Burning issue: More than 70 people have been killed in the Northern Transvaal owing to witchcraft since April 1994 … The malevolent tokoloshe and the snake that drinks blood. Amid flashes of lightning and under a new moon, Eddie Koch, Edwin Ritchken and Vusi Khoza, investigate a strange case of sorcery in the Eastern Transvaal
WE are driving through the village of Shatale in the Eastern Transvaal an hour after dark. Thunder clouds swirl around the new moon. The roads are drenched in a sheet of rain. Flashes of lightning strike the Drakensberg mountains in the background. It’s a fine night to explore the mystic and malevolent forces that are plaguing this neighbourhood.
Kris Mokoena, chairman of the Shatale civic association, has already told us of the village’s mysterious happenings. “This is an unusual case of witchcraft and it’s taking up a lot of our time,” he says as the car pulls up outside a dilapidated home. We have arrived to interview a person described by various residents as being either a witch or a hapless victim of sorcery. Either way he is a lucky man.
The owner of the house is 60 years old and clearly disturbed. He stands and sits, wipes imaginary beads of sweat from his brow, and twitches persistently. “Yes,” he admits. “The Zion Christian Church (ZCC) says I have a tokoloshe in me … I am not aware of raping these women. I receive no pleasure from it … I have visited five inyangas in the past for health reasons and I think one of them gave me the tokoloshe that is doing these things.”
Four women who live in this part of the village have explained in detail to members of the civic association, and now to us, how each of their lives has become a nightmare at the hands of this malignant creature.
A summarised version, which has some variations in the individual accounts, goes like this: the tokoloshe comes almost every night, usually after 10, announced by the sound of a stone hitting the corrugated iron roof. It appears instantly, as if it walked through the walls, and takes on the physical form of the man. The women’s husbands are either asleep or are thrown to the ground and made immobile.
Its victims fall into a dream state and are unable to resist a force that pins them to the bed. After intercourse, the creature disappears as instantly as it arrived. Sometimes, in the morning, their genitals are swollen, their legs are covered in semen and they experience a sharp pain in their lower backs. This has been going on for the past five or six years.
The executive of the Shatale civic association does not normally intervene in witchcraft accusations. It encourages the parties to resolve these in a private way and, sometimes, calls in the help of local street committees. The organisation’s members know from bitter experience that, when cases of sorcery become a cause for public hysteria, they can invoke violent and traumatic forms of retribution. “And if we involve ourselves in every accusation, we would have to be employed full-time,” says Mokoena.
But this is an unusual case. There is consensus between the parties involved that can be put to good use. “This man may be a witch but he is also a victim of witchcraft. The women have, in turn, become his victims. But he is willing to be helped and together we can do this,” is the message put out by Mokoena and his colleagues.
So the civic association has brokered an agreement between the parties whereby the local branch of the ZCC will, in a few weeks time, conduct a cleansing ceremony to exorcise the spirit from the body of the man and chase it from the township. Why not have the man jailed? “Because the tokoloshe would simply escape and come back in another form,” says Mokoena.
The civic has called in a psychiatrist from the hospital at nearby Acornhoek to check if the man is schizophrenic or suffers from some other mental illness. But, for the time being, its members believe that theirs is the best, the “progressive” way, to deal with a genuine case of black magic. In other places things happen differently.
Last weekend, national television news showed footage of a family scraping the ashes of a woman into hessian sacks so that they could bury her remains. She had been accused by the residents of a village near Pietersburg of being a witch and she was burned alive. During that week, four other women from nearby Kromhoek were killed by a mob of youths after being blamed for the mysterious death of a local teenager.
More than 70 people have died like this in the Northern Transvaal since April last year. One of them was Sinna Mankwane from a village called Nobody. A tyre doused in petrol was put around her neck and her husband was forced to light the match. Later the mob captured her 21-year-old pregnant daughter, drove a wooden stake through her vagina and womb, and then burned her.
Last year a development programme in Hluvukani, a settlement for Mozambican war refugees near the Kruger National Park, was stalled by allegations of sorcery. A member of the committee elected to oversee a water supply scheme in the settlement fell ill and was paralysed. The chairman was promptly accused of owning a mamlambo — a snake that lived under his home and, at night, turned into a white woman that had sex with him.
Residents said the mamlambo gave him luck and watered his fields with nutrients that could not evaporate in the harsh Lowveld sun. That is why his fields flowered and he became wealthy while others grew steadily poorer. Only the chairman had to feed the snake — with human blood and the misfortune of others. He was blamed for his colleague’s stroke and hounded out of the settlement. The development programme collapsed.
There is little doubt that politics, labour relations, civic matters, development projects and the course of everyday life for people in these rural areas are being shaped by the cosmology of witchcraft — and political organisations are struggling to find innovative ways of dealing with its recent manifestations.
The common explanation provided by anthropologists is that witch burnings are a “strain gauge”, an expression of collective anxiety caused by the kinds of changes that have pulsed through these communities since the April elections last year. New sources of wealth, the opening up of new business opportunities or the promotion of a few individuals into positions of privilege — at a time when most other people remain impoverished — activate jealousy and bitterness that moves the instruments of sorcery.
The problem with this explanation is that, like its metaphor, it is mechanical. Why do disgruntled people not express themselves in other (and to some of us more familiar) ways such as strikes, political protests or crime?
The answer lies in a system of beliefs at the heart of African culture in these areas. This is a world view that describes an intricate connection, rather than a separation, between the supernatural and the natural. In this scheme of things, spiritual powers can be used to maintain a harmonious relationship between the ancestors and the living — or they can be abused for personal gain at the expense of others.
“People here want to get rich quickly. Maybe a man has to compete with another businessman. So he consults a witch. He uses that power to kill people and turn them into zombies so they can work as his labourers. If he is popular, people will accept him. If he behaves strangely, or if he is unpopular, the thing will blow up,” says Risimathi Mathonsi, a writer who lives in the Northern Transvaal.
When this happens, sorcery is used to explain every misfortune that has come to pass. “Somebody reports that ‘Hey this person is bewitching us here.’ He mobilises the whole community, then they all say: ‘Yes that is why we haven’t seen rain for a long time. That’s why the cattle are dying. There are too many witches here. Let’s get rid of them,'” explains another civic leader from Shatale (who asked to remain anonymous).
“The problem is that most people use it for personal gain. Once they get the mob involved, it is easy to victimise somebody who is their opponent. It is easy to find a sangoma who will support you because they get a lot of money for this … If you want to be popular in this area, then make a witchcraft accusation. That is what we are trying to discourage.”
In the old days, chiefs had strict rules for regulating witchcraft accusations. The aggrieved parties would have to lodge a deposit — usually a few head of cattle — with their chief before asking an inyanga to prove that someone was a witch. If their claim was false, they forfeited the cattle. The system prevented the abuse of witchcraft accusation for ulterior motives.
But a law called the Anti-Witchcraft Act has been in force since the early 1900s and it now prevents chiefs from administering these rules. A number of tribal leaders have been arrested and charged for trying to regulate accusations in the old way. The spate of witch hunts since the freedom elections last year thus reflects a new and confident assertion of a popular creed that was suppressed under colonialism and apartheid.
Meanwhile the civic association in Shatale is trying to cope with the resurgence of witchcraft by blending traditional laws with a new system of local government. “It does not help to say these things don’t exist,” says Mokoena. “We all believe in witches and they are there. We cannot just ignore them, because otherwise the people will deal with them in their own way.”