3 Enqcobo (EC)
11‐01‐2010 1 Qumbu (EC)
12‐01‐2010 4 Rhodes Village (EC)
12‐01‐2010 4 Enqcobo (EC)

1
The Daily Sun and Volksblad both have on-line archives of all stories that were published,
so a complete search was done on both publications for the entire period. Archived copies of
the Daily Dispatch were checked in the public library, but this method is not as reliable as an
online search. IOL News and news24 are websites that contain a selection of stories from the
print versions from the Independent Group and Media 24 newspaper stables respectively and
online searches were done on both sites. Other sources are random.

116
 Number
of
Publication date deaths Places of occurance
19‐01‐2010 2 Qumbu (EC)
20‐01‐2010 2 Qumbu (EC)
25‐01‐2010 1 Okhukho (KZN)
25‐01‐2010 1 Eesterust (Gauteng)
07‐02‐2010 1 Trompsburg (Freestate)
07‐02‐2010 1 Libode, Misty Mount Village
18‐02‐2010 3 Mid‐Illovo (KZN)
26‐02‐2010 6 Jece Village(EC)
16‐04‐2010 2 Emoyeni (KZN)
07‐05‐2010 1 Tlhalane (NW)
08‐10‐2010 1 Mpikwana (EC)
08‐10‐2010 1 Mthatha (EC)
08‐10‐2010 1 Midrand (Gauteng)
25‐10‐2010 1 Tzaneen (Limpopo)
25‐10‐2010 3 Nkumbi (KZN)
26‐10‐2010 2 Eersterust (Gauteng)
17‐11‐2010 1 Makhado (Limpopo)
27‐11‐2010 7 Pongola (KZN)
30‐10‐2010 1 Soweto (Gauteng)
04‐11‐2010 1 Elliotdale (EC)
09‐11‐2010 1 Soweto (Gauteng)
12‐11‐2010 1 Thohoyandou (Limpopo)
23‐11‐2010 4 Port St. John (EC)
10‐12‐2010 1 Meyerton (Gauteng)
02‐01‐2011 4 Nyandeni (EC)
03‐01‐2011 4 Mamolweni (EC)
03‐01‐2011 7 Eshowe (KZN)
03‐01‐2011 8 OR Thambo District
22‐01‐2011 1 Potsdam (EC)
23‐01‐2011 1 Waterval Boven (Mpumalanga)
25‐01‐2011 1 East London
136

117
Appendix B

The following is an example of an interview that was conducted in Mokopane.

The interview was transcribed and translated by Ms Mankoko Mabusela, an
electrical engineering student at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johan-
nesburg. Ms Mabusela was also the translator who was present during the
interview. In accordance with Wits University’s ethics requirements1, the
name of the interviewee has been removed.

Transcription:

Mrs Trengove: Okay, let’s start with the names. 00:00:09-42

Translator: Re kgopela Lebitso le Sefane. 00:00:09-4

Interviewee: Interviewee Mapoga. 00:00:09-2

Mrs Trengove: Interviewee Mapoga? 00:00:14-1

Interviewee: Mapoga. 00:00:16-4

Mrs Trengove: Okay, how old are you Emly? 00:00:23-0

Interviewee: 1944... 00:00:31-4

Mrs Trengove: 1944, okay.. 00:00:44-3

Interviewee: ...4-14. 00:00:44-3

Mrs Trengove: Okay, and how did you become a traditional healer? 00:00:53-1

Interviewee: Go tlile jwang gore lebe ngaka ya sesotho? 00:00:54-3

Interviewee: Go tlile ka bolwetsi. Ke be ke lwala, jwale ge ntse ke lwala, jwale ge ntse ke lwala
gwabe gwa fihla mo eleng gore bo-ntatemogolo ba nyaka kebe ngaka. 00:01:14-9

Translator: Okay, she is saying that uhm...like the one yesterday, she was sick for a long time and
then she went to a traditional healer seeking for help. Then they told her that the ancestors, the

1
Interviews were conducted in accordance with the ethics clearance protocol
number H1 10226 of the University of the Witwatersrand’s Human Research
Ethics Committee.
2
Numbers refer to the time stamp on the recording device.

