by M G Vassanji
Uganga is the Swahili term for magic or sorcery of whatever sort and the practitioner is called a mganga. In the past, regular medical doctors were also known as mganga, before daktari became common. The word mchawi is sometimes used for the sinister sort of magic; and the Muslim mganga is also called a maalim.
There are various forms of sorcery. There is the magic of the Book, involving the Quran; there is the magic of the medicine, involving potions, sometimes obtained in gruesome manner; and there is magic involving sacrifices. All these may overlap—why stop at one means? Potions are often made using parts of murder victims. There is good magic and bad magic.
Living abroad, it is easy to forget how common are the beliefs in witchcraft even today, how much a part of life they once were in your own life—when you feared passing by a cemetery or walking under a tree at night in case a djinn got you and you were transformed into an albino, or became possessed and acted strangely, and needed the services of a maalim or mganga. Djinns and spirits supposedly stayed on trees, especially the dreadful-looking baobab that looked as if its head were buried in the ground; they wandered out at dusk, the time known as maghrab, which could be both holy and sinister. Asian children were commonly threatened with bogeymen who could take you away—in Kilwa there was said to be an old woman who set traps for children. You could come under a spell, cast by some mganga, through a drink or some other means. The outcome of a football match could be blamed on a wicked spell: rematches have been demanded on the basis of a rooster having ominously crossed a field before a game.
All this sounds amusing and primitive. But only a few years ago came grisly reports of albinos being abducted and hacked to death by sorcerers’ agents, their body parts used for magical purposes as far away as the Congo. Victims included babies and family men; a man had offered to sell his albino wife. Tanzania has an inordinately high number of albinos. The incidents involving their murders and hacking received large coverage, especially from the BBC, and Tanzania’s president made a speech condemning such sinister crimes. The police subsequently exhibited an albino skin at one of their stations to demonstrate how terrible the crime was. This begs the question: did the people need convincing?
One day in the 1950s, at dusk in the Muslim month of Ramadan, a coven of four sorcerers held a meeting in the village of Mteniyapa in the coastal region. They were the senior sorcerer called Bwana Shambi and three women: Binti Jizia, the planner of their misdeeds, Binti Hanifu, a young woman, and Binti Ramadhani, an older woman and their weakest link. Bwana Shambi sounded frustrated that day. Listen, he said to the three women gathered around him. We must perform a rite to bring us good fortune; enough time has passed, and we suffer. For what? At once Binti Jizia pounced upon the young Binti Hanifu: It’s your turn now, she said, you’ve done nothing for us. Bring us a victim if you want the benefits from this coven. It’s as simple as that—no free rides, pay up. When Binti Hanifu demurred, Binti Jizia pressed on, And your victim must be someone close to you—your child, or a sibling. Just anyone won’t do. Bring them soon.
With this ultimatum given, the four went their ways.
The next day was Saturday. Just as Bwana Shambi was passing Binti Jizia’s house, she came out. I am looking for you, she said. Bwana Shambi, feeling listless that day, said querulously, Binti Jizia, you are our planner. Tell Binti Hanifu to give us her sister—if not, let herself be sacrificed.
On Wednesday the four of them sat and waited in their secret place, which was towards the sea. Binti Ramadhani had already had qualms about the plan, and she had come unwillingly. As they waited, Salima, Binti Hanifu’s younger sister, who was also Binti Ramadhani’s daughter-in-law, left her house, pulled by the power of sorcery set in motion by the evil four. As she walked through the village, entranced and barely in her own mind, she was observed by a few of the villagers. She left the village behind and approached the four sorcerers.
Grab her, cried Bwana Shambi as Salima arrived, whereupon Binti Hanifu grasped her sister and pulled her down, saying to the others, Now I’ve settled my debts to you, I owe you nothing. The other three sorcerers rubbed Salima with medicines, and as she lost her strength and became faint, knowing her end was near, she said the Shahada, her confession of faith: There is no God but God. The four sorcerers left her there, trussed up, planning to come back for her that night.
