The Mamlambo: The River's Mother They Called the Brain-Sucker
In the deep green river country of South Africa's Eastern Cape — the old Pondoland, where the rivers come down folded between steep grass hills to the Wild Coast — the autumn of 1997 produced one of the strangest episodes in the modern history of folklore: a monster made the national news, the police issued statements about it, and a question about it was raised, in complete seriousness, in the provincial legislature. Along the Mzintlava River near Mount Ayliff, seven, then eight, then nine bodies had come out of the water in a span of months; and the villages along the banks knew what had taken them, because the thing had been seen : at night, in the pools, a creature half serpent and half horse — a body like a monstrous snake, twenty meters by the boldest accounts, with a horse-like head — and around it in the dark water a glow , a shimmering greenish light, as though the pool itself had a lamp in it. The press, hunting a headline, found the detail that made the story immortal: ...