Aaron Nicodemus
It was a bright Sunday afternoon when Tsepo Molemohi (11) went to play his favorite game – soccer – on a field between Central Western Jabuvu and White City in his Soweto neighbourhood.
Before he left, he kissed his mother goodbye. Tsepo, with his soft voice and wide smile, always told his mother he loved her before going out.
That was the last time Pinky Molemohi saw her son alive. Tsepo was found brutally murdered several hours later, lying decapitated in an open field. His genitals had been cut off.
The several hundred mourners who joined the Molemohi family this week to bury Tsepo were saddened by his death, and angered by its arbitrary brutality.
“They can take away parts of Tsepo, but they can’t take away his spirit,” said Lolo Matomela, a teacher at Rutengang Primary School, where the boy was in Grade Six.
“We as a community have to join together to fight this. It has to stop.”
Rutengang’s principal noted that Tsepo was the school’s second pupil to die this year, and urged the community to get involved in stopping the violence.
A 17-year-old neighbour has confessed to killing the boy, although he claims he killed him to steal his bag of soccer balls. The evidence indicates that Tsepo’s death was not a simple robbery.
Police, and Tsepo’s parents, believe he was murdered because a child’s body parts are considered valuable muti.
Tsepo’s death is not the first muti-related killing in Soweto this year. Although police officials did not have an exact figure, they confirmed that such mutilations have occurred “several times”.
Muti is magical potions that are supposed to inject users with extraordinary powers. It is a perversion of traditional African healing practices: human body parts – most commonly the brain, genitals and eyes – are ground up and mixed into potions and powders that followers believe will bring them prosperity, vitality and luck.
According to a story last year in the Mail & Guardian, selling human body parts is a lucrative business in South Africa. Prices range from R1 000 to R10 000, depending on the body part up for sale.
The macabre practice is shrouded in mystery, and traditional healers – most of whom do not practice muti – are afraid to talk about it.
“Witchdoctors use [body parts] to prepare different medicines, based on what the client wants. Mostly it is for self- enrichment and business improvement,” says Dr Gordon Chavinduka, president of the Zimbabwean Traditional Healers Association and former vice-chancellor of the University of Zimbabwe.
“If a witchdoctor is going to go out at night to practise witchcraft, they eat human flesh, drink the soup and smear their bodies with some medicine. The connection is that they will be brave, feared and even invisible at night.”
Their reputation for supernatural powers prompts businesspeople to consult certain sangomas, who also practice witchcraft, to help with ukuthwala (accumulation of wealth). The sangoma will recommend certain human body parts as ingredients to be used in brewing the muti.
“If the business is not doing well, get a boy’s or a girl’s head – someone who has a future and your business will have a future too,” Chavinduka explained.
The youth suspected of Tsepo’s murder – who cannot be named because he is a minor – is being held until Monday, when he will appear in the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court. Police believe he did not act alone.
According to Detective Inspector Nofomele Modiba of the Soweto police, the youth’s bloody fingerprints were found at the scene of the attack, along with fingerprints from at least one other person.
Police followed the trail of blood from the crime scene to the youth’s home.
After his arrest, police found bloody clothes in the house, which have been sent to forensic experts for testing. Once the teenager was presented with the evidence against him, Modiba says he confessed in a written statement.
Currently he is the only suspect in the case. According to Modiba, he says he killed the boy to steal his soccer balls, and offers weak explanations why Tsepo’s body was found mutilated.
Tsepo’s mother, Pinky Molemohi, says the community outpouring of support has helped her family deal with the tragedy of her son’s death.
Hundreds of people have sat in the Molemohi home to talk, pray, sing and offer small contributions toward funeral costs.
Tsepo’s coffin was donated by a local funeral director, and two supermarket chains donated the food that fed several hundred mourners.
Throngs of schoolchildren, dressed in their school, soccer and cricket uniforms, took turns standing vigil beside Tsepo’s small blue-and-white casket.
They remembered him as a quiet, intelligent boy with leadership potential and a flair for playing soccer.
At his grave, Tsepo’s team-mates made one last gesture: they buried him with a soccer ball, in the hope that there is soccer in heaven.
@Witch-hunts on the increase in Tanzania
Nicodemus Odhiambo
The murders of elderly people accused of witchcraft in Tanzania are threatening the country’s social stability.
Over the past 10 years about 20 000 people have been lynched to death by witch-hunting mobs.
The Tanzania Media Women’s Association (Tamwa) recently launched a video on the atrocities and prodded the authorities to tackle the issue.
More than 5 000 old people were murdered on suspicion of witchcraft between 1994 and September 1998, research by the Ministry of Home Affairs shows.
Between January and September 1998, 1 452 old people were killed, 500 of them old women.
Most of the killings happen in Shinyanga region, where at least nine old people are slain every month. In 1996 throughout the country 170 alleged witches were murdered. Of these, 91 cases were reported in Shinyanga, 48 in Mwanza, 10 in Kagera and eight in Tabora. But many of the killings go unreported.
Tamwa’s deputy chair, Deborah Mwendwa, says young people in these regions believe that old women with red eyes, or those who are harsh or cruel, are witches and should be killed.
Tanzanian law recognises witchcraft but the killings are investigated and punished as criminal cases. Evidence of witchcraft is difficult to prove, a state attorney says.
In 1996 a 68-year-old widow, Maria Isike of Usoke village Urambo district in Tabora, was lynched by a mob. She was in her kitchen preparing lunch for her four grandchildren who were at school, media reports said.
In July 1997 four old women were lynched within a week in Kisesa and Mwenge villages in Shinyanga by mobs who burnt them on suspicion of witchcraft.
“It is possible that many old women may have fallen victim or may have been killed on mere suspicion,” says Catholic priest Father Anacietus Mjenia of Tabora.
What constitutes witchcraft is unclear because laws enacted during the colonial era, and which are still in use, dictate that many native practices constitute witchcraft. There is no distinction between the use of witchcraft for healing purposes and exercising the power for evil.
A Nyamwezi elder from Tabora, Donald Maganga (72), explains that witch-hunting was practised in secrecy in the past. Traditional charms concocted from bitter herbs were used to help distinguish a traditional healer from a dangerous witch.
“A suspect was forced to smear himself or herself with a liquid from these herbs and then asked to remove a bracelet from inside a pot steaming with hot water. Those without evil powers would remove the ornament without being burnt, but those who were [evil] got burnt,” he says.
Those who failed the test in the past were beaten to death in public, but never burnt, Maganga says.
Among the Sukuma in Shinyanga, witches had a stick stuck into their orifices. Or, a nail was hammered into their foreheads as a seal to prove they were caught red-handed.
Tanzanian Minister for Health Dr Aaron Chiduo has also condemned the killing of old people. “The problem lies with education. Once the society is educated, the elderly will live in peace and that will be the end of such disgrace,” he says.