118
grandfather wanted her to be a traditional healer. 00:01:31-2

Mrs Trengove: And, is it in her family? So did she eh... 00:01:46-5

Translator: Ohong, gobe gona le ba bangwe ko marago ba eleng gore le bona ka mo gae... 00:01:53-0

Interviewee: Ka mo lapeng la gesho? 00:01:53-4

Translator: Eng. 00:01:53-4

Interviewee: Eng, ntatemogolo. 00:01:53-4

Translator: She is saying, her grandfather, was a traditional herler thing. It was a generation thing.
00:02:03-4

Mrs Trengove: Okay, i mean how did she learn how to become a traditional healer? What was the
process? 00:02:06-6

Translator: Bare le ithutetse kae goba ngaka ya sesotho ka gonna mokgwa wo? 00:02:14-9

Interviewee: Klipgart ko Pretoria. 00:02:14-5

Translator: Ko Pretoria? 00:02:13-8

Interviewee: Eng, 00:02:22-2

Translator: Klipgard in Pretoria. 00:02:22-2

Mrs Trengove: And didi she learn from another traditional healer? How was she trained? 00:02:24-4

Translator: Le be le ruta ke ngaka ye nngwe? Ko ba thwasishang go be gona le ngaka ye nngwe ye e

le rutang? 00:02:29-2

Interviewee: Eng. 00:02:32-0

Translator: She is saying yes... 00:02:32-2

Mrs Trengove: Okay, and for what kinds of things do people come and consult with her? 00:02:43-8

Translator: Batho ba batlang mo go lena tlabe ba nyaka thusho e jwang? 00:02:44-6

Interviewee: Ke gore ba nyaka dithusho tse di fapaneng. Ba nyaka thusho ya malwetsi a bana ba
dihlogwana, ba nyaka dithusho tsa malwaetsi a maoto, ba nyaka dithusho tsa go kereya goba go
thushega ga bana, go tshwara masea, ba nyaka dithusho tsa metse; go ba tshwarela metse ka mo gae.
00:03:14-8

Translator: She is saying for different sicknesses like in children, newborn children. Its is a traditional
thing that if a child...after giving birth to a child you have to take them to a traditional healer, and
there issome sort of whatever they are treating. Also uhm... 00:03:36-7

119
Mrs Trengove: Is it like a blessing or purification ritual? 00:03:37-1

Translator: Yah, more like that, for the babies. And for protection of the house; there is something
that they do to protect your house... 00:03:56-3

Translator: Kana le rileng le eng? Le rile ya go thekga dintlo, ya ngwana le ya maoto, le efeng?
00:03:54-7

Interviewee: Le ya...go thushega bana. 00:04:01-0

Mrs Trengove: Does she throw the bones...? 00:04:01-0

Translator: Oh, again for women who are baren, that they should have babies. 00:04:10-3

Mrs Trengove: Okay. 00:04:10-3

Translator: What were you saying before? 00:04:10-3

Mrs Trengove: How does she know what uhm...does she throw the bones or how does she find out
what to give them or to do? 00:04:18-5

Translator: Bare le tseba jwang gore le ba thusha jwang? Le laola ka ditaola? 00:04:19-2

Interviewee: Re laola ka ditaola. 00:04:21-4

Translator: She does throw bones and they tell her what she ...how she should help them. 00:04:29-2

Mrs Trengove: And her mmedicine? Dows she make it from plant and roots and ... what does she
make it from? 00:04:33-9

Translator: Bare dihlare tsa lena namile, ke tse di jwang? Le di tsea ko kae? 00:04:36-4

Interviewee: Re a epa, ko thabeng. 00:04:43-0

Translator: Ke tsona tse tsa go epiwa le tse di... 00:04:46-7

E: Le tse dingwe re a di reka ko di...gona mo go rekiwang dihlare tsa sesotho. 00:04:56-4

Translator: Mara le tsa medu? 00:04:59-1

Interviewee: Eng, le tsa medu. 00:05:00-0

Translator: Like monstly is thhe roots, from mountains. She is sayong that sometimes she can buy if
there is n't that medicine in the mointains then she could buy it from other traditional healers or
traditiopnal stores. 00:05:19-7

Mrs Trengove: Uhm, do people come to her to protect themselves from being bewitched? 00:05:35-9

120
Translator: Bare batho ba a tla mo go lena gore ba iphemele gore batho ba seke ba baloya? 00:05:40-
6

Interviewee: Eng, ba a tla. 00:05:41-1

Translator: Yes they do. 00:05:44-9

Mrs Trengove: Does she know of people who get bewitched and get struck by liightning? Is that a
way in which peop[le still bewitch others? 00:05:56-6

