The Masque of Africa (6 page)

Madame Sehenna said, “But you mustn’t think it will end. We are doing work. Many of the angels who were protecting the Kabakaship have now come back. We have a prince of the royal blood who has the connection. He gets revelations and he tells us. The prince can be consulted. He lives in his shrine. You buy an exercise book and write the name of your first ancestor, your name, and your problem.”

The first ancestor, known to God, was not born but created, and this ancestor doesn’t die; he disappears.

“The exercise book with your name and your problem is taken to the shrine, and the answer is given. You have to buy back the answer.
The royal drum is tuned by someone from the lion clan, and the lion is the symbol of Buganda. You also have the fallen angels who live and are underground. If you offer them great sacrifices, like your mother or your child, something very near and dear to you, they give you great riches. Wealth beyond your dreams. In this case you go to a medium and you go to the lake and, if you are a woman, you meet a handsome man, a spirit, who takes you beneath the lake. If you are a man it is a beautiful woman who will take you and give you the wealth you want. But once you invoke the spirit world you have to obey their rules. You cannot marry a human then, as the spirit of the man or woman will live with you. You see many such people driving these big cars and living in big houses like palaces here. You cannot escape their rules. If you do, the riches vanish and you are punished.”

F
OR A FEW
days Luke was my guide. He didn’t have much to show me because he didn’t know a great deal, and because he lived in a far-off part of Kampala where the roads were unpaved. When it rained the roads around his house became impassable, and then he would telephone to cancel whatever arrangements we had made. Later, when we tried to work out what I owed him, he would claim these blank days as working days because he had set them aside for me.

He worked in a university, one of the many new universities of Uganda. He got 170,000 shillings a month, a little under 600 pounds or 1200 dollars a month, which I thought sufficient for his needs. But he and the other teachers and many of the students as well were on strike. This meant that he had great needs. And when he came late one morning and said he wanted to take me to a diviner or witchdoctor I became anxious. I was worried about the fees those people might charge. I said I thought we were going to look at Bassajadenzi that morning, a famous rock-shrine. He had spoken at length about it the day before. He said no, I had asked for witchdoctors. That was why he had asked a friend of his to come with us, a man in touch with witchdoctors. This
man was waiting for us at a police post. This official-sounding detail made me doubt my memory. We went to pick the friend up.

The police post was in an awful part of the city, the ground scuffed down to red earth, children everywhere, the ditches unsavoury, and there was often a spread of garbage between the rough shacks.

The sloping dirt road we turned into had been diagonally trenched by rain, and the car bumped up and down in the most worrying way. A further side road, narrowing, suddenly full of green, brought us to the witchdoctor’s house.

It was a proper little cottage, modern and newly painted and pretty, fenced with concrete blocks. Luke and his friend, suppliants in their demeanour, as though they didn’t want to make too much of a noise, undid the two leaves of the wide side gate, and went into the yard and waited for the witchdoctor. He came out of his house wearing what was clearly his home clothes, an off-white singlet and red jogging shorts. He looked sour; it seemed he didn’t like being disturbed. Many words passed between the three men, the witchdoctor firm, Luke and his friend speaking more softly, as though they didn’t want me to hear.

The driver told me that the witchdoctor was saying it was Wednesday and he didn’t receive on Wednesdays. That was his day for gathering herbs.

This would have been a small but valuable part of the witchdoctor’s business. People in Uganda believed in the magical value of herbs; men liked to have herbs in their wallets, to protect the money they had and to attract more.

So, from having to plead with me, Luke and his friend now had to plead with the witchdoctor. They had told me, “He is not an ordinary witchdoctor. He is modern. That is why we brought you. It will be good for you to see him.” I didn’t know what they were telling the witchdoctor; there was a torrent of words between them. I suspected they were tempting him with the promise of a good fee.

