Little Grey Men? Animals and Alien Kinship

Abstract

This essay confronts the lack of vernacular, indigenous or local knowledge in human-animal history and pushes it back into Deep History. It analyses the shifting meanings of the occult baboon and the alien 'other' in South Africa's syncretic and synchronic cosmologies. It asks why it is the baboon - out of all the animals - who came to be a witch's familiar? It asks why the tokoloshe, a supernatural sprite, became baboon-esque? In answering these questions, it uses Freud's notion of 'alien kinship' - the ancient attraction and anxiety induced by baboon as the uncanny, the alien, the changeling, the shape-shifter - or the 'Other within' us. It examines not only the changing role this understanding of the supernatural baboon has played in human societies historically (including a new role created by the tabloids) but the concomitant consequences for baboons themselves - to show that 'animal history' can advance a 'usable past'.