Translator: Are, go sana le taba tse tsa gore batho ba rathe ke magadima? Le bona tle batle go lena?
Ba eleng gore sale ba ratha ke magadima? 00:06:04-4

Interviewee: Aowa, a se ke alafe motho wa go ratha ke legadima. 00:06:07-7

Translator: Asenke? 00:06:07-7

Interviewee: Ga senke ke hlakane le yena wo mo jwalo. Ke dikwa ka mo ntle fela, asenke a tla.
00:06:15-9

Translator: ...a person who was struck by lightning never came to her, but she heard of people who
have been struck by lightning, but no one had ever come to her. 00:06:34-3

Mrs Trengove: So, in this area, had people been struck by lightning? 00:07:13-5

(Exchange greetings) 00:07:33-2

Translator: Bare gona mo ga gona batho ba eleng goere sale ba ratha ke magadima? Goba dintlo, ga
nke bare dintlo di swele di fisha ke magadima? 00:08:01-6

E: Ke kgala maan... 00:08:04-6

Translator: Ba nyaka tsona tseo tsa kgale. 00:08:08-9

Interviewee: Ebile ga ke tseba gore... 00:08:11-3

Translator: Ga le gopole? 00:08:10-1

Interviewee: Ke gopola gona kamo go nang le lehu ka ga-Mokagane sale bare ntlo e rathilwe mara ya
sebe gore ka nnete e rathile ke legadima. Re kwa ntse go bolelwa... 00:08:27-7

Translator: She is saying that there was a house near by were they suspected that it was hit by a
lightning but there was no proof to show that it was lightning for real. 00:08:43-8

Mrs Trengove: Okay, and does she know about the lightning bird? 00:08:48-2

Translator: Le tseba ka ga nonyane ye ya magadima? 00:08:53-1

Interviewee: Nonyane ya legadima? hai, yona ga ke e tsebe botse, ga ke rate go bolela maaka.

121
00:08:59-5

Translator: Ke yona ntse ba ree botsa ka yona ka mo ntle kamo. 00:09:02-8

Interviewee: Yona botse ke kwa ba e bolela, ase nke ke e bone ka mahlo aka. 00:09:06-6

Translator: She does not know it, ... 00:09:10-9

Mrs Trengove: She has n't heard of it, okay. 00:09:08-8

Translator: No, she has heard of it but she does not know of it. She has never seen it before. 00:09:17-
9

Mrs Trengove: Okay...are there other questions you wanna ask? 00:09:22-3

Translator: Ahh, nothing else i guess. 00:09:32-8

Mrs Trengove: Okay, ke a leboga. 00:09:31-7

Interviewee: Eng, go leboga rena.

Translation:

Mrs Trengove: Okay, let’s start with the names. 00:00:09-4

Translator: What is your name and surname. 00:00:09-4

Interviewee: Interviewee Mapoga. 00:00:09-2

Mrs Trengove: Interviewee Mapoga? 00:00:14-1

Interviewee: Mapoga. 00:00:16-4

Mrs Trengove: Okay, how old are you Interviewee? 00:00:23-0

Interviewee: 1944... 00:00:31-4

Mrs Trengove: 1944, okay... 00:00:44-3

Interviewee: ...4-14. 00:00:44-3

Mrs Trengove: Okay and how did you become a traditional healer? 00:00:53-1

Interviewee: How did you become a traditional healer? 00:00:54-3

Interviewee: I was first sick because my late grandfather wanted me to become a traditional

122
healer. 00:01:14-9

Translator: Okay, she is saying that...like the one yesterday, she was sick for a long time and
then she went to a traditional healer seeking for help. Then they told her that the ancestors,
the grandfather wanted her to be a traditional healer. 00:01:31-2

Mrs Trengove: And, is it in her family? So did she eh... 00:01:46-5

Translator: Was this inherited in your family? 00:01:53-0

Interviewee: In my family? 00:01:53-4

Translator: Yes. 00:01:53-4

Interviewee: Yes, my grandfather was one. 00:01:53-4

Translator: She is saying, her grandfather was a traditional healer thing. It was a generation
thing. 00:02:03-4

Mrs Trengove: Okay, I mean how did she learn how to become a traditional healer? What
was the process? 00:02:06-6

Translator: Where and how did you learn to become a traditional healer? 00:02:14-9

Interviewee: Klipgart in Pretoria. 00:02:14-5

Translator: Pretoria? 00:02:13-8

Interviewee: Yes. 00:02:22-2

Translator: Klipgard in Pretoria. 00:02:22-2

Mrs Trengove: And did she learn from another traditional healer? How was she trained?
00:02:24-4

