In the shadow of witchcraft

rituals that have governed our lives for millennia.
Taurai’s soul wandered the bush waiting for kurova guva, the ceremony to join his spirit with that of the ancestors. Even though I have doubts about the existence of witches, it is difficult culturally to dismiss their existence entirely. For good to triumph, there must also be evil.
The kurova guva ceremony was going to take place in the dry season, before November, the month of the goat. We knew that November was the sacred month and no ceremonies could take place. Doing so would anger the chiefs and the ancestors.
After the burial, four elders were scheduled go to the n’anga, the diviner or traditional healer whose role was to call upon magical soothsaying powers and tell us the identity of the witch who killed Taurai.
Last month Taurai got his driver’s licence after driving a kombi illegally for three years. He boasted that he could now drive without tempting the police with bribery money on the road between Hwedza and Harare. Taurai planned to make enough money to buy his own kombi within a year. But that was not to be. Two weeks later, Taurai complained of a severe headache and was admitted to Harare Central Hospital. The doctor said he had meningitis and within a week, Taurai was gone.
There was a time when death was rare in the village. Mostly it was old people who died or those involved in accidents. When severe illness struck, the blame was always laid on witches. Witches had the power to kill or disfigure someone very easily, it was said.
We heard many stories of witches being nailed on the breasts when caught in the act. A woman believed to be a witch could wake up one day to find a stretcher or a dara, made with planks of trees and bark placed on her door step. The presence of a dara meant she had to leave the village immediately or risk being chased away by men wielding sticks.
In the 1940s, Chief Svunurai shot Mai Mamvura in the hip at night when he caught her naked, busy administering witchcraft on his unsuspecting wife. The colonial Native Commissioner came all the way from Salisbury to inquire about the shooting.
The British had stopped the business of persecuting their own witches and burning them at the stake back in the Middle Ages. The Native Commissioner was not going to let that savage and primitive behaviour continue among the Africans of Southern Rhodesia.
Chief Svinurai said the shooting was an accident and had nothing at all to do with witchcraft. Everyone present supported the chief’s story even though they all knew the truth. The Native Commissioner left and the matter was officially closed.
Few weeks later, Mai Mamvura died from the wound. It was a sad death, but people believed Mai Mamvura deserved to die. A witch had to be stopped from causing illnesses and premature deaths among the people.
If a woman died during child birth that was also caused by witchcraft. She might have refused to name a lover responsible for her pregnancy. Unless she confessed that she got pregnant from someone else and not her husband, the baby got stuck in her birth canal and both mother and child died.
If she confessed, the witches were sometimes merciful and they let her live. The real paternity of the father was kept secret forever among the midwives and the witches because the lover had no child, gomba harina mwana. Twenty years ago, a new kind of death arrived in the village when my cousin Patrick died after “a long illness” HIV/AIDS. He was only 25. People said Patrick had been eaten away by witchcraft. There was no knowledge of HIV back then. The following day they went to the local n’anga who said Patrick had been bewitched by Babamukuru Bhurakwacha. The n’anga said Babamukuru secretly kept a gnome-like animal called a chikwambo with magical powers to make people rich.
Chikwambo demanded blood as a reward for giving Babamukuru wealth. Yet Babamukuru was not rich, but dirt poor like the rest. If this chikwambo was indeed as potent as it was purported to be, then it had failed to keep his promise to make Babamukuru rich.
The tension between Babamukuru and Mai Patrick remained for years and only stopped when many more people started dying in the village. Babamukuru lost his son Morgan and the focus on his chikwambo changed. People pointed at a mysterious little bag with an oil calabash and some twigs belonging to Tete Stella’s deceased Malawian husband.
They whispered that the Malawian was a foreigner, a mubvakure whose medicine could only bring bad luck to the village. Tete Stella was forced to throw her dead husband’s clothes and the calabash of oil and twigs into the river.
But the deaths did not stop. In fact there were two or even three deaths in one month. The elders got together and summoned a n’anga from Chipinge, near the border with Mozambique. Chipinge N’angas are renowned to know all the traditional medicines capable of healing, maiming or killing.
The n’anga arrived wearing an old black suit, a leopard skin cap, an eland skin cloak thrown across his shoulders and carried a big bag full of medicines and bones. He moved from house to house, seeking out witchcraft accessories like hyenas, snakes, owls, chikwambos, effigies, gnomes, zvidhoma and poison concoctions in people’s granaries and other secret places.
