Ghost Stories

According to common consensus, Mombasa is a city of ghosts.

I discovered this last night when I was talking to Jerome. There is a big painted sheet hanging from a tree down the road from us that advertises the services of a Ugandan witchdoctor, claiming cures for everything from STDs to malaria. I told Jerome I wanted to go see the man. We know the government sponsored ideas on health, but nothing about folk remedies or sorcery. I think it would be fascinating to see another side to health in Africa.

Unfortunately, witchdoctors aren't people you just waltz in to talk to. Jerome, Lucy, Abigail and Marion (one of the guests staying here) all offered to take us, but patently refused to go inside. This leaves us at a bit of a disadvantage, since none of us speak anything but English and I have a feeling that communication could get difficult. And really, you want to make sure you can be clearly understood when dealing with witchdoctors. It just seems like misunderstandings aren't something you want to aim for.

This ended up sparking a discussion with Jerome wherein he tried to explain to us exactly why he wasn't going to mess with sorcery. We kept calling it mere superstitions but he rejected that word, and said that he wasn't superstitious, he just wasn't an idiot. And then he explained why.

You wear a cross, so you cant go to see a witch doctor.
Depending on how you treat them, they may be very nice to you, or they may curse you.
You'll walk in and they will know your name, and start telling you how your mother is back at home in America.
You will come home from visiting a witchdoctor and he will send things to you in the night, things that rain dirt or rocks down on your bed, or send plague-ish insects after you, or he will bewitch you so that you get out of bed in your sleep, walk outside, dig a grave and then walk back to bed. You will wake up with mud on your legs and not remember how it got there.
If you sleep with the window open, things will crawl in, or a disembodied hand will stretch through the net and clamp around your throat.
In Mombasa, there are ghosts. They take the form of cats, or beautiful women, or just a nice man you meet on the street. You have a conversation with the, buy them drinks, maybe go to bed with them, and you wake up with your body entwined with a snake. Or you go to turn out the light and the person next to you stretches their hand all the way across the room and flips it off. Or a cat streaks in front of your car and you hit it but then its gone, and in its place is a woman, standing next to your car, smiling.
If you hold a lighter in front of their face and flick the flame, a real person will stay. A ghost will disappear, and if other ghosts see you using a lighter, they will know that you understand them and they will stay away.
You meet someone and they tell you they love you, and you are in trouble because then they kill you, but they are just ghosts.
There was a beautiful woman in the town Jerome lived in, and she slept with two men, and then both of those men died. But you cant ever find the woman. You cant ever find a ghost.
There are people in Mombasa, people from the sea, who morph into half man, half fish, and their legs meld together into one giant scaly tail, and they dive into the sea and drag you with them. You wake up underwater, or lying on a grave, and don't know how you got there.

These are the stories they told us. They all independently verified what the others were saying. They wont take us to a witchdoctor, but I don't blame them. Personally I think that beliefs like this have power only if you believe in them, and the more people who believe in it, the more powerful the beliefs get. I'm not going to sit at a table with Lucy and Jerome and Abigail and tell them that they are just superstitious, that it isn't real, that ghosts don't exist and supernatural powers are impossible. That's not for me to judge. That's not for me to know. But it is interesting because religion and superstition have both everything and nothing to do with each other. Belief in God is normally accompanied by belief that unexplainable events are tinged with divinity. But sorcery and the powers accompanying it are unexplainable, but not divine. No one believes that witchdoctors are gods. There isn't the belief that witchdoctors are working through God, as his messengers. People like Jerome know that witchdoctors are thieves, but they also believe in their power, and believe that that power has nothing to do with God. But that in itself is contradictory.

There is a statue of the Virgin Mary in the church at Isohe. A long time ago, some men tried to steal her from the church, when they were raiding the village. They moved her onto the bed of a truck, but the truck wouldn't start. They tried to carry her, but they couldn't get her past a certain point. But when they took her off the truck and put her back in her niche, the car started just fine. So they left her.
There is also a rock, on the way to Isohe. Its not a big rock, but it cant be moved from where it is. An old man stays by it and doesn't speak. Jerome wont go near it.
There are rainmakers and if you make them angry, they bring the rain. Jerome says you wont see any magic if you don't piss off the rainmaker, or the sorcerer, or the witchdoctor, but I don't particularly want to do that. It seems like poking a hive of bees with a stick.

But I really want to know more about this. The relationship between belief in God and belief in sorcery is a potent one. Even people as modern as can be, as educated and level headed as you can imagine, let flow a fountain of truths about ghosts, and curses, and magic.

I don't know if we will go see the witchdoctor.