Africa urban legends

A huge continent with many different countries, and having numerous urban areas as well as village society, Africa has barely been documented as a place where urban legends flourish. Only South African urban legends have been systematically documented. A few other examples so far recorded are scattered through this encyclopedia. See the entries for “The Baby-Roast,” Body parts Rumors and Legends, “The Blood Libel,” and “The Man in the Middle.”

John William Johnson published two interesting versions of “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” that he heard in the 1980s, one from sub-Saharan East Africa and one from West Africa, both told to him by university students. In 1987, after giving a lecture on folklore at the Somali National University, Johnson, who had mentioned the hitchhiker legend in his talk, was approached by a student who told him of an occurrence that “had actually happened in Somalia some years before.” A Somalian student, he said, returning from studies in the United States is met at the airport in Mogadishu by the girlfriend with whom he had corresponded for four years. The couple spend the day together, then dance at a nightclub all evening. The young man walks her home late that chilly night, giving her his jacket to keep her warm. The next day, calling at his girlfriend’s home, the student is informed by her father, “I have very bad news. Fadumo [the girlfriend] was killed in a car crash two years ago.” The student and the father visit her grave and, of course, find the boy’s coat lying atop it.

In a similar situation in Senegal, on the West coast of Africa, “sometime in the 1980s,” Johnson collected a different version of the legend from a student in his folklore class. This time a Wolof taxi driver meets a girl at a dance, lends her his sweater, walks her home, forgets the sweater, and—no surprise—learns the next day that he had dated a ghost. Going to the graveyard with the girl’s elderly mother, the taxi driver finds his sweater draped over her tombstone. “As a result of this incident, the
Wolof youth goes insane.”

Johnson postulates that these urban legends have been adopted into the traditions of both modern African settings as their societies have become more urbanized and more exposed to outside cultural influences, but also that native belief in a spirit world has made the cultures receptive to a supernatural story. A similar appearance of a well-known but nonsupernatural urban legend in an African setting—and also told by a student—was documented by a Nigerian student in one of my folklore classes at the University of Utah in 1976. She related a detailed and localized version of “The Baby-Roast” (see that entry) after hearing of the Western versions of the legend in class.