The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief

  This would have been a small but valuable part of the witchdoctor’s business. People in Uganda believed in the magical value of herbs; men liked to have herbs in their wallets, to protect the money they had and to attract more.

  So, from having to plead with me, Luke and his friend now had to plead with the witchdoctor. They had told me, “He is not an ordinary witchdoctor. He is modern. That is why we brought you. It will be good for you to see him.” I didn’t know what they were telling the witchdoctor; there was a torrent of words between them. I suspected they were tempting him with the promise of a good fee.

  In a room like a garage at the side of the house a woman could be seen through the big open door washing down the concrete floor, soaking a rag in a bucket and dragging the rag over the floor. She was taking her time over this, washing the same piece of floor again and again; it seemed she was more interested in what was being said in the yard by the men. She was standing in the remarkable African way, bent at the waist, legs straight; a naked baby was crawling about behind her.

  Luke and his friend came back to the car and said it was all settled. The witchdoctor would see us. But he had to purify himself before he went into the shrine section of his yard. This was a connected but separate fenced plot next door to the house. We should go there, taking off our shoes beforehand, and wait for him. We left the main yard, went out into the street, and then almost immediately turned into the shrine area, which had its own entrance. Ismail, our hotel car driver, was by now sufficiently interested and awed to lay aside his Muslim anxieties about the occasion. He took off his shoes with the rest of us, and said that if the witchdoctor didn’t purify himself before he came to us the spirit who guided him would become very angry. The witchdoctor himself had said that.

  I felt the witchdoctor’s bill was growing by the minute.

  There were about five small huts in different parts of the shrine yard. The huts were modern, with concrete walls; they were too small, I thought, for anyone to live in; and they were connected—as though for a game—by a raised walk in red concrete about a yard wide and six inches high. But perhaps this red concrete walk was only another modern touch: no visitor need walk either in dry-season dust or rainy-season mud.

  To one side of the entrance, where we were, there was something like a little office, with a few books, a telephone, a small steel safe. A framed green-printed certificate on the wall was the witchdoctor’s official licence; it was like the certificate issued in other countries to professional people like accountants and pharmacists. Everything here was modern and correct; no believer need feel ashamed.

  Below a mirror was a small wash basin with a thin wafer of used soap. A proper painted black-and-white sign pointed, with arrows, to where the toilets were. They were next door, in the yard of the main house, and they could be reached through a gate in the middle of the fence. It wouldn’t have done for toilets to be in the shrine area.

  While we were considering all these things, and arriving at some (not all) of the subtleties, an assistant or servant of the witchdoctor came in through another side gate, and began to open up the padlocked huts. In one hut he managed to get a wood fire going. Perhaps it was a fire of welcome, done expressly for our sake; or it might have been a more general purifying fire, a commissioning of the shrine area.

  Whatever the fees, I now had to stay. After all that had been done for me I couldn’t say I wanted to go back to the hotel. Even Ismail the driver, Muslim though he was, would have turned against me.

  The witchdoctor himself now appeared. He had replaced his red jogging shorts with a pair of long trousers, and was wearing a sports shirt. His purification had given him a freshness and formality which he didn’t have before. He had lost his sourness and looked ready for business.

  He went and sat on the floor in one of the huts at the far end of the yard. The open door framed him. It was now as though we were really clients and he was receiving us, sitting behind a spear head, the spear head being one of the Baganda emblems.

  Luke’s friend said that each hut had a different purpose. In one the witchdoctor would receive the client and assess his needs. Another was a kind of pharmacy; the medicines here, compounded by the witchdoctor, were in small jars; they were doled out to the client according to advice from the spirits. The witchdoctor had to hold himself ready at all times for communication from the spirits. It was how he healed. It was the great difference between him and ordinary people. It explained his success.

  We went to look at the witchdoctor in the hut where he was sitting in his mystic posture below a portrait of the Kabaka. The hut, concrete and modern on the outside, was traditional and African inside, completely hung with lengths of bark-cloth, stitched together in the way bark-cloth had to be stitched, and concealing the foreign material of the roof. A spiritual or magical quality attached to bark-cloth, which was the special material of the ancestors, as was shown in the tomb of the Kabakas at Kasubi, where it hung from dome to floor and concealed the “forest” where the spirits of the Kabaka resided after death.

  Everything in that great tomb had to be made of local materials, and the witchdoctor knew that in his shrine area (and perhaps also in his house) he was going against tradition. He had a reason for that. The world had changed since Kasubi. He had now to compete with the Christian church and the Muslim mosque. He had to build in modern materials; he wanted people who came to his shrine to feel good.

  The witchdoctor came out of the hut. He went to where, not far away, there was an open fireplace with much grey wood-ash and a length of partly burnt wood still in place. He said that was where he sat sometimes, in the living fire. He was moved to do so by the spirits; and when the spirits were on him he didn’t feel the fire. Inspired words came to him from above or below, from the earth.

  Ismail, snapping back into his Muslim faith, said to me in English, in an undertone, “I would like to see him do that.”

