When two witches fight, the village dies of poverty

A couple of years back, a guy popped out of the blue in Western Kenya claiming to be a ghost buster and some clown in government uniform gave him a permit to run from village to village arresting ‘witches’.

How someone who is not a witch could catch a witch remains a mystery. Now in my village, witchcraft is a perfect scapegoat, an explanation for everything that goes wrong.

Someone doesn’t bother to smear cow dung on the floor of his hut for years and when jiggers come calling, he turns around and claims he has been bewitched by a jealous neighbour.

Another harvests his cane and boozes the loot with barmaids in one week then he creeps home with this wretched expression on his face claiming a jealous neighbour fixed him.

ghost buster

Another knows pretty well that his lineage is a coloured by a kumbafu gene. But he doesn’t bother to do genetic engineering by eloping with a primary school teacher’s daughter. When he ends up with dunderheads for children, he whips around and claims the granny across the ridge bewitched him.

In a village such ours, where everyone works around mumbling that he or she is poor, or the kids are daft or his wife’s womb is dry because an equally dirt poor neighbour bewitched him, anyone who purports to arrest witches pro bono is like a miracle preacher.

Predictably, our ghost buster quickly became a celeb of sorts, the subject of many a discussion in changa’a dens and tea kiosks. He probably amassed a harem as well (call it fringe benefits) and got nice mention in the media.

Of course you don’t have to be the holder of a Bachelor of Commerce degree to figure out that this pro bono ghost busting was earning our man free advertising and attracting clients who needed to bewitch a pesky neighbour or get ‘unbewitched’.

And then our ghost buster vanished, as quickly as he appeared. Rumour that he could have retired didn’t make sense because the fellow wasn’t even 40.

So last week, when I am pretending to be an elder by dozing outside my hut from a stool borrowed from my father’s house, who pops in?

A school mate from my primary school days that I haven’t seen in decades.

dwindling fortunes

After a bit of this and that, discussions naturally veer to the trending village topic, witchcraft, and to the celebrated ghost buster. “What happened to him?” I ask.

My old mate clears his throat as a junior elder is wont to do: “He died. He went to arrest a witch somewhere in Luo land but that witch told him to go to hell. The two challenged each over whose ‘medicine’ was more lethal and pointed juju rungus at each other. They both died shortly after...”

Now, technocrats in government might link the increasing rate of petty theft in Mumias to the dwindling fortunes of Mumias Sugar Company and collapse of the local economy.

But what they would never know is that the petty thieves were merely bewitched to be thieves, or that the rascals never went to school because their parents, instead of educating them, wasted cash from cane harvests bewitching the neighbour’s kids.