I can't believe a week today I am leaving again. It was meant to be three weeks but we have changed plans, yet again. I have spent most of the past two weeks on my own with Greg either in Namibia, Joburg or up at the mine so the freezer is full of cakes and biscuits and Limited and Andrew are getting substantial lunches of soup, quiche, curry, cakes and biscuits.
I have asked them to tell me if they do not like certain foods. I know they don't eat pork but they do eat bacon! I don't go there. We can't get pork here anyway so it is irrelevant and I consider ham, which is also rarely found, to fall into the bacon category. I know they don't like chilli but then I use it sparingly at the best of times myself. If I am going to cook I may as well cook things they will like and eat although they would probably eat it anyway even if they did not like it.
But tastes do differ. In a land where maize meal is a staple of the diet and it tastes like 'Clag' the quintessential glue which kids use for pasting things in place, it is clear that flavour differentiation is going to be different. I discovered how different when we had a visitor at the guesthouse the other week and she told me that Andrew had offered her a very strange banana jam at breakfast, when she had asked if jam was available.
She had taken one sniff of the 'banana jam,' looked at it's dark colour and decided it must be Malawian jam. She put a small portion on her plate to be polite but couldn't bring herself to eat it on toast. I don't blame her.
I realised immediately she was talking about the banana chutney I had given them a few weeks before to have with some cold meat. Clearly chutney did not compute. It looked like jam, gluey, albeit a tad dark, and it was banana ... that was a fruit wasn't it? So despite the fact it smelled of vinegar and spices, it must be jam.
I took both Limited and Andrew aside later and clearly explained that chutney was very different to jam and not the least bit pleasant on buttered toast. Well, not to muzungus anyway! Chutney is for meat or cheese, I said, only ever for meat or cheese. Jam is for toast! I am not sure the message really got across but I do believe the banana chutney will not be handed over as jam in the future.
Beyond my writing, manuscript editing, baking and painting there has not been a lot happening. Well, beyond the fact that there is a diesel and petrol shortage in Malawi and cars queue in long, languishing lines around corners and down streets near any service station which has anything to sell. There's a knock-on effect as well because people conserve their fuel and the roads are much less crowded, but so too are the shops and supermarkets. We are thinking it might pay to be well provisioned just in case.
This week I finished reading a fascinating book, A Voyager Out, the life of Mary Kingsley, written by Katherine Frank. Mary Kingsley was a remarkable young woman who travelled through West Africa in the late 1800's and wrote extensively on what she called 'fetish' - the spiritual/religious beliefs of Africans. Superstition, or what was called superstition was widespread in Africa and is still.
The Africans pretty much as a whole believe that every single thing is inhabited by spirits and everything which happens is caused by spirits, whether for good or for evil. Animistic, pantheistic, fascinating and generally bleak. They also believe that the spirits of the dead remain with them and if not propitiated correctly will cause harm. And they believe in witches. Even the newspapers here carry stories of witches, sadly, at times, it is children who are accused although the most common target is old women. It was ever thus.
It is little wonder that the missionaries made inroads given the level of fear with which Africans appear always to have lived and with which they still live today. I am beginning to understand too why the evangelicals do so well here with their vengeful, punitive and unforgiving God ..... because this sort of God, powerful, capable of great good and great harm is the sort of God they can understand.
You need to have massively powerful JuJu to counter the forces of the spirits at work in Africa and a God who rages and threatens and punishes and smites sounds pretty powerful indeed. Sadly, the evangelical God is about as unpleasant as most of the African 'gods' and it is hard to know if people are better off or worse.
Mary Kingsley, who sadly died very young, at 37, of typhoid contracted while nursing in Cape Town during the Boer War, remained adamant that the missionaries were the worst thing which had happened to Africa. She saw in their teachings the seeds of destruction for African culture and belief. She may well be right but the fact is, much of the African belief ranged from unpleasant to terrifying and the culture was misogynistic and unforgiving.