  Luke and his friend didn’t hear. They were completely taken up with the witchdoctor, who was explaining the uses of the various huts. When this was done the witchdoctor called to his assistant, and the assistant, like a man well trained, went to the house and brought a thick square album of colour photographs. The photographs were of people who had visited the shrine here. The witchdoctor turned the thick pages of the album one by one, and Luke and his friend and even Ismail fell silent, because we were looking at photographs of famous local people who had come here as suppliants.

  Then the question of money came up. Luke said in his dangerous way that it was up to me. I gave 20,000 shillings, just under seven pounds, fourteen dollars. I gave that because I had not put any questions to the witchdoctor. To my amazement the money was accepted without trouble, and I was sorry that worry about the man’s fees had slightly spoilt the occasion.

  The trouble came later, when I had to settle with Luke. I offered him a hundred dollars—this was on the telephone—and he appeared to agree. But later that evening he telephoned and wanted to know whether he had heard correctly: had I offered a hundred pounds? I had been thinking that a hundred dollars was really too little. So I said yes, I had offered him a hundred pounds. But when he came to get his money in the morning he made it clear that in his mind the bargaining was far from over. He went over the little we had done together and said that a fair price would be two hundred pounds. This was his way, doubling an agreed figure, not moving up in smaller increments. I began to know the exasperation and blackmail Speke had to suffer with one chief after another a hundred and fifty years before over the hongo, the entry tax that had to be paid a chief for being in his territory, before the “drum of satisfaction” could be beaten, which told people not to trouble the visitor.

  In the end Luke so tied me up in dollars and pounds, always mixing the currencies, that I believe I gave him a hongo of 150 pounds, far too much.

  9

  EVERY WEEK there were two or three items in the newspaper from various parts of the country about witchcraft.

&nbsp
; In one village people were reported to believe that malaria, a great killer in Uganda, was caused by witchcraft and mangoes. They had good reason for linking mangoes to the illness. Mangoes were plentiful in the rainy season; that was also when mosquitoes bred, seeking out even small accumulations of stagnant water. To others witchcraft seemed a more natural explanation. One villager said, “Malaria is caused by witchcraft or bad spirits. When I got malaria, I found out that my neighbour was responsible for it. And when he was sent away from the village, I got cured.” One procedure—a visit to the witchdoctor—would have been responsible for finding out about the neighbour; another, more violent, procedure, probably involving the village, would have been necessary to send him away.

  When it came to witchcraft, violence was never far away. In Easter week, in a village in the south-west, four brothers strangled their forty-two-year-old aunt. They removed her jaw and her tongue, no doubt for some private magical purpose, and then dumped the body in a nearby banana field. Not long after, dogs began to gather in the banana field. The village people became suspicious. They went to look, and found the dogs feeding on the dead woman’s body, which was lying in a pool of blood. The dead woman was well known. Suspicion at once fell on the four brothers, who were believed to practise witchcraft. About twenty of the village men went to look for them. When they found them they began to beat them with sticks and anything else that came to hand.

  Two of the brothers got away and went to the police. The other two brothers were killed and buried in a latrine. Four goats, five hens and two pigs belonging to the brothers were slaughtered; this was what happened to animals belonging to people who were thought to be bad. The police, when they came, arrested fifteen people. They recovered the two bodies from the latrine and took them away for a post-mortem: a strange legalistic note in this story of country wildness.

  Sometimes, of course, it goes the other way: witchcraft in a setting where it doesn’t fit. The story begins peacefully enough, in a village, with animals looking for pasture. A cow enters a secondary schoolyard, sees a shirt put out to dry, and begins to eat it. The student, whose shirt it is, chases the cow in the hope of getting his shirt back. He hits the cow with a stick. A few days later the student’s leg—not the cow’s—begins to swell, and he becomes paralysed. The students at the school recognise magic and witchcraft when they see it. They deal with it in the only way they know. They attack the village in a body, burn eight houses, and they try to lynch the cow-owner, an old man of seventy, whom they accuse of bewitching the paralysed student. In their rampage through the village they kill a dog, six cows, fourteen goats, three sheep and eleven chickens; they also destroy four pit-latrines, and the banana and coffee plantations of eight villagers. Three of the villagers, armed with spears and pangas, later hide in the school, to counter-attack; there—somewhat unfairly—they are arrested by the police; and the affair fizzles out.

  Witchcraft is not a joke to these people. They cannot laugh at what they fear. The students at a senior secondary school in a major town, a boarding school, become very agitated when they see one morning, in the school compound, a fresh goat’s head and a whole goat’s skin. They see these as witchcraft fetishes. They blame the headmaster; already, they say, the food at the school is not good; and that morning when the boarders got up they found some school windows broken and the school generally in a mess. This is a clear “sign” of magic afoot. The students feel they are being threatened in an unpleasant diabolical way, and (speaking now in a code which they expect to be understood) they say some “big people” are behind it all. Later they parade through the town, sturdy young men in their school uniform, dark trousers, white shirt, and they declare a strike. The police, when they come, are conciliatory; they understand their country.

  To live in a world ruled by witchcraft, a world liable to irrational dissolution in its details, is to be on edge, to be on a constant lookout. Add to this the eternal anxiety about politics, the fear of a land being lost; add the great population of Uganda, the constant feeling of a crowd too great for the land available, the roads, the jobs available.

