Dolos: Isinyama

Take me to Mystic places all over the world where the spirits might dwell.

This dolos started off with his brother  Ngikufisela Inhlanhla to see what luck would bring them.

ISINYAMA is the isiZulu name for Bad Luck or Misfortune. It describes the opposite of anything positive.  

A dolos is a knuckle bone from the hind leg of an animal such as deer, buck, sheep and cattle.

The word “dolos” is guessed to be derived from “dollen os” (where “dollen”  is Dutch for plaything [doll] and “os” is Afrikaans for oxen). Voortrekker children and many thereafter played with the dolos as oxen and the jawbone of the sheep as the wagon. My own (dolosG)  father (born 1915) played as a child with these dolos oxen and had a dolos on his keychain as long as he could remember. (I still have his dolos on my own car keys till this day—70 + years old).

In the present southern  Africa, the dolos is also still used in divination practices by sangomas of various tribes to foretell the future. The dolos is supposidly a bringer of luck, or when carried/worn , a lucky charm.

For some the dolos is very real and an integral part of life; pointing towards the positive and guarding against the negative (evil).

Others  just avoid the bone because of “bad luck”.

Other references to “dolos” include: A town in Italy, Concrete Coastal Wave Breaking structures used worldwide and designed in South Africa, a RAP group/band, the Greek god of deceipt, a pizza and a business in the USA.

In our instance it is our caching name --  and a bone we keep on our keychains....

dolos