The Ilomba: The Witch's Snake That Wears Its Owner's Face
On the great Barotse floodplain of western Zambia — where the Zambezi spreads each year into a shallow inland sea, and the Lozi people move their whole kingdom to high ground and back with the water — the deep pools and hidden channels were understood to hold a creature that is, by common consent of everyone who has ever studied African witchcraft-belief, the most psychologically terrifying familiar in the world's records. The ilomba is a water snake — but a water snake with one feature no honest animal carries: it has a human face . And not any face. The ilomba wears the face of its owner — for the ilomba is made, not born: a man of ambition who wants wealth, power, or the death of his rivals goes secretly to a sorcerer, and the sorcerer constructs the creature for him, working into its making the man's own substance — clippings of his nails, cuttings of his hair, the intimate leavings that all the world's dark crafts require — and sets it, small at first, in a deep poo...