Ugandan witchdoctors’ obsession with snakes

Chances are, snakes don’t rank anywhere on the list of animals you want to stumble upon in your house. Ordinarily, we subject them to mob justice, even without provocation. However, witchdoctors in Uganda seem to have an unrivaled obsession with the serpent.

Those who have consulted witchdoctors always report incidents involving snakes. Forget razor wire, fierce dogs or even security guards, allegedly, snakes provide the best security. Ever since witchdoctors discovered this, besides using them for ritualistic purposes, they have made snakes their best friends.

Most witchdoctors walk around with snakes as security in their bags. You can’t, for instance, pickpocket a witchdoctor and get away with it. Just the other day we had an off-the-wall incident in which passengers aboard a matatu had to run for dear life after a snake slithered out of a granny’s handbag.

Nobody boarded the public service vehicle, leaving the embarrassed granny, suspected to be a witchdoctor, seated by herself in the vehicle. She had to walk away and look for an alternative means of transport.

Most of us suffer from ophidiophobia— the fear of snakes. This is partly courtesy of religion; remember when Eve was misled by a snake, costing us what would have been a blissful life of bumming around, eating, sleeping and frolicking.

The behaviour of snakes has also compounded this fear as we imagine all snakes are a one-way ticket to a painful death by poisoning.

Scamper for safety

Recently, Jajja Misota, a traditional healer, was enjoying a soft drink outside a kiosk in Kampala. As he was perusing a newspaper, two crooks tiptoed behind him and stole his briefcase and took off. Once they were out of sight, they stopped and opened it to share the ‘loot’. But much to their shock, there was a big snake in it.

The shocked crooks did not scream or jump back and run away as most of us would do. Instead, they walked back to the kiosk in a trance and explained their ordeal to the shopkeeper. The shopkeeper told them they were lucky to have returned the briefcase because Misota was a traditional healer. Had they not done so, he had threatened to bewitched them.

In yet another bizarre snake-related incident, not long ago, a student went to a police station in Kasese municipality to report a witchdoctor who had conned him of Sh25,000. He had gone to his shrine in a bid to double his pocket money. When he returned with cops, hoping that they would intimidate the witchdoctor into giving back the money, he was in for rude shock.

The witchdoctor tossed two big snakes in their direction, causing the scared policemen to scamper for safety. The police had to literally plead with the witchdoctor to give the student his money.

In an interesting turn of events, when Uganda Wildlife Service heard about the story, they didn’t take it lightly. They came with heavy security and dispossessed the snake from the witchdoctor, and then arrested him for possession of a protected wild animal.