At sunset a cry went out that Salima was missing, and the next morning a frantic search began, in which the four sorcerers also participated, though they had already killed the girl in the night and placed the body in a derelict hut to make it appear that it had collapsed over her. When the body was found, it was clear that the girl had been murdered. A part of her tongue had been cut and taken away. The police were called, and it was also decided to call the famous magician Nguvumali.
This story of the four sorcerers and the murder of Salima in a small village has been narrated in a long epic poem of 393 four-line verses, Swifa ya Nguvumali, by Hasani bin Ismail, an ode to the powers of the most famous magician in the country during that decade. The poem has been translated by Peter Lienhardt, with an excellent introduction.
Nguvumali came from a village in the Kilwa region, though he often came to Dar es Salaam for his work and would be cheered by the crowds. He used plant or herbal magic, and so successful were his methods that on certain occasions he was consulted by the police to solve murders. He died in 1957, when the bus in which he was travelling from Kilwa to Dar overturned. The Tanganyika Standard, the English-language daily, called him “a white witch doctor working on the side of law and order rather than with any evil or ulterior motives.”
The story told in the epic is somewhat anticlimactic. When the police arrive, Binti Ramadhani confesses, naming not only her accomplices but many others, and dies from remorse. Nguvumali arrives in the village, summons all the suspects named by Binti Ramadhani; he dons his special clothes and puts on his necklaces, as do his assistants. Twelve hundred people from the area gather around to watch the magician at work. After doing a dance he brings out his charms, his herbs, and other medicines. He gives a medicine to the suspects to drink. The three guilty sorcerers feel its effects immediately, but not the others. Bwana Shambi’s eyes pop out, his nose drips, his face changes. He starts talking and confesses to many misdeeds. He then asks to be taken to his hut. Among the objects that he shows them is a portion of a tongue. The two women meanwhile are confessing volubly. The guilty three are finally handed over to the policemen, who are from the Luo and Nyamwezi tribes and beat them up mercilessly. Later Bwana Shambi recants. And when the three sorcerers are brought to court, they each receive a sentence of less than a year for witchcraft, there being insufficient evidence of murder.
Years later, in 1990, Nguvumali’s son, named Matoroka, was practising sorcery using his father’s name and would visit Dar es Salaam periodically to collect money that was placed at his father’s grave. And two more decades later there occur the grisly albino murders, and a taxi driver in Tabora tells me casually that a mganga can make me rich, but for that to happen I have to sacrifice someone dear to me.
But most waganga are there to solve ordinary problems believed to be caused by spirits and spells, or cure illnesses that cannot be cured by ordinary medicines. When I was young, there were a couple of Asian women who were called on to “strip” away jaundice, which they did using a certain secret ritual requiring water, a brass bowl, a needle, and special prayers; this ritual was learned during the festival of Diwali and the women healers could be Khoja or Hindu. Asians also consulted the Muslim maalim for cases of spirit possession.
As I write this, a man in a remote northeastern village of Tanzania, affectionately known as the Babu (grandfather) of Loliondo, claims to cure all illnesses, including AIDS and cancer, with his herbal potion. Ambilikile Mwasapile, as the man is called, is a former Lutheran pastor who received his formula in a dream. Hundreds, if not thousands, go to see him every day in hired minibuses from as far away as Nyeri in Kenya. The queues waitin
g for him are claimed to be miles long. There they sit before the elder and receive “the cup”—and are cured, so they say. He charges the equivalent of thirty-three cents for a cup, some of the proceeds of which he donates to the Church. But a bus ride over the rough terrain to Loliondo costs as much as forty dollars. In all seriousness, a newspaper report criticizes the Babu for not having a medical degree. Suppose he did have one? The government has set up a task force to evaluate the situation. Not surprisingly, even government ministers are said to have taken the Babu’s cup.
