I have never met a tokoloshe in my life, let alone spoken to one. I did, however, spend my formative years near a lower primary school where pupils were reputed to flee classes on a regular basis at the urging of these imaginary creatures.
Still, even as a child I was always suspicious of the tokoloshe stories and put the legend of my age-mate escaping classes at that school — I think it was called Gugulethu — down to the fact that, unlike in my school on the other side of the township, they did not have a feeding scheme.
It was hunger, I reasoned, that drove those kids to skip classes before school was over and the tokoloshe excuse was just that.
In spite of not knowing what a tokoloshe looks or sounds like — or believing such a creature exists — I find myself associated with a gory story apparently involving the mythical entities.
A couple of years ago somebody updated the Elifasi story on Wikipedia and thought it should be accompanied by a fresh picture. The problem is that they picked mine
Google the name “Elifasi Msomi” and what you get along with the picture of the real Elifasi is a photo of me.
Now this Elifasi Msomi character was born some 63 years before my parents brought me into this world. He had been dead almost 20 years when I first lay my eyes on my mother.
We may share a surname, but we share no relations.
His claim to infamy is that he was convicted of murdering 15 people, over a period of 18 months in the 1950s, in Umzimkhulu and other parts of the then southern Natal. He used an axe to commit most of the killings, hence he was later dubbed “the axe killer” in English-language newspapers.
But what made his case of interest to South Africans across the racial spectrum was his sensational claim that he committed the murders on the instructions of a tokoloshe.
By the time the state hanged him, he had earned a legendary status in the criminal world. One of the gangs that terrorised Nelson Mandela and other residents of Alexandra township in the 1950s named itself the Msomis or the Msomi Gang — in his honour.
In the 1970s, his reputation as a no-nonsense, hard-tackling footballer earned Kaizer Chiefs co-founder Edward Khoza the nickname “Msomi” — hence today people speak of a soccer legend by the name of “Msomi Khoza”. People gave him the moniker because they said he turned his feet into axes on the field of play, chopping down the opposition.
The Alex gang obviously didn’t mind being associated with a serial killer, Edward Khoza probably didn’t take his nickname too seriously — soccer is known to give players some bizarre labels — but I do mind.
A couple of years ago somebody must have decided to update the Elifasi story on Wikipedia and thought it should be accompanied by a fresh picture.
The problem is that they happened to pick mine. From what I can see it was lifted from my byline picture for a column I used to write for the now defunct daily, The Times.
Since then my face has illustrated numerous internet articles about South African serial killers and has been used in short social media videos — created in countries as far flung as Jamaica — on the same subject. There is even a findagrave.com that has my image as Elifasi. I have lost count of the “True Crime” YouTube videos that tell the Elifasi and the tokoloshe story with my picture in the background.
I have spent years trying to have this injustice addressed. Some sites remove the picture after receiving a complaint, but most just ignore me. And Wikipedia, the apparent source of the problem, is really terrible at attending to such cases.
Now if these publishers were based in South Africa, I could have easily approached any of the regulatory bodies that handle such cases. But where do you go when the offending website is domiciled elsewhere, in a place where it seems anything goes?
Yet giving up is not an option, not when every three months or so I get a call from a concerned friend, a business contact or even a family member asking if I know that I am being called a serial killer on social media.
I am at my wits’ end.
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