Translator:Did you learn from another traditional healer? 00:02:29-2

Interviewee: Yes. 00:02:32-0

Translator: She is saying yes... 00:02:32-2

Mrs Trengove: Okay, and for what kinds of things do people come and consult with her?
00:02:43-8

Translator: What kind of help do you offer to people who consult with you? 00:02:44-6

Interviewee: They come with different problems. They need help with baby illnesses like
“hlogwana”, when they have problems with their feet, those who cannot conceive babies,
protecting their babies and their houses. 00:03:14-8

123
She is saying for different sicknesses like in children, newborn children. It is a traditional
thing that if a child...after giving birth to a child you have to take them to a traditional healer,
and there is some sort of whatever they are treating. Also... 00:03:36-7

Mrs Trengove: Is it like a blessing or trifurcation ritual? 00:03:37-1

Translator: Yah, more like that, for the babies. And for protection of the house; there is
something that they do to protect your house... 00:03:56-3

Translator: What else did you say you do? You protect the children, houses, help with feet
problems and what else? 00:03:54-7

Interviewee: Help barren women to conceive. 00:04:01-0

Mrs Trengove: Does she throw the bones...? 00:04:01-0

Translator: Oh, again for women who are barren, that they should have babies. 00:04:10-3

Mrs Trengove: Okay. 00:04:10-3

Translator: What were you saying before? 00:04:10-3

Mrs Trengove: How does she know what...does she throw the bones or how does she find out
what to give them or to do? 00:04:18-5

Translator: How do you know how to help these people? Do you throw bones? 00:04:19-2

Interviewee: I throw bones. 00:04:21-4

Translator: She does throw bones and they tell her what she ...how she should help them.
00:04:29-2

Mrs Trengove: And her medicine? Does she make it from plant and roots and ... what does
she make it from? 00:04:33-9

Translator :What about your medicines, what are they made of and where do you get them?
00:04:36-4

Interviewee: I dig them from the mountains. 00:04:43-0

Translator: Do you cook them and … 00:04:46-7

Interviewee: I also buy some at the traditional medicine stores. 00:04:56-4

Translator: Are they plants roots? 00:04:59-1

Interviewee: Yes, roots. 00:05:00-0

124
Translator: Like mostly are the roots, from mountains. She is saying that sometimes she can
buy if there isn't that medicine in the mountains then she could buy it from other traditional
healers or traditional stores. 00:05:19-7

Mrs Trengove: Do people come to her to protect themselves from being bewitched?
00:05:35-9

Translator: Do people come to you to protect themselves from being bewitched? 00:05:40-6

Interviewee: Yes, they do come. 00:05:41-1

Translator: Yes they do. 00:05:44-9

Mrs Trengove: Does she know of people who get bewitched and get struck by lightning? Is
that a way in which people still bewitching others? 00:05:56-6

Translator: Do people get struck by lightning? Do those people also come to you? 00:06:04-4

Interviewee: No. I had never healed a person who was struck by lightning. 00:06:07-7

Translator: Never? 00:06:07-7

Interviewee: I had never met such a person. I have heard of them but never seen one.
00:06:15-9

Translator: ...A person who was struck by lightning never came to her, but she heard of
people who have been struck by lightning, but no one had ever come to her. 00:06:34-3

Mrs Trengove: So, in this area, had people been struck by lightning? 00:07:13-5

(Exchange greetings) 00:07:33-2

Translator: Has there ever been a person who was struck by lightning in this area? Or houses
that were struck and burned by lightning maybe? 00:08:01-6

Interviewee: A very long time ago... 00:08:04-6

Translator: That’s what she wants you to tell her about. 00:08:08-9

Interviewee: I don’t even recall clearly... 00:08:11-3

Translator: You can’t remember? 00:08:10-1

Interviewee: There is a house nearby, there is a funeral now though, their house was struck
but we did not know for sure if it was lightning. We just hear rumors… 00:08:27-7

Translator: She is saying that there was a house nearby were they suspected that it was hit by
a lightning but there was no proof to show that it was lightning for real. 00:08:43-8

125
Mrs Trengove: Okay, and does she know about the lightning bird? 00:08:48-2

Translator: Do you know of the lightning bird? 00:08:53-1

Interviewee: Lightning bird? I do not know it; I do not want to lie. 00:08:59-5

Translator: We had people telling us about it yesterday. 00:09:02-8

Interviewee:I have heard of people talking about it but I had never seen it with my own eyes.
00:09:06-6

Translator: She does not know it ... 00:09:10-9

Mrs Trengove: She hasn't heard of it, okay. 00:09:08-8

Translator: No, she has heard of it but she does not know of it. She has never seen it before.
00:09:17-9

Mrs Trengove: Okay...are there other questions you want to ask? 00:09:22-3

Translator: Ahh, nothing else I guess. 00:09:32-8

Mrs Trengove: Okay, thank you. 00:09:31-7

Interviewee: Yes, you are welcome.

