The Kishi: The Two-Faced Charmer with a Hyena Behind
The girls of the old Mbundu villages of Angola were taught to check one thing about a handsome stranger, and the instruction has lost none of its edge in a century and a half: look at the back of his head. For among the ogres and spirits of the Kimbundu-speaking country — set down in the 1890s by the missionary-folklorist Héli Chatelain in his great collection of Angolan tales, and alive in the telling long before and after — walks the kishi: a demon with two faces . From the front he is everything a dangerous evening promises: a young man, beautiful, strong, superbly dressed, and above all eloquent — for the kishi's human face is the finest talker in the country, honeyed, attentive, funny, tireless, the suitor every mother distrusts precisely because nothing about him can be faulted. But at the back of his skull, hidden under thick long hair that he never, ever lets anyone touch or part, there is a second face: the face of a hyena — muzzle, carrion breath, and jaws of which th...