#ofwitchcraft

The first I saw of her, she was running. Very fast, towards us. With a baby. And she was crying, her face stained with tears and mucous that threatened to slide into her mouth. But she had another mission. I looked at her as she passed us. She looked devastated. “Nyabo, kiki? Omwana abadde ki?” The sight of her and the baby took me back 22 years ago when I desperately ran to Mulago hospital with my son who was seriously ill.
“Wuiii! Wuiiii!” She cried harder. “Si mwana! Nina ebizibu, omwami wange ayagala kututta!” That her husband or boyfriend, or lover, wanted to kill them.
I quickly abandoned the visitor I was chatting with, and said my hurried goodbyes.
Her baby couldn't have been older than a week. I suspect that his umbilical cord was still attached. He was wrapped carelessly in a multicolored checkered blankie. I offered her a chair and she sat down heavily.
“Kiki?”
She repeated the statement about her husband. “He wants us dead. My sister and the children are hiding in a lodge in Kamwokya, that’s where we spent the night. I have no idea how they are but when my sister called me about ten minutes ago, she said that my first-born daughter was having a seizure and foaming at the mouth! That was what happened to my other son yesterday, before we fled the home in Nansana! You have to help me! I want to go on the TV and tell my story! That man is wicked! He must be stopped before he kills all of us! Help me please before we all die!! She leaped up as she shouted the last two sentences, making as if to enter the building.
I was kind of lost. Her story had a torso but no head, legs and hands. “Nyabo, sooka otuule wansi onnyumize story yo nga ogiva ku ntobo.” I needed details. But just then the baby started wailing.
“Feed her,” I implored.
“Nedda, kano kalenzi! (She was informing me that the child was male, not female) Omusajja agenda kututta! Omusajja atumalawo!!”
She started shaking the baby. Vigorously. Willing him to shut his mouth.
“Nze gwolaba nze, ndi nakawere wa weeksi emu n’ekitundu!” Baby was only one and a half weeks old. “My husband has accused me of bewitching him and his relatives! Can you believe he accused me of taking my children to a witch doctor!”
“When did this start? By the way, what is your name?”
“I am called Fiona Madinah. Trouble started about five years ago, when my husband brought some majiini home. I tell you, the things I have seen!”
She paused and breathed heavily.
“What did you see? What happened?”
“So many things had been happening, we couldn't sleep at night because there were voices that spoke in the dark, sometimes you’d feel something touching your head and when you woke up, there was nothing. Other times, there was the stench of rotting flesh in out bedroom but I was the only one who could smell it! But that day, what I saw made me really believe that my husband is an evil person!”
I waited, willing her to get to the “shocking” point.
“One evening, about three weeks ago, I had not even given birth yet, I was in the kitchen when I heard him approaching. I came out and went behind the kitchen. You know, our kitchen is outside. When he came back, he didn't enter the house. He went to the compound, just outside our front door. Then he knelt down and dug a small hole with a stick. Then he put something inside that hole. He had come with a sheep on a rope and tied it to a tree somewhere near the path leading to the banana plantation. Then he went and untied that sheep. Suddenly, the animal started talking… In a man’s voice!”
“What was it saying?” It’s kind of scary but I have my doubts.
“It was speaking in a man’s voice! You couldn't hear what it was saying, but it had a deep voice, not ‘maaaaing’ like a sheep, it was a man’s voice! I was so scared! That night I took the children out of the house and we slept outside!”
“Are you a Christian?”
I could tell that that question threw her off balance.
“Eh? Yes, you see, I was a Christian before I got married to this man, but he made me become a Muslim when he got a second wife. That woman is the one bringing this zahama to our home, and yet me I decided that I was not going to cook with another woman so I went to the witch doctor so that he could leave her!”
“So you ALSO went to the witch doctor?”
She takes some time to answer the question and looks on the floor, making patterns with her foot.
“Yes, what did he expect me to do? I had to go and get something to make him love me again!”
“It seems there’s a lot of ‘going to the witch doctor” in your home?”
“Yes! What do you expect me to do?”
She was getting really worked up and shaking the baby so hard, I feared for its health. It wailed harder.
“Feed the child nyabo!”
“I don’t have breast milk! We haven't eaten since yester…”
Just then, her phone rings. It’s a Techno with a loud, very weird ringtone.
“Wanji!” She yells. “Ndi wano, agenda k’unteeka kumpewo! Baleeta camera!”
I am aghast. Nobody has promised to put her on air. And nobody has promised to bring a camera to film her.
She talks some more with her sister as I stand up and stretch. When she is done, I tell her we need to get the baby out of the cold.
“That was my sister,” she said. “The lodge owner has ordered them out! Kyokka they have not eaten since yesterday!”
“How much do you owe him?”
“30,000 shillings. But we haven’t eaten since yesterday and the children are so hungry!”
“And how is your daughter? The one with the seizures?”
“My sister says she has recovered!”
To be honest, I didn't know what to do for her. I realized I was trying to hold on as long as I could find a solution.
As luck would have it, a work colleague sauntered by. “What’s the matter? Why is the woman crying?”
I narrated what the woman had told me, but it was as disjointed and full of gaps as I could understand it. My colleague sat down opposite the mother and asked more questions. She said she needed to get to the bottom of the problem. I walked away and back to my desk for a few minutes. It was getting dark and I worried what would be of this woman and her children.
When I returned to the reception a few minutes later, my colleague was dialing the Police. She said that after getting the “whole” story, and if there was a threat to life involved, the Police was best placed to deal with it.
The Police Spokesperson for Kampala Metropolitan Emilian Kayima  offered to help and called back within a few minutes. He said that the Police in Nansana would be sending a car to pick up the lady, and then go to Kamwokya and pick the kids and their aunt. Soon enough, the Police truck arrived and we handed the mother over to a Policewoman who said she was from the family department.