The Impundulu: The Lightning Bird of Southern Africa
In the storm-country of southern Africa—the Eastern Cape of the Xhosa, the Zulu lands, the highveld where the summer thunderheads build like white mountains and the lightning kills more people than almost anywhere on earth—the bolt from the cloud is not a discharge. It is a bird . The impundulu —the lightning bird of Xhosa, Zulu, and Pondo tradition; inyoni yezulu , "the bird of heaven"—is a great bird, white or black-and-white in most tellings, the size of a man when it chooses; and the thunderstorm is its visitation: the lightning is the flash of its descent —the beat of its wings is the thunder, the bolt its talons striking—and where lightning strikes the earth, there, say the traditions, the bird has landed and laid its egg in the ground . The scorched pit at the strike-point conceals it; and the egg of the lightning bird is an object of terrible ambivalence: a thing of power for the healer who knows how to take it—the strike-site's soil and the egg figure in the old...