Lightning and Fiction: An Engineer Reads Phaswane Mpe's Brooding Clouds

This article presents an interdisciplinary experiment in which electrical engineering meets literary studies. In my work as an engineer and a lightning researcher, I became interested in myths, beliefs and misconceptions regarding lightning in southern Africa, and whether they play any role in people's safety during an electric storm. This took me on a journey that is very foreign to an engineer, namely into the world of oral narratives, folktale collections, archival sources, interview material, fieldwork conversations and media reports, as well as fictional texts. One of the texts that I read, was Phaswane Mpe's collection Brooding Clouds. The article presents my analysis of that text.