When I was in Kilwa, one morning I inquired of Mwana Hamisi, our young waitress at the Island View Hotel, if she knew of any mgangas in the area. Kilwa, like any old town on the coast, had its reputation as a place of the supernatural. And it easily had the look of one. Nights were pitch-dark and empty but for the occasional subdued, disembodied voices; there were old graves scattered around town, some of them mysterious and abandoned; and the baobab trees looked suitably grim. As a man of these parts, however rational I’ve made myself to be, a man of science who sees death as mere corporal disintegration into the elements, someone who’s tangled and tangoed with complex mathematical formulas that explain intriguing features of atomic nuclei—of which we are all made—in all honesty I could not in Kilwa’s dark night help that little supernatural shiver, the skin prickling at the slightest suggestive brush from the breeze at night.
That evening as my companion and I were quietly finishing our meal, our visit to Kilwa having come to a close, the chef—a short, stout man wearing the white jacket of his profession—came over from the kitchen and told me somewhat furtively to be ready the next day at 3 p.m., if I wished to see a mganga. I said I would be ready. I did not know what to expect, but the temptation was too great, and my friend’s presence emboldened me.
At the appointed hour, the three of us and our venerable kofiaclad driver (who it appeared had been informed of our mission) headed off on Masoko’s main and only paved road, from which, just past the small airfield, we turned into a track winding over a grassy landscape. After a short, bumpy ride we arrived at a small settlement of typical Swahili houses. The last house, somewhat more solidly built than the others, looked away from them and was our destination. There the chef asked us to remove our shoes on the porch, which we did, and we stepped inside.
The house opened into a large room, on the floor of which sat a collection of women, perhaps twenty in number, all looking patient and subdued, ready to wait forever if necessary. We were in a consultancy. To the left the room led into a short corridor, at the end of which, leaning against the front wall, sat the mganga, the maalim, speaking in a voice rich and mellifluous, but pleasantly edged. He was a man in his forties, small and wiry, with a chocolate skin, wearing shirt and trousers and a kofia. Before him sat a woman, between them glowed a brazier. While he spoke, with mechanical deftness he executed symbols or characters on an aluminum tray using his forefinger and an orange solution as ink. What he wrote looked like an Arabic formula, possibly from the Quran. Having finished each tray he would set it aside and pick up another one. Room was made for my friend and me to sit against the wall across from him. Finally he sent off a bunch of finished trays to the main room, where the women poured water on them and drank the solution.
Throughout the process a benign but firm smile lit up the man’s face and his inscription-writing was fluid and automatic. The woman in front of him having got up, he invited the one beside him to come forward and asked her what ailed her. A husband not paying attention. He sprinkled some incense on the brazier, the smoke billowed out, and he asked her to repeat after him: I am Fatuma, daughter of Binti Yusuf, I beg you, Almighty God, to remove my problem and help me … When she finished he gave her an inscribed tray into which he poured water; the writing dissolved and she drank from the yellow solution; he poured what remained over her head. She stood up to go.
It was my turn. He asked my name, my mother’s name, and then my shida—my problem, which I had practised beforehand: I was a writer, I told him, but recently whenever I sat down to write my mind went blank. This was a recent affliction, I added. All the time I spoke he carried on his writing, his questions put to me in a bantering, teasing manner. When I had finished he gave his diagnosis. You are possessed by some air spirit, he said. It was perhaps sent to you by a no-gooder. It may have been around and got into you while you were walking. It is not going to come out by the pills of the wazungus—the whites. It has made you weak. It will affect your virility. That is your problem.
I didn’t know what to say. I had invented my problem, therefore I couldn’t look desperate. Perhaps he guessed. My friend and I were the only non-Africans there, though we spoke Swahili; and my problem was not the kind that would come his way. He must know too that we were from the tourist hotel. Nonchalantly he returned to his writing and said, Who’s next? A woman came forward and sat before him and underwent the procedure. She was depressed. When she had left, the maalim turned to me and asked, Well, what do you say? As I fumbled for a response, not knowing what was expected of me, the chef came to my rescue. But he’s come for the cure. You should give him the cure. I agreed promptly, and was asked to come and sit closer, across from the maalim, and to spread my legs, the brazier hot before me. Sprinkling incense on the glowing coals, as instructed, as the choking smoke billowed out, I recited after the maalim, Mwenyezi Mungu, I beg that my problem goes away, that I am able to write well—and more that I can’t recall. Then my friend did the same, asking for my cure but with more eloquence than I had managed, clearly affected by the ritual. His grandfather, he had already informed me, had been a maalim in Bagamoyo.
