THE DOLPHIN (The Redeemer)

The Zulus call a dolphin an ihlengethwa, which comes from the verb hlenga which means to “redeem”. To ransom or to save, thus the translation for the Zulu word hlengeto is the fish of salvation or the redeemer fish.

The Zulu people believe, as did other nations in other parts of the world, that if a human being fell into the ocean, or was stolen from the seashore by waves and swept far out it seam he could be saved from drowning, or from being mauled by sharks, By school of dolphins which nudged the victim towards the shore. The people also believed that like the whale the dolphin is gifted with speech and great telepathic power. When you are undergoing training as a high sanusi, you are taught to communicate with dolphins.

You are taught the click and the grunts which we are told are the language of the dolphin It is said that Bushmen could communicate with dolphins with amazing accuracy. Bushman medicine men and women had the ability to summon a school do dolphins close to shore from far away in the ocean, simply by uttering a long series of clicks and other sounds to which the dolphins never failed to respond. When I was a young man undergoing training as a sangoma, I met an old Bushmen on the Wild Coast who worked
as a cattleherd for a wealthy Xhosa businessman. This wrinkled old man, who had come to the Wild Coast from the Northern Cape, amazed me and my fellow apprentices by sitting for about two hours near the seashore, telepathically communicating with dolphins in the sea. We watched as dolphins responded to the old man`s silence calling. Among those dolphins was a large one with a scar on its dorsal fin. We noticed how this
particular dolphin, which the old man called Ximba, never failed to appear in response to a call.

Our people believe that on the day we start communicating with dolphins and whales, great doors of knowledge and wisdom will be opened to us because these marine animals, the umkhoma and the ihlengethwa, are custodians of knowledge that we wretched human beings have not even dreams about.