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A reliance on the supernatural still permeates African society. Now it is not about dealing with nature, but managing the strains of modern life
Fourteen years ago, Mbitini was a nondescript village in eastern Kenya with no electricity, rutted roads and a solitary bar. It still has no electricity, but today boasts five bars, ten guest houses, ten butcheries, two markets, seven churches and now needs its own police station. Its brightly painted shops are bustling with customers.
This is all thanks to Dr Kilungya Mwinzila, the best-known witch doctor in Ukambani, a hilly region famous for its wizards, herbalists, enchanted rocks and connection with the supernatural world. Dr Kilungya is the reason scores of vehicles wend their way up to the Yatta plateau from Nairobi every weekend. He sells a commodity Kenyans can't seem to get enough of in these uneasy times: peace of mind.
In 1992, Dr Kilungya came up with a simple potion, called ng'ata, made from the arterial blood, neck and intestines of a goat. Visitors are allotted numbers - "it's just like a clinic", explains a local - and wait to be summoned. One by one, they lick a stick dipped in the fluid and listen to incantations by Dr Kilungya and his sons. If they practise the dark arts, locals say, they will swell up to five times their normal size and their intestines will fall out. But if they are innocent, ordinary mortals, they leave having received a supernatural "vaccination", protecting them from the spells of those who wish them harm. "Everyone visits our place," boasts Mac Kilungya, one of the great man's apprentices. "We get MPs, university graduates, Christians - although those come in secret. They come from all over Kenya, even from Tanzania and Uganda. Ng'ata is very powerful."
Nominally illegal, abhorred by the established churches, witchcraft is alive and kicking in Kenya. Even as East Africa's most sophisticated nation urbanises, even as mobile-phone masts sprout on remote hillsides and graduates tap at keyboards in the capital's high-rises, the country's appetite for the supernatural grows. What is true of Kenya is true of much of Africa, although you will rarely get a hint of it from the western press. On this topic, the media fall prey to a form of convoluted racism, amused by such practices as feng shui, astrology and crystal healing when practised by westerners, terrified of standing accused of pandering to colonial-era stereotypes if "Africa" and "witchcraft" appear in the same sentence.
Magic permeates modern African society. MPs use it before elections, football teams apply it to psyche out their rivals, students resort to it before exams. Shop owners use it to destroy rivals, Aids sufferers in a desperate attempt to survive. Founded on the philosophical conviction that everything happens for a purpose, it satisfies a spiritual craving recognised by the media-savvy evangelical American preachers who have taken, in growing numbers, to targeting the continent's teeming slums, a need not being met by the established churches. "Here in Africa it is much more obvious than in the west that we cannot control the universe or even understand it," says Professor Cyrus Mutiso, a development consultant. "Magic seems to explain the unexplainable, and that is why people feel they need it."
But for Professor Mutiso, what he calls the "new magic" differs fundamentally from the traditional variety practised in African villages before Europe's missionaries arrived; this involved an entire community and aimed to maintain a subtle harmony between man and the natural world. The new magic, in contrast, echoes life as it is experienced today by millions of Africans, with all its crushing economic pressures and solitary anxieties. "Magic is changing to fit the urban mess. It's now all about the individual: the community doesn't come into it, and it tends to focus on money."
Ng'ata illustrates the depressing nature of the new magic perfectly: here is a charm based on the assumption that the outside world is out to get you. It's a potion premised on paranoia, a terrible insight into how hostile many Kenyans believe their surroundings to be. They have seen living standards plummet since independence and the promises of democracy wither and die.
"The whole thing is based on fear, and capitulation to fear," says Father Paul Healy, of Ukambani's Kitui Catholic diocese. "It does nothing to enhance the dignity of the human person. Ng'ata is not going to protect anyone from the real evils of this country. The only thing that will is education and empowerment of the people. Instead of lifting people up, ng'ata subjugates them."
Those same economic and social strains may explain the harrowing cases of exorcisms of "bewitched" children in London's Central African community, which preoccupied the British media last year. Asylum-seeking families tend, by definition, to be families with problems. One way of releasing those tensions is to shift responsibility on to the shoulders of a naughty child, then lance the boil with exorcism.
This response lies behind a much-reported phenomenon in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where growing numbers of "witch" children are being abandoned by families desperate to shed a mouth to feed. The saddest thing about these cases is that the street children themselves believe the calumny, accepting that they are indeed witches.
While church and state authorities may fret over the popularity of mysterious ceremonies conducted in smoky huts, it is safe to predict that witchcraft will prosper as long as Africa's crisis endures. Pragmatic in the extreme, most Africans are as skilled at holding a belief in witchcraft beside their official faith as they are at juggling tribal and national identities with rural and urban personas. Why buy one lottery ticket, when you can invest in a range? After all, magic usually works if you think it will. An entrepreneur who has paid a witch doctor to bring him good luck will be more aggressive in business; a student who believes he cannot fail will do better in exams; and a woman who has bought a love charm will believe herself irresistible, and lure her victim into bed.
The self-fulfilling nature of the experience is amply demonstrated in the case of the Kwa Matingi Co-operative Society near Matungulu, on the road between Ukambani and Nairobi. When the coffee co-operative began being plagued by thefts of beans and equipment, with hundreds of bushes set alight, the directors suspected dissident members of plotting a takeover.
By 2003 things had got so bad that they took a step others might regard as unusual, but which seemed natural to them. They applied to the local district officer for permission to use the kithitu, a cursing oath so powerful it is said to last seven generations, killing children, grandchildren, even livestock. A holy man was summoned and the night before the ceremony, missing equipment miraculously reappeared. The co-operative's members were all then administered kithitu. "Since then, we have had no trouble," smiles George Munyoli, the administrative manager. "I would recommend this technique to any manager."
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