In a room like a garage at the side of the house a woman could be seen through the big open door washing down the concrete floor,
soaking a rag in a bucket and dragging the rag over the floor. She was taking her time over this, washing the same piece of floor again and again; it seemed she was more interested in what was being said in the yard by the men. She was standing in the remarkable African way, bent at the waist, legs straight; a naked baby was crawling about behind her.

Luke and his friend came back to the car and said it was all settled. The witchdoctor would see us. But he had to purify himself before he went into the shrine section of his yard. This was a connected but separate fenced plot next door to the house. We should go there, taking off our shoes beforehand, and wait for him. We left the main yard, went out into the street, and then almost immediately turned into the shrine area, which had its own entrance. Ismail, our hotel car driver, was by now sufficiently interested and awed to lay aside his Muslim anxieties about the occasion. He took off his shoes with the rest of us, and said that if the witchdoctor didn’t purify himself before he came to us the spirit who guided him would become very angry. The witchdoctor himself had said that.

I felt the witchdoctor’s bill was growing by the minute.

There were about five small huts in different parts of the shrine yard. The huts were modern, with concrete walls; they were too small, I thought, for anyone to live in; and they were connected—as though for a game—by a raised walk in red concrete about a yard wide and six inches high. But perhaps this red concrete walk was only another modern touch: no visitor need walk either in dry-season dust or rainy-season mud.

To one side of the entrance, where we were, there was something like a little office, with a few books, a telephone, a small steel safe. A framed green-printed certificate on the wall was the witchdoctor’s official licence; it was like the certificate issued in other countries to professional people like accountants and pharmacists. Everything here was modern and correct; no believer need feel ashamed.

Below a mirror was a small wash basin with a thin wafer of used soap. A proper painted black-and-white sign pointed, with arrows, to where the toilets were. They were next door, in the yard of the main
house, and they could be reached through a gate in the middle of the fence. It wouldn’t have done for toilets to be in the shrine area.

While we were considering all these things, and arriving at some (not all) of the subtleties, an assistant or servant of the witchdoctor came in through another side gate, and began to open up the padlocked huts. In one hut he managed to get a wood fire going. Perhaps it was a fire of welcome, done expressly for our sake; or it might have been a more general purifying fire, a commissioning of the shrine area.

Whatever the fees, I now had to stay. After all that had been done for me I couldn’t say I wanted to go back to the hotel. Even Ismail the driver, Muslim though he was, would have turned against me.

The witchdoctor himself now appeared. He had replaced his red jogging shorts with a pair of long trousers, and was wearing a sports shirt. His purification had given him a freshness and formality which he didn’t have before. He had lost his sourness and looked ready for business.

He went and sat on the floor in one of the huts at the far end of the yard. The open door framed him. It was now as though we were really clients and he was receiving us, sitting behind a spear head, the spear head being one of the Baganda emblems.

Luke’s friend said that each hut had a different purpose. In one the witchdoctor would receive the client and assess his needs. Another was a kind of pharmacy; the medicines here, compounded by the witchdoctor, were in small jars; they were doled out to the client according to advice from the spirits. The witchdoctor had to hold himself ready at all times for communication from the spirits. It was how he healed. It was the great difference between him and ordinary people. It explained his success.

We went to look at the witchdoctor in the hut where he was sitting in his mystic posture below a portrait of the Kabaka. The hut, concrete and modern on the outside, was traditional and African inside, completely hung with lengths of bark-cloth, stitched together in the way bark-cloth had to be stitched, and concealing the foreign material of the roof. A spiritual or magical quality attached to bark-cloth, which
was the special material of the ancestors, as was shown in the tomb of the Kabakas at Kasubi, where it hung from dome to floor and concealed the “forest” where the spirits of the Kabaka resided after death.

Everything in that great tomb had to be made of local materials, and the witchdoctor knew that in his shrine area (and perhaps also in his house) he was going against tradition. He had a reason for that. The world had changed since Kasubi. He had now to compete with the Christian church and the Muslim mosque. He had to build in modern materials; he wanted people who came to his shrine to feel good.

