Impundulu, the lightning bird

The impundulu, or lightning bird, is a witch's familiar in the beliefs of South Africa's Pondo, tied to thunder and lightning. Monica Hunter recorded it in 1936, and a Port Elizabeth paper explained it in 2005.

The oldest source here, Henry Callaway's The Religious System of the Amazulu (1870), describes a similar lightning bird, which he calls the bird of heaven. It was thought to come down from the sky in thunder and to be found close to where lightning had struck. Heaven-doctors, he wrote, set a big pot of amasi mixed with medicines beside a hilltop pool to draw the lightning there, then waited. When the bird came down with the strike, the doctor ran in and killed it.

Monica Hunter, in Reaction to Conquest (1936), her study of the Pondo of South Africa, recorded the impundulu, also called izulu, as a familiar that women were commonly said to keep. Her informants called it the lightning bird that lives beyond the sky and is present when lightning strikes. It belonged only to a female witch, appearing to her as a handsome young man who became her lover. Some said he always wore European clothes; one informant described a stiff collar and the look of a man back from the goldfields.

Wikipedia describes the impundulu as a bird of black and white as big as a person, calling up thunder and lightning using wings and talons. It calls the bird a vampiric creature tied to witchcraft, often a witch's or witch doctor's servant sent against the witch's enemies, with an endless hunger for blood. It can also appear as a handsome young man and seduce women.

The Herald, Port Elizabeth, took up the belief in 2005 in a report by Nicky Blatch on an attack on a toddler, which its headline put down to the killer's belief in omens and spirits. The paper quoted an explanation of the impundulu as an unseen agent that a witch sends to a chosen victim, bringing on a range of unpleasant bodily symptoms.