  The land can look so open and unused (as it did to the early explorers), but you never can tell when you are encroaching on protected wetlands that are now known to filter and cleanse water for Lake Victoria; or when, hunting antelope for food in the Mount Elgon area, a traditional hunting ground of your people, you are trespassing on land protected by the Uganda Wildlife Authority, whose guards carry guns and shoot to kill, and where, as they say, poaching is “like shaking death by the hand in the forest.” There are many regions where as a herdsman you never can tell when you are occupying land reserved for cultivators, or sometimes driving your cattle over the border to Tanzania, where they are not wanted. In Kayunga you cut down trees, with others, to burn charcoal; and then, because there is now no forest cover, the hailstorms destroy houses and fields and animals, and people quite suddenly have nowhere to sleep and nothing to eat. It is so easy to make matters worse.

  That feeling of being on edge can easily turn to a feeling of being torn, can turn to pain. It is of this pain, of people driven to extremity, of a world now beyond control, that many of the items in the newspaper speak every day.

  Man burns 10 to death in hut: this is an item from the north, from an internally displaced persons camp. The name of the camp suggests the tensions. Within that, a family quarrel: a man settling accounts with his estranged wife. It was a grass-thatched hut; after it had been sprinkled with petrol it would have burnt fiercely. Seven of the ten people killed were children; some of them belonged to other families; shortage of space had caused them to be brought to this particular hut. A photograph showed the little charred bodies in the burnt-out hut, lying together, for that little bit of last-minute comfort, and lying face down, instinctively protecting their faces.

  My husband was hacked to death as I watched: this is an item from the same issue. It was a second marriage for both parties. The husband had fifteen children from his first marriage, six from his second. They were returning home from a trading centre when they were attacked by a man with a panga coming out of a banana plantation. The attacker, while he hacked and chopped, accused the husband of being a polygamist. So—in addition to possible resentment from the husband’s first family—there was some Christian feeling here. After the husband was killed, the attacker turned to the woman. He chopped off one of her hands and would have done more, but he ran off when a boda-boda cyclist with a bright cycle light appeared. The woman was taken to hospital and there her other hand was amputated. Without hands, she has to be fed by other people. She told the newspaper, “I do not know where I am headed with these children, and now that they are going back to school, who will feed me?”

  Accused of burying her son alive: again, this is from the same issue of the newspaper. A thirty-three-year-old casual labourer, a woman, working at a flower farm (of all places), is accused of burying her eighteen-month-old son in a potato garden. The child had been wrapped in a sack and his legs had been tied. The photograph of the mother shows a woman undone and helpless. A neighbour tells the paper that people so desperate should be allowed to take their unwanted children to any police station. And in the description of the buried baby—the sack, the tied legs—there is a strange echo of the witchdoctor’s advice to a seeker to make an offering of something very dear to the seeker. As though the poor woman had heard of this advice and was trying to do it all by herself.

  So much for the pain of the poor. But for better-off people, even people of a royal clan, there is an equivalent kind of distress.

  “We had independence and we lost it. We have never recovered from the years of destruction that followed independence. Twenty years of it till 1984. Traditions are fading away by default. Are you going to Mbarara? You should go there and see the destruction with your own eyes. See the deserted palace with weeds growing there because of the politics. Once you remove cultural restraints you have chaos and anarchy. People put under this wi
ll do anything to survive.” This was like the point Prince Kassim had made. “They will do anything and at the same time they want the technological advances of the world. The race for these technological luxuries has replaced culture. Our religion was not savage. It was based on the veneration of the ancestors. If your father dies you venerate him. You give a libation to the ancestors before you drink. The destruction of traditions and the lack of cultural restraint, especially for people who have been brought together by a colonial power and told to form a nation, could only bring disaster.”

  And from someone in the middle, an educated woman, not poor, not of a royal clan, and from quite a different part of the country, someone overtly Christian but with a love for her roots: “Modernity wants us to sweep our culture away, and that will manifest itself in a political upheaval. A conflict between Christianity and traditional religion. In the Lango tradition when there was a drought, or it was prolonged, all the elders got together and made sacrifices, and it would rain while they were there at it. My grandmother told me this. But the missionaries called it devil worship. Culture does not die—today it is called witchcraft. My grandmother produced twins who died. They had to be buried in a special way, in hollow pots, and a shed had to be built over the grave, to protect and shade them. Every year my grandmother went there, to tend the shed, feed the grave, and sing and dance there. When she became a Pentecostal she had to stop that, as it was not allowed. She had to remove the shed, and she was so afraid that the twins would come and kill her living children. I talk to myself so as not to get confused. To me it’s all about belief and what treats you well. In traditional religion it was not about money. It was a communal spirit and people came together for a common cause like the drought.”

  And gradually, from the tragedies the newspapers report, and from conversations with good people, the visitor arrives at the unsettling idea of a poor country still vulnerable—in its people, living on their nerves, and even in its landscape, which might be despoiled—after forty years of civil conflict, still waiting for an upheaval which may solve nothing.