Ditaolane, also known as Moshanyana-wa-Senkatana is a mythic hero and deity in Southern Africa, the Basotho religion. Kgodumodumo is a mythical creature, described as a shapeless, gluttonous monster that swallows everything living it comes by and gets larger and larger the more it swallows. It has multiple sharp tongues which it uses as weapons. Kgodumodumo is the main antagonist in the story of Ditaolane where the monster is symbolic of all that holds back humanity and is killed by the hero.
As the story goes …
There remained but one woman on the earth who escaped the ferocity of Kgodumodumo by carefully hiding herself from him. The woman conceived and brought forth a son in an old stable. She was surprised, on looking closely at the child, to find his neck adorned with a little necklace of divining charms. She therefore decided that his name would be Ditaolane, the Diviner. She was worried about the child being born at a time when Kgodumodumo was ravaging the world. Of what use, she wondered, would his charms be? And she took straw to make a bed for her child. When she went into the stable, she was shocked and terrified: the child had already reached the stature of a fully grown man who was uttering words of wisdom.
He went out and expressed surprise at the solitude around him. He asked his mother if they were the only ones on the earth. She told him how, until a short time before, the valleys and mountains were covered with humans, but the beast whose voice makes the rocks tremble had devoured them all. She pointed the beast out to her son. Ditaolane took a knife and went to attack the devourer of the world. Kgodumodumo swallowed him, but he was not dead.
Armed with his knife, he went into the stomach of the monster and tore his entrails. Kgodumodumo roared fiercely, then fell dead. When Ditaolane set about opening the beast to get out, the point of his knife made thousands of human beings cry out, beings who were buried alive with him. Finally, he made an opening through which the nations of the earth emerged.
"Ditaolane, Pursued by Those He Saved, Is Transformed into a Stone". Oxford Reference. Retrieved February 11, 2021.https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095722759
It said that the purpose of a myth is to provide the hearer with a truth which the audience then interpreted for themselves within the value system of their culture. Myths answer timeless questions and serve as a compass to each generation.
As decolonial thinker, I can’t resist the temptation to think that the myth of Kgodumodumo is meant for Africans to have a better understanding of colonialism, its impact in society and most important that we have not escaped its gastric juices from its belly, because Africa still stuck in Eurocentric knowledge hierarchies and ways of being. We were freed from Kgodumodumo and Kgodumodumo is dead, we still need to root out that which remains in culture, education, society, and so on from the colonial era.
