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Comoros Legend
Topic Started: Dec 14 2005, 03:18 AM (81 Views)
Michael Blazer
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Volcanic Eruption Adds New Twist to Comoros Legend

By Matthew Green Fri Apr 29, 8:26 AM ET

IDGIKOUNDZI, Comoros (Reuters) - Nobody has ever seen
him and lived.

Quite how the ancestors ever verified the existence of
"Red Headband" -- the Indian Ocean's answer to Big
Foot, the Yeti and the Loch Ness monster -- is thus a
mystery.

What is clear is that when a volcano erupted on the
largest island in the Comoros archipelago on April 17,
an old story gained a new twist.

Since time began, an evil spirit which appears as a
giant human wearing his eponymous red headband has
stalked the crater at the summit of Mount Karthala,
sometimes appearing as tall as a house, or even,
deceptively, as a dwarf.

That's only when he's viewed from very far away.

"When people leave the village and they don't come
back, we suspect they have seen Red Headband," said
Ibrahim Ali, 60, a farmer from the mountain village of
Idgikoundzi, where night fell early and rain turned
black during the eruption.

"Some people say they have seen him, and he looks like
a giant," he said, sitting with other elders in the
cotton robes common in the Comoros, introduced to
Islam by Arab traders seeking ylang ylang and vanilla
in centuries past.

Few in the village of corrugated iron huts, bleating
goats and pecking chickens -- including those telling
the story -- give much credence to the legend
nowadays, but they do remember the tale of the
spirit's most famous victims.

"A very long time ago, seven hunters went looking for
deer near the summit," said Ali. "Only their skeletons
were found. Local people covered them over with
rocks."

Poison gas seeping from the bowels of Karthala killed
17 people a century ago, and many fear a repeat
performance today by a volcano that dominates the
Grande Comore island off east Africa and has erupted
periodically in past decades.

The ancestors, however, would not accept such a
pedestrian explanation for the deaths of their
brothers on a summit that overshadows the capital
Moroni and whose ash nourishes the tropical spices
flowering on its flanks.

"If they died up in that place, they must have been
killed by Red Headband," said Ali, perched on a ledge
of rock with a view up to the cloud-ringed summit, and
over crusted rivers of ancient lava tumbling into the
sea below.

Such lore is as common as the volcanoes spat out in
the geological convulsions that tore the north-south
crack in Africa known as the Great Rift Valley more
than 30 million years ago, but perhaps only Comoros
can boast of adding a footnote to its story that is
still in living memory.

SPIRITS IN CONGO, GOD IN TANZANIA

While every eruption takes just a nanosecond in
geological time, the slow-motion groans and shivers of
tectonic plates rarely give humans a chance to
embellish tribal culture that takes generations to
refine.

Elders in eastern
Democratic Republic of Congo blamed an eruption in
January 2002 that razed much of the city of Goma with
lava on malignant ancestral spirits living in the
Nyiragongo volcano, saying they sometimes floated over
the peak in the form of white figures.

That explanation was just a rehash of old fireside
tales and traditional African ancestor worship, even
if they attributed the latest bout of ghostly wrath to
years of civil war then raging in the former Zaire.

The red-cloaked Masai of Kenya and Tanzania, who tend
cattle wandering between volcanoes steaming on the
Rift Valley floor, also have little new to add to
their myths.

Masai legend has it that the Ngong hills outside the
capital Nairobi were created when a giant wandering
across the plains tripped, gouging the knuckle-shaped
range out of the ground with his fist as he broke his
fall. That was many generations ago indeed, and the
mountains are unchanged.

The still active Ol Doinyo Lengai volcano in the north
of neighboring Tanzania is venerated by Masai as the
home of God, and always has been. There's nothing new
there.

Unlike other countries with geographies shaped by the
white hot crush of rock and magma, Comoros has been
granted the rare chance for a volcano myth update.

The graves of the seven hunters may be no more.

Karthala's first eruption for a decade not only forced
10,000 people to flee, but may also have destroyed the
warriors' resting place as chunks of the crater walls
collapsed into a caldron of lava, providing a
cataclysmic epilogue for their deaths so many
centuries ago.

"We're wondering whether they may have been entombed
by the last eruption," Ali said. Unsmiling, the other
elders just nodded.


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Sinion Kabe
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Interesting.

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