Honey-guides are birds that have intrigued writers about Southern Africa since the eighteenth century. Travel books, popular non-fiction about the land and its history, popular adult fiction and children's fiction frequently introduce an episode featuring the bird, and children's books retell indigenous folktales about it. It is also the subject of children's stories in which white writers tell original stories in the style of African folktales.

The scientific name of the family of honey-guides is Indicatoridae, which comes from the Latin meaning “to make known, betray or show”, and refers to their practice of leading humans, and possibly creatures such as honey badgers and other birds, to rob a beehive so that they can eat the beeswax, honey and grubs thus exposed. According to the standard reference work on South African birds, their ability to do this is a fact, not a myth (Roberts [1940] 1966, 233). Honey-guides are members of the barbet family, but like the cuckoo are parasitic, laying their eggs in other birds’ nests and killing the nestlings of the host. This practice is mentioned only in scientific descriptions and has not captured popular attention; it is its uncanny, human-like behaviour of invoking another creature to assist it in accomplishing what it cannot do on its own that writers fix upon.

From the eighteenth century onwards, writers about South Africa regularly included an account of the honey-guide and their encounters with it. Typically, David Livingstone (1857, 547) wrote in Missionary Travels, “We began to be frequently invited by the honey-guide. … I am quite convinced that the majority of people who commit themselves to its guidance are led to honey.”

Well into the twentieth century, writers on South African wildlife continued in this vein. Victor Pohl, whose articles in the family magazine The Outspan and books on the bushveld appealed to all ages – his books were immensely popular as school readers from the 1930s to the 1970s – devotes several pages of Bushveld Adventures to his experiences with the birds and also extensively quotes Colonel J. Stevenson-Hamilton, first warden of the Kruger National Park, on the subject (Pohl [1940] 1970, 78–82). Books about the bushveld lay at the heart of the culture of English-speaking South Africans in the mid-twentieth century, Stevenson-Hamilton's South African Eden: The Kruger National Park (1937) being a favourite (see Chapter 10).