the witches' brew

After two weekends of attending SDA church related activities with Bio, I found myself sitting on the couch with Matheba during a freak rainstorm in June, listening to her talk about the strange things that had happened when she first moved to Gaborone. She had been staying at her brother’s place and for the first several nights, would get into bed fully clothed and would wake up in the morning totally naked. One of the nights she had woken up to see a “monna o mo khutswane” ( miniature man) leaning over her bed who had then suddenly disappeared. She was so upset by all of this that her boss at the supermarket where she was a teller gave her a few days off.

With the rain hammering on the tin roof and Matheba speaking in Setswana, I was still pretty confused about the story. What she describing some sort of rape? Or just a dream? She continued on and then things became clearer. After a few days of these goings-on her mother came from the village and she along with the brother took Matheba to the ngaka ya Setswana—the traditional doctor. After paying a hefty fee, he in turn mixed up a concoction that was of course to get rid of the witch that had been plaguing Matheba. Where did this witch come from, I asked? From her relatives, she said. They were jealous that she was off in Gaborone, living in the big city, making a decent income at the supermarket, and so they had used witchcraft to send this little man to her and to have these strange things happen like her clothes coming off and her looking into the mirror and having a completely white face (please see the irony in this last part). I couldn’t quite figure out whether the “moloi” (witch) was the disgruntled relative who had sent these spells or if the witch was the mini-man himself, but the point was she really and truly believed in the stories she was describing. She then went on, prefacing with a laughing “Clare, you really just don’t know” (in Setswana), to describe all the strange things that have happened in Moshupa, her home village where I stayed two years back. Meeting strange sepoko (ghosts) in the road, one who was very very tall like a person on stilts, another with the top half of its body separate from the bottom half (apparently Janet had encountered that one). I spent most of the time while she was talking just nodding, but I couldn’t help put in a small interjection. What about the fact that her whole family, including herself, were Christian (Seventh Day Adventist to be precise)? I didn’t want to be rude, I added, but how did that work—believing in witches and spells and also the Christian faith? To me it was all the same, whether you believe in half-bodied witches grabbing cell phones or men who can walk on water, but I was pretty sure her church did not approve of these beliefs, no? I guess I got the answer I was expecting, as she rolled her eyes and said something along the lines of, oh please, you think all those church goers don’t also go to see the traditional doctors to protect themselves from jealous cousins and the like?

This evening conversation, which took place a couple of weeks ago, was the first time anyone had candidly talked to me about witchcraft. I knew it had a presence in Botswana, but I also knew that it was not something that people talked to casual visitors about, especially white university students from the States. I guess Matheba and I had spent enough time together just the two of us hanging out at the house with Junior, watching T.V. and chit-chatting, that it finally came up. It was still sort of surreal though—there is a difference between knowing that a society, or a culture, believes in something you find outlandish, and then hearing your good friend talk with such credulity about it.

About a week later, I bought a book called “The Screaming of the Innocent”, by Unity Dow, one of Botswana’s few internationally known novelists. She was the first female judge on Botswana’s High Court and is quite a high profile lady here. I’d heard her name mentioned at the conference “Mapping Africa in the English Speaking World” that I’d attended at University of Botswana, and her works contrasted with those of Alexander McCall Smith. So I was curious what her stories would hold.

“The Screaming of the Innocent” was timely reading after my talk with Matheba. It was a “cold case” story of sorts—about a strong-willed female health worker in a small village who accidentally unearths some evidence regarding the murder of a young girl, suspected to have been killed for ritual purposes. The novel is well-written, riveting, and at the end, quite disturbing. A penultimate scene that re-lives the girl’s murder, in which several “big men” (meaning prominent men, a businessman, headmaster, and another) pin down the girl and “harvest” certain body parts while she remains alive in order to use them later to make a powerful potion, made me feel sick. Not exactly Mma Ramotswe drinking bush tea and reveling in her traditionally built body. But the book felt much more true to Botswana, despite highlighting some of the darker sides to life here. The character descriptions, their interactions, the depictions of both village life and life for a city professional (the lawyer who comes to help out)—all of it manages to both tell an intriguing story and reveal a bit of Botswana from the perspective of a person born and raised here. Not that the “insider” perspective is necessarily more “true” to reality than a Scotsman’s, but I do think that for anyone captivated by Botswana after reading The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, Unity Dow’s books would be an interesting and thought-provoking read too.