Encounters between baboons and people are common in parts of South Africa. WhatsApp groups often share stories of baboons raiding a kitchen and stealing all the food. And stories appear in the media about the torture and killing of baboons.
Recently the hashtag #JusticeForRaygun has been widely shared on social media. A young male baboon named Raygun was being tracked as he made his way through a suburb of Pretoria to the wilds. When he stopped at a school in a small town, a group of teenagers hunted him down, attacked him and burned him to death. Some children had reportedly fainted earlier in the day and he was blamed. This connection to superstition and the occult is nothing new.
Sandra Swart researches animal and human history, often with a focus on baboons. She told us the fascinating and cruel history of these encounters in South Africa.
Why are baboons so often badly treated in South Africa?
People are far more aggressive towards baboons than the other way round. Analysis suggests that the rage is not really just about baboons, but about society’s anxiety more generally, with baboons acting as stand-ins for humans.
People expand their settlements into areas where baboons once lived freely. They create secure spaces behind high walls, razor wire fences and security systems: they fear burglars, they fear those who invade suburban safety, and they want them removed. But they cannot get rid of the human intruders – so they take their frustration out on the baboons. For a long time baboons were legally labelled as “vermin” (pests) and, while patchily protected today (it’s illegal to hunt baboons without a permit in most areas), they’re still killed illegally in suburbia or on farms.
Of course, baboons are complex, adaptable beings whose cultures are closely evolved with ours: they live in social groups as we do and behave in recognisably similar ways. Baboons have evolved to live near humans and benefit from our environmental modifications. So they often enter human spaces. This feels “unnatural” to people used to the shy, human-averse smaller wildlife surrounding urban settlement.
Like us, baboons are inquisitive, socially complex and flexible, with enough dexterity to navigate sources of delicious food. They embrace our high-energy, low-effort foods, from orchards, fields, rubbish bins and dumps, picnics and kitchens – in a (very) few cases, wounding people and domestic animals.
Some baboons lose their usual suspicion of humans and deploy scare tactics to acquire food. This behaviour precipitates human–baboon conflict even before the added factor of the occult baboon.
The occult baboon?
The baboon may also be seen as part of the occult arts or as linked to the tokoloshe (a supernatural baboonesque man-beast in South African folklore who acts both independently and as a kind of witch’s familiar).
Indeed, some South Africans refuse to even name the baboon or utter the words used to describe it in various languages, like imfene, tshwene and mfenhe. Some adults rather use the euphemism selo sa thabeng (mountain thing).
We need to ask why it’s mainly the baboon, out of all animals, that’s come to play this role in the popular imagination.
Why does it play this role?
The answer is both psychological and historical. Baboons were important in the cosmology of indigenous hunter-gatherer groups. They’re evident in mythic stories, including those of shapeshifting between human and baboon. Oral history and rock art suggest there wasn’t an inevitable hostility between baboons and humans.
In fact, some groups, such as the AmaTola or VhaLaudzi, chose baboons as totem animals. Baboons were associated with root medicines called so-/oa by the /Xam San, and U-mabophe by the Nguni people. These medicines made a person invincible to weapons while clouding the enemy’s judgement – so you could defeat them in daylight and raid their cattle by night.
They cured headaches and stomach ills, but were also a powerful “charm” against evil. The baboon, because it also self-medicated with plant roots, was understood as a symbol of protection.
What went wrong?
The rupture in the shared deep history of the baboon–human relationship came with the shift from hunter-gatherer lifeways to sedentary crop farming (starting about 1,000 years ago). Baboons raiding crops suddenly posed a real threat to human food security. But they also came to be a threat to psychological security.
To this day they’ve remained linked with an unnatural “wrongness” in society inherent to witchcraft. The occult or witchcraft (a flawed term that doesn’t capture local nuances) is the darker side of traditional healing and remains part of the cosmologies of most South Africans. This might take the form of consulting with diviners for ritual help in order to cause harm or to accumulate wealth and power illegitimately.
Historically, baboons became understood to work as witches’ familiars (as tokoloshes or as themselves) or, occasionally, to be actual witches. Stories can be traced that tell of witches riding baboons backwards, approaching homes in reverse, at night, disrupting all that is normal, a creature out of place.
But being in the wrong place at the wrong time is entirely normal for baboons: young males like Raygun tend to leave their troops to seek mates in other troops (which ensures genetic diversity). Today, these young males end up perceived as “out of place” because they follow historical routes that are now human spaces.
This is probably the greatest challenge that a male baboon will face in his life: navigating a new world alone over great distances in unfamiliar landscapes – with increased testosterone and cortisol. He’s primed to be a being terrifyingly “out of place”.
In some high conflict areas, the majority of baboon deaths on the urban edge are human-induced (hit by cars, electrocutions, poisoned or shot or killed by dogs). As baboon numbers drop it becomes rarer to see a dispersing baboon, more “unnatural” and more difficult for the baboons themselves.
Add to this a psychological factor: baboons provoke sympathy, indeed empathy, by coming into focus as almost-us. Then, with the final click of the intellectual lens, they are in complete focus and are revealed as not us at all. This is integral to the “uncanny”. They are us and not us.
Historically, the uncanny creature has been used as a proxy or scapegoat to account for something unsettling or unlucky. The uncanny might also be that which unconsciously reminds us of ourselves – the dark side of ourselves, the “animal side”, our own repressed impulses. So we project these onto the uncanny thing, blaming them for inexplicable troubles that befall us.
What should happen to prevent another Raygun?
Hope lies not in furious outbursts on social media but in law-enforcement supported by education.
Animal protection societies already do a heroic job, with very limited resources. They focus on criminal prosecutions as well as animal rescues. A R20,000 (US$1,000) reward has been offered for information leading to a successful conviction of Raygun’s killers. In simple individual cases of animal cruelty, law enforcement is both vital and sufficient.
But in dealing with community cosmology and supernatural belief, education initiatives may be as useful. This shouldn’t be left to animal protection groups. Educators, traditional and church leaders, community leaders and the media all need to promote knowledge about animal behaviour and sentience to encourage connection to the animal world.
If you remove the fear, you can remove the violence.
Sandra Swart does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
By Sandra Swart, Professor of History, Stellenbosch University
