SOCIETY


Juju for Love

By Patrick Bwanali

It is 1980. You are in love. At 15 hours, you feel the urge to see your lovely one. There are no cell phones. There is no one to call her for you. You still need to meet her.
What do you do? Do you start shouting her name? What if she is some kilometers from where you are? Posting a letter to her means you are surely not meeting her on that particular day and hour you want. How did they do it then? How did the big men then call their spouses? Stories from the eighties, told by people that cannot be named here because they are “happily married”, tell us how it happened.

Isaac, not his real name, clad in a black bell-bottom trousers matched with a blue shirt and unmatched with a red tie, kneels close to the half opened front door of his gowero. What he is holding in his hands is a broken clay pot, christened phale with burning charcoal in it. The half opened door brings with it its own misfortunes.
The ash spreads to the shirt with the help of the first breeze finding its own way inside. He does not care. He knows that the act he is about to perform will bring with it the most wanted result; to see his most loved one. Alone in the house, he starts to say what looks like the prepared text. Not caring that the passers by may hear him, he begins, ‘Joyce!’ Faintly. He clears his throat. ‘Joyce!’ Convinced that the voice is audible enough he continues. ‘I am your boyfriend, Isaac, and wherever you are, please, leave anything you are doing and come here. Your man is dying to see you.’
Within some minutes, depending on the distance the girl is, she knocks on the door. Isaac feigns surprise at seeing her. Mwitano has done its magic. No phone but, whatever the powers mwitano had, the girl is here in his arms.
This is what used to happen when some couples wanted to meet. What about in circumstances when a man sees an attractive woman but does not have the guts to go for her?
Here too men had their own ways of winning women. Stories say that only a strong man who cultivated could find a better wife.

Gender or Juju?

There were still other cases where strength alone was not a passport to a good wife. Men could be blessed with all the strengths but lacked skills in sweet talk. The lazy ones could end up having better and well-looking women. Therefore, men tattooed their tongues with charms. Whatever they said to the women would be gospel truth and sweet. With the tattoos, men were victorious. Such was the belief so common.
Those who use the sword will die by the sword themselves. Knowing that women could use magic too, men kept themselves immune from any juju. Women could also make men love them as if they were a religion. This meant just staying at home. It was not just staying at home alone but also doing chores that were considered womanly.
Men sought magical powers that, whenever any charmed food was brought to them, the plates would on their own turn. This was a warning that the food contained love charms. Or the food would crack.
What if they were not given any food? How would one know that he was in danger of love? Men went further. A gentle handshake could cause unbearable pain to the recipient who had prepared the love charms. In this case, the woman would either cry with pain or the facial expression would warn the man that there was no peace between them.
However, not all charm stories were succesful. Many dubious muti found its way on the market. Some men, while oozing with confidence that they were going to propose with the blessing of the artificial wounds on their tongues, ended up been rebuffed. Others, despite not knowing that they had been given fake juju, went with self-belief and in the end, came out prospective sons-in-law.
Beliefs die hard. It is not uncommon nowadays to hear that some young people are using juju to achieve some goals. Have you ever tried it? You could give testimony to whether charms are as effective today as they were in 1980.

Juju And Its Repurcussions For the past 30 to 40 years, Malawians have been known to be good at juju as compared to other people in this region. This association of Malawians with juju came to be when a Malawian from Mulanje was returning home from work in gold mines in South Africa. He met a hooker from Botswana the night before catching a flight home. Sangoma at work On the morning of the following day, this Mulanje man discovered that almost all his earnings he had sweated for in the mines had been stolen. When asked, the woman denied taking anything. The man told her that, if indeed she had taken the money, she shouldn't spend a coin; if she is to spend any, she should keep some for buying her own coffin. It started with her siblings dying one by one in a short space of time. Then it was her mother, her father ... The time she revealed, it was too late! She, too, died. * * * A certain man in his fifties married a girl thirty years his junior. The girl was very out-going, lively and all that fashionable girls do these days, which was not in line with a guy in his fifties. She could go out on Friday nights, leaving the ‘old man’ at home, coming back in the early hours of the next day or the other. The man sought help from a ng’anga to make his beloved young beauty stay at home. The ng’anga asked him to fetch a heart of a puppy. The man quickly brought the heart and the ng’anga made the charms for him to mix with his dear one’s food. Our friend did as instructed. What resulted was a disaster. The girl could not move an inch. She couldn’t even go outside the house from then on. She could not go to a tuck shop just across the road, opposite their house. * * * Though shall not eat mud fish (mlamba). He followed it to the letter. One, two, three, he changed girls. Just a cough, ndalola, girls accepted every proposal he made to them. The day came when he fell hungry. One temptation, he ate. Ten, nine, eight... the number of girlfriends began to fall till he fasted for forty days but never found one. “I will never use juju again in order for me to find a lover”, he swore.

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© Montfort Media, 2007