The interesting thing, although perhaps I should say the sad thing is, that despite Christianity washing over Africa in a deluge and soaking the land to its spiritual bone, witchcraft is alive and well on the continent and witches of all ages continue to be attacked and even killed.
Belief in witchcraft runs deep in this conservative country, where curses and spells are blamed for everything from bad luck, unexplained deaths, illness, the spread of AIDS, or even a lack of rain. And it is not confined to the uneducated but remains a prevalent belief throughout the society as a whole, as it does throughout the African continent.
Belief in witchcraft and the persecution of witches is also still found in India with up to 200 women a year killed in that country because they are believed to be witches.
There is an old British Act which covers witchcraft in Malawi. The Witchcraft Act states that “any person, who by his statement or actions represents himself to be a wizard or witch or exercising the power of witchcraft, shall be liable to a fine of 50 British Pounds and to imprisonment for 10 years.”
The Act is 107 years old and was put in place by Malawi’s colonial power, Britain, in 1901. Back then, the British rulers in Malawi had negotiated treaties with indigenous rulers resulting in the formal laws now governing the country.
In Malawi, as in Africa in particular and witchcraft in general it is believed that witches and wizards have supernatural powers that they use to make people ill or even kill them.
They are also said to be cannibals and prey on the bodies of corpses. And as in the witch-hunts of Europe, centuries ago, witches and wizards are said to be able to fly at night and to shape-shift - turn into animals or become invisible and pass through solid walls.
It seems that all that religion and Christian belief does not serve to save Africans from a life of doubt and fear. It probably just adds to it. Not only are you tormented in this world by spirits and witches but you face roasting in the fires of hell when you leave it!
But efforts are being made at local government and international levels to bring greater awareness, understanding and justice.
In a report published this year in the New York Times, by Chi Mgbako - clinical associate professor of law and director of the Walter Leitner International Human Rights Clinic at Fordham Law School in New York Cit, it said:
Many clients came to our mobile legal clinic eager to learn the status of Malawi’s law on witchcraft. According to the law, currently under review by Malawi’s law reform commission, it is illegal to accuse someone of witchcraft or to hire a witch doctor to identify an alleged witch.
Some clients were resistant to the notion of providing a measure of protection to accused witches, but others were relieved. A female village chief, previously unaware of the law, had been holding town-hall meetings for years to encourage community members to stop witchcraft accusations. After attending our clinic, she was happy to learn that the law supports her stance.
We had many other cases in which individuals sought legal advice on whether they could proceed with accusing someone of witchcraft. We welcomed these cases because they gave us an opportunity to intervene before the belief in witchcraft was transformed into public blame and potential violence.
One young woman with chronically bad luck in love believed that her failed romantic relationships were the result of spells cast by her uncle. After we informed her that it is against Malawian law to accuse her uncle of witchcraft she vowed not to do so. We also dissuaded another woman from branding a local child in the community as a witch. She left the clinic determined to deter other potential accusers.
Many Malawians believe in witchcraft. This belief, in and of itself, is not the issue. It is the transformation of belief into accusation and subsequent harm that is at issue. So although the law does not address the question of whether witchcraft exists or not — individuals are free to believe or disbelieve — it should continue to criminalize witchcraft accusations.
Legislation alone will not stop attacks against alleged witches. Malawi and other African countries grappling with this issue should raise public awareness through nationwide campaigns that enlist church groups, police, the justice system, N.G.O.s and traditional healers to encourage people to refrain from making accusations of witchcraft against neighbors and relatives, especially emphasizing the often irreparable harm these do to children and elderly women.
Anything which serves to set people free from fear and ignorance is deserving of support. It is too easy to forget that such beliefs were common in the Western world, the developed world, in the past. The last executions of people convicted as witches in Europe took place in the 18th century and in the United Kingdom, witchcraft ceased to be an act punishable by law with the Witchcraft Act of 1735. In Germany, sorcery remained punishable by law late into the 18th century.
So, as with the developed world, here in Africa it is a matter of awareness, education, reduction of poverty and time which will put to rest this most evil of beliefs and all its attendant suffering by victims and accusers alike.
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