The Encounter

By Anthony Muchoki , originally published 2005.

You wouldn’t know she is a traditional healer.  She is a light skinned woman, tantalizingly beautiful and in the prime of her life. She is aged 35 but resembles a young girl in her early twenties. Walking with a light gait, her busy eyes and smiling lips tell it all. It’s like they are shouting out. “I’m in control”.

She is in a flowery blouse, well matching her red skirt, with a true African woman’s stride, full hips, fleshy, and with nicely plaited hair. Her refreshingly sweet young girlish look denotes no care in the world calling the world to her attention.

Any one would have mistaken her for a top white-collar roller; as of late many women are emerging. Yes, especially if she has picked you up with her brand new blue Toyota Prado, the current craze of women high rollers in Randiera City.

She picked me up at the Landmark Hotel. After the normal niceties, we shared beverages and started our business. A friend had told me she was a highly gifted traditional doctor and had introduced me to her. That was about four months ago at Steers Restaurant in the city centre.

I jumped at the occasion, and politely asked her if she would grant me an interview regarding her trade. She refused to but took my phone number and promised to call me one day. She refused to give me her contact and warned me not to try to get them from her friend.

“When the time comes, I will call you,” she solemnly told me. She had left with a smile of contentment on her face. My mind simply refused to associate her with witchcraft. She was the total embodiment of modernity, and I could simply not comprehend how she could be in that trade.

True to her word one month later she phoned me. As we drove to her home-cum-office, I was in a state of excitement and fear. I was about to have a first hand experience with witchcraft.

 “Why do you want to write about witchcraft?” she asked me.

“It’s an interesting subject that will intrigue our readers. Secondly, I don’t believe in it, though that does not mean that it does not exist.”

I tried to ask her some questions, all of which she brushed aside. Soon we were in one of the city’s upmarket suburbs. She honked as she stopped the car in front of a magnificent gate. A guard opened it majestically.  She drove in and parked the car in an enclosed garage. The house was a big two-story mansion with a beautiful and large mature garden. Talk about the good life! The inside was exotically furnished. I noted that the curtains and seat covers matched her dress, shoes, bangles and necklace.

She went to the kitchen and came back with a tray of fruits. The colour of the tray and the plates also matched her dress.

My mind was full of a whirlwind of questions.

“Eat and from there I can feed your curiosity which I can plainly see. I will let you know what I want you to know and what you can,” she told me as she served me with ripe bananas.

I was now fully convinced she was not a traditional healer. She was just too sophisticated and modern. Maybe, a con artist but not a witch. She spoke perfect English and she had earlier told me she was a university graduate.

Finally, the time I was waiting for came. She took me to her office, labeled “Doctor’s room”.  Instead of opening the door she uttered some unintelligible words. The door opened by itself automatically. Now I was afraid to go in. With a commanding baritone, she ordered me in.

It was a normal office with several of her life portraits on the walls. There was an executive desk and all the usual office paraphernalia.  In fact, it looked like a perfectly typical CEO”s home office. She sat down and I did the same. She took a beautiful small coloured stone that was on top of her table. She was silent for a time, just fondling it. Suddenly her voice, as if coming from a great distance, chanted as she left her seat to jump up and down.

“Strong enough for a man

But made for a woman,

Life is a witch

When you  fly

To clean up the Earth…”

I was scared stiff. To say I was afraid is an understatement. My heart and lungs were almost bursting out of fear and bewilderment.

  “You said you don’t believe there is witchcraft, now in the next one hour I will fly you to South Africa,” she solemnly told me.

I was getting more than I had bargained for. I didn’t want to fly to South Africa in a witch’s plane.

“I believe, I believe,” I shouted.

“Please, I will never doubt your powers again,” I told her.

  “You are forgiven but as you write your story if you dare mention my name or where I live, I will come to you like a tornado. I will strangle you every night and make your life a hell on earth. Never give anyone my contact. Otherwise, you are welcome to see me any time you wish,” she told me.

“Where did you get these powers?”

“I inherited the powers from my grandmother. She was a herbalist, a rainmaker and a fortune teller. I avidly recall when I was a very young girl; there came a murderous rainfall that obstinately refused to stop for two days. It was full of lightning and thunders that were cutting across the land like the angel of death.  After three days she called and gave me a very small stone, the very one you see here. She told me to toss it up four times in rhyme of a few centimetres up. The moment I did it the rain stopped. She was so happy. And she told me her time was up and she was going to bequeath me her powers. The sacred stone became mine.

“Take the mantle,” she said to me and grimly instructed me not to discuss the issue with anyone, not even my parents and to wait till I was old enough to practice, then I’d be free and powerful to follow the will of nature. That very night she died.

I kept the stone and the secret for many years. I finished my primary and secondary school. Later I went to university and somehow along the way, became a very good Christian.  Five years ago, my grandmother, came in spirit and reminded me that the time was ripe.

I went to the village I come from where I had buried the stone next to my grandma’s grave. God was with me as I got the stone in place.  The moment I touched it, power filled me, I have never been the same again.”

She was telling me the story of her life. Her presence was overwhelming and charming. The questions I had planned to ask her melted over my head and all I could do was to nod at what she was telling me.

To demonstrate her power she lightly touched me with the magic stone. For a moment I was lost, then I thought I was hallucinating. I saw my best friend who was miles away in another country. He was doing his chores; it was like in a movie.  Later I called him to confirm what activity he was doing around that particular time. What he told me, was exactly what I had seen him do in the “movie.”

The lady spent almost an hour explaining to me how she does not use her powers for evil but just for healing and empowering people for good.  When the weather gets too dry, she claimed she could make rain. When there was too much rain, she said she could stop it as well.

She avidly studies books on witchcraft from all over the world and true to her word there was a library full of such books. According to her, negative connotations attached to witchcraft were a creation of the colonialist, Christianity as well as other modern religions. All have associated it with the devil and evil which is a gross misrepresentation, she said.

“Yes, there are witches who harm children and other people. But not me I heal, I provide good luck and I open closed wombs. I never play dirty games,” she told me.

“When a person approaches me to send evil spells to someone else, I don’t do it. I take no such money,” she continued with her monologue, as I was speechless. 

“Believe me, I am a good woman. I believe abortion is evil, and I preach faithfulness as the solution to the HIV/Aids menace.

I can heal selected people out of HIV/Aids, the ones who got it genuinely by accident but not the ‘don’t cares’. Once an Aids patient calls me I can instantly tell how he got it, and instantly tell him whether my powers will work on him or not. You better call me a medicine woman, that is what I am.”

Then she turned to the business of fortune telling. Fortunately, the predictions she made about my future were almost exactly in line of my projections, and were favourable.

Later, as she drove me back to town, I could only marvel at the beautiful modern witchcraft practiced by this lady. I could no longer deny witchcraft’s existence, and I admitted as much to her.

When I told her such a beautiful woman with a strong and clear personality like her should not be in that trade, she just smiled my comments away. Then she asked me what other job I thought was suitable for her. I told her, “Could be because you have a magnetic personality, you can make a good politician.”

I don’t know what was so funny about it. She really choked with laughter and had to park the car sideways to finish her fits of laughter. From there we did not talk much until she dropped me just outside the Steers in city centre. 

As I got out of the car she promised another date, but told me to keep her secrets with myself.

“Don’t give my name to anyone, don’t include my personal data in your story, good luck, see you again,” she told me and drove away.