He then set fire to his findings before anyone could see them because such accessories could only be seen by those with medicinal powers to see, vakarapirwa. Moving from one hut to the other he proceeded to burn twigs that smelt like incense. After a whole week’s cleansing operation, Sabhuku gave the n’anga a cow out of gratitude. Rather than walk all the way to Chipinge with his ox, the n’anga sold it to the butcher in Hwedza.
But still, village cemeteries continued to fill up with the dead. Grandmothers forgot their aches and pains because there were orphans waiting to be looked after. Along the Save river between Hwedza and Dorova, five burial societies were formed by the people to help each other mourn and bury their dead.
If people suspected that it was HIV/AIDS or mukondombera killing people, they did not openly talk about it. Why did the disease take more than one person in one house and not touch some houses at all was never discussed. This scourge must have its roots in a new form of witchcraft practiced only by very clever witches. I accompanied my mother down to the main village compound for Patrick’s funeral. “Who will bury us?” my mother wailed, embracing Patrick’s mother. All the women echoed her cry.
We travelled to the village in a convoy from Harare with Taurai’s body and arrived in the village just before sunset. The Burial society women were already there; busy cooking, sweeping the yard and fetching water. They stopped to embrace Mai Taurai and mourn, calling her by name: “Nhai Mai Taurai, nhai Mai Tau, woviga vangani? How many shall you bury?” They embraced her and wailed.
Inside the kitchen hut, they placed Taurai’s coffin on the bench at the front. His wife sat at the foot of the coffin with their two children while his mother sat at the head surrounded by her close relatives. Big bouquets of flowers from his kombi driver friends were placed on top of the coffin. They sang old burial songs and some from the Anglican, Methodist and Roman Catholic hymn books..
At midnight, the preaching began with the Anglican pastor followed by Apostle Madzibaba Jeremiah who gave an inspiring message about the universality of death. He stood there in his long white gown, tall, shaven head, a beard and carrying a big rod.
To grieve and mourn is the way of creation, masikirwo edu, he said. Not once did he open the Bible but he quoted whole verses from memory word for word. He encouraged us to accept death with hope.
He recited I Thessalonians 4 verse 13 to 14: “Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.”
Madzibaba said: “Do not cry without hope”. Musacheme sevamwe avo, vasina tariro. Then, in a deep voice, he sang a song about crossing the river Jordan and we all rose and sang with him.
His message did not mention witches or the pit of fire where dead sinners went.
At dawn, a lone voice sang to say daylight was near and suddenly there was an outpouring of shared grief. We felt it. Mai Taurai walked out singing but not crying. Nobody followed her. She began to wail holding the back of her head in her hands. She called Taurai to wake up and see the sunrise.
“Kunze mbembembe! Kwaedza mwanangu, chimuka. Jesu ndiye zuva rangu, kunze kwayedza.”
They let her cry. She shed tears to ease the pain of grief and allow her son to travel in peace. The men sitting around the fire outside looked at her, shook their heads and mourned silently. Where does the strength come when a mother buries her third child?
The grief was unbearable. Suddenly, the women from Tsungai Burial society entered the courtyard singing and dancing, playing the drum and shaking rattles. They sang of hope: “Anosimudza marombe kubva muguva – he lifts the poor and down trodden from the grave and takes them to Calvary.” With tears flowing down her cheeks, Mai Taurai joined the women in the dance.
We buried Taurai on the anthill in his mother’s field near the road. This is where he wanted to be buried so he could wave good bye to all the kombi drivers and their passengers. The morning after the burial, we set off for Harare. Babamukuru Bhurakwacha, Mai Patrick, Mai Taurai and two others came along as far as the stop near the n’anga’s house somewhere along the road to Mbire. They were on a mission to find the witch who killed Taurai.
On the passenger seat in front was my friend Beatrice on her way to Harare for her monthly check up and collection of the Anti retroviral drugs, ARV’s. When she was diagnosed with the HIV virus five years ago, she came out and told everyone about her status. It was a brave thing to do. Beatrice is that kind of woman who is not worried or scared about what people think.
As the elders got out of the car, Beatrice told them to stop. She addressed them: “Why do you want to welcome the coming of a n’anga who might call your mother a witch? Sei muchifarira n’anga inobata mai? There are no witches, all you are doing is to look for someone to blame and increase hatred in the community. Go back home and tell people to get tested for HIV, receive treatment and live.” They looked at her, frowned and kept on walking towards the n’anga’s house.
“Our people need education from medical ignorance,” Beatrice said. Witches or no witches, there is no family in Zimbabwe that has remained immune to the effects of the HIV/Aids epidemic. It is the stigma and ignorance of others forcing us to point at people and calling them witches for a crime they did not commit.

l Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic. She holds a PhD in International Relations and is a consultant and director of The Simukai Development Project.