The cholera witches, the brain in the box, the cursed owl in the latrine and the evil spirit down the well
on Mischa in Cameroon (Cameroon), 05/Nov/2010 09:51, 34 days ago
One morning soon after I first arrived in Maga in 2009 I was cycling through the bush with my national volunteer, Tchipounama, on the way to a meeting. Tchipounama is very well educated; she’s completed secondary school and did several years of secretarial training in the capital.“Mischa,” Tchipounama asked me, “are there lots of sorcerers and witches in your country?”“Hmm,” I replied. “Not many, no. Are there a lot here?”“Yes. They’re everywhere.”The cholera witchesA few weeks ago I was in the reception room of the Sultan’s palace in Pouss when a man came in with two women and knelt on the floor to request an audience. Although I was present during the audience it was conducted in Fulfulde, so I didn’t understand much. After they’d gone I asked the Sultan what the problem was.Apparently a boy had fallen ill with the symptoms of cholera (there has been a cholera epidemic in the Extreme North) and he accused the first woman of being a witch who was eating his soul, which made him fall ill. A good sorcerer was called in to heal the boy and the first witch was charged with cursing him. She confessed and explained that she’d been acting as part of a coven of witches, who communed using magic rites that it would be impossible for the Sultan to understand. The second woman was an accomplice witch whom she had named. The minor chieftain in their locality then brought them to the Sultan, explaining that they were threatening to call down cholera on the community.The Sultan (or so he claims) told them to do some good spells and stop cursing, and then dismissed them. A couple of days later I was with Tchipounama, and she told me that some wicked witches had been taken before the Sultan (the very same witches I had seen) for keeping cholera spells in a box, and that the first witch had confessed and named an accompliceafter she had been beaten up by people from her neighbourhood.The brain in the boxAfter the audience with the cholera witches the Sultan recounted the story of another incident where two men had come to see him. The first man explained that he had fallen ill because the second man had stolen his brain. The second man, when questioned, confessed that this was the truth, but he had the brain at his house and would go and fetch it. He went away and came back with a box, which he said contained the stolen brain. The Sultan, curious, looked inside. The box was empty. He gave the box to the first man who took it, and then announced that he had got his brain back and was cured.The cursed owl in the latrineOne day Tchipounama was late for work. When she arrived at my house she apologised and explained that her family had been cursed: someone had put a live owl in their latrine hole and they’d discovered it that morning. To counteract the curse the owl had to be killed in a certain way and sold to a medicine man. Several times that morning Tchipounama had to leave our meeting to take phone calls from her father, away in the capital Yaounde, and her sisters, who were at home trying tobreak the curse. Apparently you can curse people by magicking all kinds of creatures into their latrines- one of Tchipounama’s sisters was cursed when someone put a live sheep into her latrine, but it was so much bigger than the hole that they had to break its bones to get it out.In fact Tchipounama’s sisters have all kinds of problems: one of them went through a phase where the devil made her attract snakes in her sleep, one of them got malaria because a neighbour who was a witch was eating her soul, and another was poisoned by an evil medicine man.The evil spirit down the wellIn June 2010 in the Mandara Mountains on the other side of the Extreme North province a village well was broken, and so two men climbed down the well to fix it. They didn’t come back up. A third man was sent down to see what was going on. He didn’t come back up. The village medicine man was summoned, and sent down the well to try and cast protective magic against whatever was down there. He didn’t come back up. A fifth man was sent down with an oxygen tank andattached to a harness. He called up from the bottom of the well that they should haul him up. Half way up he called that he felt strange. By the time he reached the surface he was dead.I heard this story from Tchipounama and Doubla, the RESAEC volunteer at the commune.“Perhaps it was carbon monoxide poisoning?” I suggested. “No, no,” they told me firmly. “There was some kind of evil spirit down that well, and it didn’t want anyone who had seen it to make it out alive.”The only consolation for all of this evil witchcraft in the neighbourhood is that people tell me it’s worse over the border in Nigeria, where sorcerers sell human body parts on the open market as if they were fish.