Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

Kasawo had always found Catholic dogma both abstract and deficient, unable to stand on its own in the real world. Catholicism did not provide practical ways to confront evil, and its dismissal of witchcraft was too complacent in its essence. As a businesswoman, she could never afford to be complacent about evil. The business community was infested with ruthless Devil worshippers and practitioners of the worst witchcraft. In business, luck was a holy sacrament which was sought both in the grandest cathedrals and in the dimmest witch houses. Kasawo consulted witch doctors, burned mysterious herbs on hot coals and mouthed incantations. On Sunday, she went to church, because it was good for her image and also because she had never managed to dismiss Catholicism as a total hoax. She felt comfortable with keeping a leg in both worlds, because deep down she knew that God and the Devil were two sides of the same coin, and she wanted to play it safe.

There was another side to it. In her desperation, Kasawo had visited her parish priest soon after the violation, wanting some neutral party to talk to. The good man had advised her to commend the rapists into God’s hands, and to hate the sin but not the sinners. Such complacency had left her feeling betrayed and more determined than ever to go to a witch doctor, who would assess the possibilities for revenge and purification. Kasawo was itching to get it over with and to avoid suffering for years as she had after the Pangaman escape. Now, as she looked at her sister, she was sure that if she had relied on her and on her parish priest in her darkest moments, she would have ended up raving mad.

Kasawo felt asphyxiated, as though her sister’s house were a sealed box. She felt the need to take a walk and never come back. She looked at her watch. She was glad that she was leaving early the following morning.

The Kasawo that came to visit Aunt Lwandeka and me, two days after re-enactment therapy, was not my picture of somebody who had been gang-raped. She was brimming with confidence and energy, and talked almost non-stop. It was evident that her days of self-pity were over. Her ordeal seemed to be just one more hurdle she had cleared. She talked a lot about politics, expressing her skepticism over the new coalition government. She said that she was very happy the liberators were being sent back home to Tanzania.

As she talked I kept thinking about all those men on top of her, and I wondered at how resilient she was to bounce back so quickly. I kept thinking about how African women were Olympic-medalist camouflagers of pain: my mind was filled with twenty-minute pissings, drop by drop, through infibulated holes by women in the Horn of Clitoris- and Labialessness. I watched her closely to see if she was just putting on a show for us. But halfway through her four-day visit, I was convinced that it was for real. The Vicar General had performed wonders for her.

I knew the man they called the Vicar General. Nobody called him by his real name. He was given that title because he was one of the few Catholic witch doctors, the majority being Muslim. He first caught my attention when I came to live with Aunt Lwandeka. At the time, I thought he was the tall, dark man who had threatened to damage her with a knife and a snake. Later the man reminded me of a Catholic parish priest. He had a lot of land, a new car, and lived in a huge house on a nearby hill. He knew many influential people. He had a big practice and had that pompous air of conceited priests. I felt a sneaking admiration for him for posing a direct challenge to the Catholic Church and for pointing out to them that, despite being in business for the last one hundred years, their teachings had left a big, unaddressed hole in many people’s lives.

If Kasawo was any example to go by, people were cured by what they believed in. The psychology behind the Vicar’s therapy was that those who came expecting pain got painful treatment, and those who came expecting sweet words, blood sacrifices, incantations or cuddles got exactly that. He had such wide experience that as soon as a client started talking, he knew what would work for them.

Kasawo had arrived at the famous man’s headquarters feeling special and anticipating immediate attention. She felt she was the big man’s special prize, because she had just rejected her sister’s Catholicism and opted firmly for him. She also had the feeling that she was the only champion survivor of a vicious gang rape to arrive at the headquarters that day. She expected to find about a dozen people waiting in line. She knew that by using her trader’s tongue, she would quickly get the attention she felt she deserved.

It came as a shock to Aunt Kasawo to realize that she had greatly overestimated herself. She arrived at around ten o’clock to find a crowd whose size reminded her of her primary school days. If all these people had not come from nearby, then some must have arrived when it was still dark. She thought that some might even have spent the night waiting in line. The long lines strangely reminded her of the sick, the blind, the deaf and the infirm who travelled long distances to go and meet Jesus in the hope of a miracle cure. The place had the ambience of a school compound: there was the main building, a registration office, a dispensary, dormitories, a kiosk, playing spaces for children, clotheslines, water taps, lines of toilets and of course the many assistants keeping order. This was the most pompous and most organized witch doctor Kasawo had ever seen. She was awed by the thought that all these people had come to meet only one person. She felt proud, in a way, because this man had rescued the business from dirty little places run by dirty old men and shrivelled old women and elevated it to the realm of modernity.

The quarter-kilometer walk up the hill had left Kasawo sweating. The wet-look grease in her hair was trickling down her head, and she kept wiping it off her neck with a large handkerchief. She kept looking at the many well-dressed women, who far outnumbered the men. It struck her once again that if women abandoned the business, witch doctors would run out of work.

She was annoyed that there were so many people ahead of her. She was irritated by the bawling children and by the arrogant airs pulled by some of the visiting women. She could tell the die-hards from the beginners by their indifference. The first-timers looked around nervously to make sure that nobody they knew could see them from the road. The discomfort they felt about being here also came out in the way they shifted uneasily, coughed or blinked as though their bodies were in open rebellion.

Quite a few of these people were supposed to be in a hospital, but they were awaiting clearance from the Vicar General of the Devil’s Diocese. Western medicine had been around for more than a hundred years, but many people trusted their witch doctors more than they did medical doctors. Kasawo could understand their reaction. There were many greedy medical doctors who milked people’s money without telling them the truth. It was a question of trust. In her case, though, she knew exactly when to consult medical doctors. A little education is not too bad, after all, she thought sourly.

From her experience, Kasawo knew that half the people here had not come to be relieved of physical ailments; they were here in pursuit of luck, success, revenge, love, power, favor and divination. There were housewives who wanted love potions to make their husbands love them more than other women; and some in search of evil magic to cause car accidents, illness or other disasters to their competition. There were barren women desperately searching for babies after combing every church and hospital for help, and fecund women who wanted more children in order to ensure their position in the home. There were mad men and women tormented by “voices” which told them to walk naked, to attack people, to sit in fire, to climb roofs or to talk to themselves; and men and women who wanted to drive somebody they hated mad. There were people with psychosomatic and psychological ailments, and others with migraines, cancers, swollen legs and broken limbs. There were people in search of themselves who needed the big man’s magic touch to peel away layers of self-delusion, self-pity and old pain before moving on to a better life. Last but not least were those who had lost loved ones in the recent past to deep forests, swollen rivers, dank dungeons and mass graves. They wanted to locate the remains, lay wandering spirits to rest with a proper funeral and, where possible, make the killers pay.