In Uganda, I wrote a questionaire that I had my research assistants give; on it, I asked about the embalasassa, a speckled lizard said to be poisonous and to have been sent by Prime minsister Milton Obote to kill Baganda in the late 1960s. It is not poisonous and was no more common in the 1960s than it had been in previous decades, as Makerere University science professors announced on the radio and stated in print… I wrote the question, What is the difference between basimamoto and embalasassa? Anyone who knows anything about the Bantu language–myself included–would know the answer was contained in the question: humans and reptiles are different living things and belong to different noun classes… A few of my informants corrected my ignorance… but many, many more ignored the translation in my question and moved beyond it to address the history of the constructs of firemen and poisonous lizards without the slightest hesitation. They disregarded language to engage in a discussion of events… My point is not about the truth of the embalasassa story… but rather that the labeling of one thing as ‘true’ and the other as ‘fictive’ or ‘metaphorical’–all the usual polite academic terms for false–may eclipse all the intricate ways in which people use social truths to talk about the past. Moreover, chronological contradictions may foreground the fuzziness of certain ideas and policies, and that fuzziness may be more accurate than any exact historical reconstruction… Whether the story of the poisionous embalasassa was real was hardly the issue; there was a real, harmless lizard and there was a real time when people in and around Kampala feared the embalasassa. They feared it in part because of beliefs about lizards, but mainly what frightened people was their fear of their government and the lengths to which it would go to harm them. The confusions and the misunderstandings show what is important; knowledge about the actual lizard would not. Luise White
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It is true that in Uganda, I wrote a questionaire that I had my research assistants give; on it, I asked about the embalasassa, a speckled lizard said to be poisonous and to have been sent by PM Milton Obote to kill Baganda in the late 1960s. It is not poisonous and was no more common in the 1960s than it had been in previous decades, as Makerere University science professors announced on the radio and stated in print… I wrote the question, “What is the difference between basimamoto and embalasassa?” Anyone who knows anything about the Bantu language was able to answer it without any problems. A few of my informants corrected my ignorance by pointing out that humans and reptiles are different living things and belong to different noun classes. A few of my informants corrected my ignorance by pointing out that humans and reptiles are different living things and belong to different noun classes.

The problem with this correction is that what makes something poisonous or not poisonous is based on its physical qualities. The problem with this correction is that what makes something poisonous or not poisonous is based on its physical qualities. Some animals can be poisonous because they contain poisons in their bodies.

The poison in them will affect other animals if they ingest them. On the other hand, some animals cannot be poisonous because it has nothing to do with its physical qualities like size or shape. There are many examples of this such as snakes, scorpions, lizards and frogs but there are also examples such as termites which can be poisonous but can also be eaten by other animals because they do not contain any poison even though they look quite similar to snakes or scorpions Do you think this idea of humans and reptiles being different living things and belonging to different noun classes was correct? Those who need more information should read the article: Do you think this idea of humans and reptiles being different living things and belonging to different noun classes was correct? Those who need more information should read the article: http://bloggingabouthistory.blogspot.com/2010/07/why-one-lizard-is-not-poisonous-and-two.html

Source: Speaking With Vampires: Rumor And History In Colonial Africa

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