And then the maalim took my hand in his hands, saying, Let this man’s problem go away, let him write well, let it come to his head; if the problem is caused by a person, let that person come to no good; if that person is on a plane, let it fall; if he is in a car, let it break; if the problem is caused by a jinn, take it away; if it is caused by you, My Lord, let it escape from him …
On and on he recited, in that warm, fluid, yet edgy drone, now reading in Swahili and Arabic from a tattered book in his hand, giving me the full treatment. A tall man came and sat down beside him, picked up another tattered book and went full blast reciting some Arabic prayer, so that the two rich and full voices, one higher than the other, filled the room and there seemed no conclusion in sight. The second man could have been in his thirties; he had a short scruffy beard and a grave look, and also wore trousers, but with a T-shirt with a logo on it.
While this ritual proceeded, a woman in the main room seemed to enter a trance, rolling her eyes and groaning. The maalim continued, all the while holding my hand, his plea on my behalf sounding more urgent, counterpointed by the second voice, and I thought, This will never end, and my knees are hurting, and I struggled to suppress a sudden burst of giggling at the predicament I had put myself in. The maalim would throw the occasional look at me, hoping perhaps that I would also enter a trance.
Finally, at long last, the two men stopped, and we said together, Alhamdu lillahi rabb al alameen. Praise be to the Creator of all beings.
Now the maalim put an inscribed tray in my hand, gave me a glass of water. I poured it into the tray, producing an orange solution, which I then poured into the glass I found in my hand. Drink it, the maalim commanded. I took a sip—tasteless—and said, I can’t drink more, pour it on me. There was a pause. The chef and my friend explained to the maalim that my stomach was delicate and there was a journey the next day—which was irrelevent, of course, if the water was blessed—whereupon the maalim poured the water over my head and sprinkled it on my face and body with some force. More orange water was produced and poured into a bottle for me to take away.
We walked out to the porch, where I was given two small bundles of cut roots to be boiled into a tea and consumed. An ugly black ball of gooey stuff was handed me from which to take up pinches and rub on my body.
We paid the maalim handsomely, took photos wit
h him, and departed. The chef, our agent, also received his commission.
18.
Zanzibar: Island in the Sun
FROM THE SEA IT APPEARS AS ONE HAS READ AND HEARD ABOUT IT, and consequently imagined it, and yet the breath catches when it appears glimmering in the distance. On the continent it’s the endless expanse of the land that impresses, here it’s the sea and the sky, and the small island in their midst. A row of short white buildings in a light haze; it’s been likened to a chain of pearls, though the buildings are not all the same nor all white. The sea is blue and green, parted by the hull of the speeding ferry leaving a frothy wake behind, and the sun is hot overhead. By compulsion or instinct, tourist cameras have appeared and click away. Perhaps it’s what one brings to the scene, but there’s a sense that here and now time has slowed, if not stopped altogether. That statement needs much qualification, nothing is so simple, this sleepy-looking isle has stories to tell and connections round the world and is rife with contradictions. It’s a conundrum in the sun. A young man has left me in charge of his backpack and disappeared, and as I stare at it, I get worried; it’s what the world has become. After a long time he returns, I sigh gently with relief and ask him which of the two prominent buildings before us is the palace. He points it out.
(Photo Caption 18.1)
Growing up in Dar es Salaam, to us Zanzibar—“Unguja” in Swahili, “Jangbar” to the Indians—was Easygoing Isle, close enough that it was thought our best swimmers could easily reach it. Actually it was some fifty miles away, and you got there by steamship or dhow, there was no ferry. But few of us mainlanders ventured there. It was too much of the past when we all looked to the future.
