Stranger than fiction: Here and there at the same time

Security companies are spending millions of dollars on personnel employment, system upgrades and armoured trucks.

However, all this would be unnecessary if industry executives could harness the purported “magical” tricks of a security guard who used to work at a farm on the outskirts of Harare way back in the 1980s.

Known as Magaisa, the security guard was believed to possess magical powers that enabled him to be simultaneously in two or more places.

Though he has since returned to Zambia, his country of origin, most villagers in Mt Hampden, Nyabira and Stapleford still recall his antics.

It is said Magaisa normally spent most of his time imbibing illicit brews in the farm compound.

Thieves who operated in the area were always shocked as they would find him at his station after leaving him at the compound.

How Magaisa did this still remains a mystery.

In another account, it is said that Magaisa was seen in two different parts of the field when thieves tried to steal maize at the farm.

To this day, the farm is known as “PaMashonga” on account of these mysterious occurrences.

“Mashonga” is the corrupted version of the Shona word mushonga (black magic).

Mr Joseph Kumimba — who has been at the farm since the late 1970s —confirmed Magaisa’s tricks, “There was a man who most people here believed had ‘magical’ powers. On one occasion, I overheard some thieves devising ways to outsmart him. Such thieves, however, always left the farm empty-handed as he would outsmart them.”

Mr Brighton Nota worked at the farm in the late 1980s and also knew Magaisa.

“He was from Zambia and settled here. When he retired, he packed his belongings and left for Zambia. Fortunately or unfortunately, he went away with his secrets,” Mr Nota said.

The farm manager, Mr Craig Davenport, grew up on the farm, but could not remember the “super” security guard.

“I was very young at the time. As for the Mashonga name, you will have to ask the local community. They are the ones who are behind that name,” he said.

Online sources say it is possible for a person to appear in two places at the same.

The practice, according to the sources, is called bi-location or multi-location, and is described as “psychic or miraculous ability wherein an individual or object is located (or appears to be located) in two distinct places at the same time”.

The concept has been used in a wide range of historical and philosophical systems, ranging from early Greek philosophy to occultism and magic.

Physicist Albert Einstein was the first to announce that a person or objects can be in two places at the same time.

In 2010, United Kingdom’s The Independent wrote that a device that exists in two different states at the same time had been named as the scientific breakthrough of the year.

The machine, consisting of a sliver of wafer-thin metal, is the first man-made device to be governed by the mysterious quantum forces that operate at the level of atoms and sub-atomic particles.

US physicist David Wineland and France’s Serge Haroche share the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics after discovering that tiny objects such as electrons can be in two places at once and can behave as a particle one moment and as a wave the next, depending on how an observer tries to measure it.

Is it possible for a person to be in different places simultaneously?

Magaisa, wherever he is, definitely has the answer to that unusual question.