126
Appendix C

School of Electrical and Information Engineering

University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
Lightning Study Questionnaire

1. Is lightning more strongly attracted by white objects than by black objects?

Yes No Don’t know

2. Is lightning more strongly attracted to water than to land?

Yes No Don’t know

3. Is it dangerous to talk on a cell phone during a lightning storm?

Yes No Don’t know

4. Do mirrors attract lightning?

Yes No Don’t know

5. Are there people who can control lightning?

Yes No Don’t know

6. If your answer to Question 5 was “Yes”, explain who those people are that can control

lightning. …………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………….

…………………………………………………………………………………………

7. Do you know of anybody who was killed by lightning that was sent by another person?

Yes No Don’t know

8. Do you know of anybody whose house was hit by lightning that was sent by another

person? Yes No Don’t know

9. If your answer to Question 7 or 8 was “Yes”, please write what happened (continue on the

back of the page if you run out of space).

…………………………………………………………………………….…….

……………………………………………………………………………………………

……………………………………………………………………………………………

…………………………………………………………………………………………
Student Questionnaire Revision 4 1

127
Questionnaire administered to 1st year Mining Engineering students

Don't
Question Yes No know Total
1 More strongly attracted by white objects? 0
2 Dangerous to talk on a cell phone? 123 29 20 172
3 Do mirrors attract lightning? 112 37 23 172
4 Are there people who can control lightning? 21 106 45 172

5 Can people send lightning to strike a house? 48 70 54 172

6 5 and 6 combined subtotals 69 176 99
7 Safe to shelter under a tree 9 159 4 172

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!"#$
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.+)/$ !"#$
;&'$ 0@'$ !"#$

()$
()$
A&'$ *)+,-$.+)/$

*)+,-$
.+)/$
1/(,0(2$3#*(2$"$02(($%"4(5$
0'$ !"#$
:'$

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()$
()$ *)+,-$.+)/$
B;'$

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.+)/$
()$ &;'$
00'$

*)$<=33)3#$
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1>316-$7=28-+=+2?$
9:'$

128
Appendix D

A recipe given by a Mthubathuba herbalist to protect a person against light-

ning1:

• Ugina
• Uphindevuma
• Umakhwenu
• Umabophe: Alberta magna or Natal flame bush, a tree with red tubular
flowers and the bark is used medicinally (Pooley, 1993).
• Umuzikawush
• Umpikayiboni: Cephalaria humilis, widespread in South Africa (SANBI,
2012a);
• Impila: Callilepis laureola (SANBI, 2012b);
• Uslephe
• Umashwili
• Ikhathazo: Alepidea amatyambica, grows in the grasslands of southern
Africa, with small star-shaped white flowers. It is used in muthi, amongst
others to treat colds and coughs (Nonjinge, 2003);
• Umvithi: This is the Zulu name for the boscia albitrunca – the tree that the
Northern Cape San believe is never struck by lightning, as discussed
elsewhere in this section.
• Umgunya
• Indindibala

References:

1
Botanical plant names have been included where they could be found in the literature. If I
was unable to find the botanical name, the herbalist’s name was included in the list using her
spelling.

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Nonjinge, S. and Tarr, B.B. (2003) 'Alepidea Anatyambica Eckl. & Zeyh.',
http://www.plantzafrica.com/plantab/alepidamat.htm, last accessed 17 June
2012.

Pooley, Elsa. (1993) 'The Complete Field Guide to Trees of Natal, Zululand &
Transkei', Durban, Natal Flora Publications Trust.

SANBI. (2012a) 'Red List of South African Plants',

http://redlist.sanbi.org/species.php?species=2744-8, last accessed 17
June 2012.

SANBI. (2012b). 'Red List of South African Plants',

http://redlist.sanbi.org/species.php?species=2999-5, last accessed 17
June 2012.

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