The witchdoctor came out of the hut. He went to where, not far away, there was an open fireplace with much grey wood-ash and a length of partly burnt wood still in place. He said that was where he sat sometimes, in the living fire. He was moved to do so by the spirits; and when the spirits were on him he didn’t feel the fire. Inspired words came to him from above or below, from the earth.

Ismail, snapping back into his Muslim faith, said to me in English, in an undertone, “I would like to see him do that.”

Luke and his friend didn’t hear. They were completely taken up with the witchdoctor, who was explaining the uses of the various huts. When this was done the witchdoctor called to his assistant, and the assistant, like a man well trained, went to the house and brought a thick square album of colour photographs. The photographs were of people who had visited the shrine here. The witchdoctor turned the thick pages of the album one by one, and Luke and his friend and even Ismail fell silent, because we were looking at photographs of famous local people who had come here as suppliants.

Then the question of money came up. Luke said in his dangerous way that it was up to me. I gave 20,000 shillings, just under seven pounds, fourteen dollars. I gave that because I had not put any questions to the witchdoctor. To my amazement the money was accepted without trouble, and I was sorry that worry about the man’s fees had slightly spoilt the occasion.

The trouble came later, when I had to settle with Luke. I offered him a hundred dollars—this was on the telephone—and he appeared
to agree. But later that evening he telephoned and wanted to know whether he had heard correctly: had I offered a hundred pounds? I had been thinking that a hundred dollars was really too little. So I said yes, I had offered him a hundred pounds. But when he came to get his money in the morning he made it clear that in his mind the bargaining was far from over. He went over the little we had done together and said that a fair price would be two hundred pounds. This was his way, doubling an agreed figure, not moving up in smaller increments. I began to know the exasperation and blackmail Speke had to suffer with one chief after another a hundred and fifty years before over the
hongo
, the entry tax that had to be paid a chief for being in his territory, before the “drum of satisfaction” could be beaten, which told people not to trouble the visitor.

In the end Luke so tied me up in dollars and pounds, always mixing the currencies, that I believe I gave him a
hongo
of 150 pounds, far too much.

E
VERY WEEK
there were two or three items in the newspaper from various parts of the country about witchcraft.

In one village people were reported to believe that malaria, a great killer in Uganda, was caused by witchcraft and mangoes. They had good reason for linking mangoes to the illness. Mangoes were plentiful in the rainy season; that was also when mosquitoes bred, seeking out even small accumulations of stagnant water. To others witchcraft seemed a more natural explanation. One villager said, “Malaria is caused by witchcraft or bad spirits. When I got malaria, I found out that my neighbour was responsible for it. And when he was sent away from the village, I got cured.” One procedure—a visit to the witchdoctor—would have been responsible for finding out about the neighbour; another, more violent, procedure, probably involving the village, would have been necessary to send him away.

When it came to witchcraft, violence was never far away. In Easter week, in a village in the south-west, four brothers strangled their forty-two-year-old aunt. They removed her jaw and her tongue, no doubt for some private magical purpose, and then dumped the body in a nearby banana field. Not long after, dogs began to gather in the banana field. The village people became suspicious. They went to look, and found the dogs feeding on the dead woman’s body, which was lying in a pool of blood. The dead woman was well known. Suspicion at once fell on the four brothers, who were believed to practise witchcraft. About twenty of the village men went to look for them. When they found them they began to beat them with sticks and anything else that came to hand.

Two of the brothers got away and went to the police. The other two brothers were killed and buried in a latrine. Four goats, five hens and two pigs belonging to the brothers were slaughtered; this was what happened to animals belonging to people who were thought to be bad. The police, when they came, arrested fifteen people. They recovered the two bodies from the latrine and took them away for a post-mortem: a strange legalistic note in this story of country wildness.