The Smith and the Devil

Why are the same myths associated with blacksmiths all over the world?


By George Monbiot. Published in Country Living magazine, sometime in 1994

From the mountain where God was said to live I travelled south, across the bleached scrub of the El Barta Plains. No rain had fallen in this part of Kenya for four years, and the nomads of the Samburu tribe had fled to the upland pastures on the edges of the district. A jackal crossed the track and turned to watch me pass; otherwise I saw no sign of life. In the middle of this desolate land I came across a group of huts.

At first I thought it must have been deserted. Only the wind moved, through the stick houses and over the empty corral. But a hurried scraping noise made me turn round. A child was crawling out of one of the huts. He straightened up and ran, dodging away through the scrub.

I wandered around the wretched camp, wondering who lived there and why they had chosen the most parched and isolated corner of their land to make their home. Drifting across the mirage lakes of the savannah came a tall, shaven-headed woman in red robes, led by the boy who had fled from me.

I sat with Ntalon in the dust beside her hut and listened to her story. She was, she explained, one of the Nkunono, the abominated blacksmith clan of her tribe. She and her people had to remain apart from the other Samburu, for they were said to be polluted by malevolent powers. They could cause a wound inflicted with iron to fester, or bring about the death of a child circumcised with an iron razor. Anyone of another clan who stepped over an Nkunono’s forge would break his legs. Their isolation and pollution were reinforced by their constraint to commit what the Samburu regard as incest, by marrying only among themselves.

http://www.monbiot.com/1994/01/01/smith-and-the-devil/