Academic studies have been written on why witch-killing became pathological among the Sukuma. A Tanzanian anthropologist, Simeon Masaki, concluded that it was a direct consequence of a clash between a state strategy of modernisation and a peasantry with its roots embedded in tradition – in effect, that social dislocation opened the way to a descent into mass hysteria.
MY FRIEND Randal Sadleir had a few stories about witchcraft. He was a district commissioner in Handeni where the chief was Salim Mhapi, a doughty old warrior who had been decorated for bravery as a member of von Lettow Vorbeck’s Schutztruppe. In 1953 the chief fell ill. A missionary doctor was called in but could find nothing wrong with him.
Randal went to see him. ‘I have been bewitched,’ the chief said. Nothing could shift him from this conviction, and he soon died.
After the funeral, mourners were returning in a lorry which overturned. A number of people were killed, including Randal’s messenger. Deeply distressed himself, he returned the body of the young man to his distraught family. They were adamant that the accident was a result of the original curse on Chief Mhapi.
Two years later Randal was in Dar es Salaam and was invited to meet the rising star of the African nationalist movement, a young teacher named Julius Nyerere. They drank brandy at the Cosy Café and Randal was impressed. Nyerere, a chief’s son but a devout Roman Catholic, had recently returned from Edinburgh University trailing laurels. He was witty and cultivated. Somehow the subject of witchcraft came up.
‘I said that in the rural areas where I had served we came across a good deal of it. I felt a bit of a fool talking to this brilliant chap about witches, and said quickly that I was sure it didn’t happen among educated people in Dar. He looked at me shrewdly and said in his high-pitched voice: “Randal, I can tell you – the most important thing in the lives of people in Dar is witchcraft.”’
THE AMERICAN MISSIONARIES were taking stock of the Sukumaland ministry. We were seated in a comfortable old colonial house outside Mwanza but the prognosis was bleak.
‘I’m pissed off at Satan – I’m pissed off as hell. You see, I know it’s not fake. This is real demonology.’ They murmured in agreement. The speaker was Dale, a pilot and Vietnam veteran. He looked like an ageing hippie, with long locks and beard, cowboy boots and thin legs encased in denims, but his experience was of a medieval world. He was a pastor, his wife a nurse, on the islands of the lake.
I had met them after booking my passage on the ship crossing the lake that night. My instinct was to flee from evangelicals but they had shamed me by their hospitality and as Dale spoke I was drawn in to the dark, outlandish, compelling world he described.
‘The islands have always been a refuge for outcasts, criminals and fugitives. Mainlanders are frightened of the lake, they believe demons collect over the water, and they do everything they can to avoid it. The islanders say “Vita uya bara” – which kind of means that the mainland is at war with them.’
There were about sixty inhabited islands in the Tanzanian sector, forested and jagged outcrops of ironstone rising hundreds of feet from the lake, in two main archipelagos. A few of the bigger ones, such as Ukerewe, were served by ferries and some form of administration, but most existed entirely beyond the pale. Anyone, no matter how heinous their past, would be accepted, provided they submitted to the culture of the island. Each was a kind of independent pariah state.
No one knew the numbers living out in the lake but Dale said they had been growing rapidly. Freed criminals had always been drawn by the absence of formal constraints. In recent years people fleeing accusations of witchcraft and refugees from Rwanda and Burundi had followed. Now outcast Aids sufferers were joining the migration. The upshot was a social laboratory in which all the ills of the mainland were stimulated to grow in hothouse conditions. Dale conjured up a place of terrible dread. Aids levels were 25 per cent higher than the mainland and growing. New schools of witchcraft were being spawned and he was frequently accosted by individuals showing all the signs of possession.
‘These things have always been there but it’s worse now and for one reason – Aids. Once Western medicine could solve the problems. This time we don’t have an answer. We’re not Superman any more. Aids has sent people back to the witchdoctors.’
It was at this point that Dale launched his outburst against Satan. After a while he went on. ‘You know our biggest mistak? We have failed to address the Africans’ innermost fear – that terrible, daily fear of being bewitched.’
‘I agree,’ chimed in Andrew, a young Englishman. ‘We have taken centuries of our gospel benefits for granted. We have our nice cosy security and we don’t talk about sorcery any more. The people are embarrassed to raise it with us, so the whole thing is swept under the carpet.’ It was time, they agreed, to confront the threat. ‘We’ve got to say, “we understand your fears, we know there is evil out there, and we are going to stand by you and see you through this.”’
For all their earnest determination, I wondered whether they were not sometimes tempted to give it all up.
‘I can’t,’ said Dale.
I had noticed that he walked with a limp. A few months earlier he had fallen off his motorcycle. The accident was quite minor but his leg was broken and complications set in. He spent months in hospital and nearly lost the leg.
‘I can’t go,’ he said again. ‘The people believe the accident happened because I’ve been bewitched by someone in our village. If I leave it means that power is stronger. I’ve got to stay to show we can take on the powers of darkness and win.’
It sounded like a life sentence. For a moment I thought I detected a hint of fear as if, isolated as they were here, witchcraft was more real a threat than any of them was prepared to admit. For me, it was time to sail. They said a prayer for my safe journey, for which I was grateful, and I left them to their demons.
THE MV VICTORIA was a proper ship. She had wooden decks off which shuttered doors led to neat little cabins, companionways, a single round funnel, and a rail at the stern over which you could watch the foam being churned up by her screws. She was a product of the Yarrow shipyards and was launched in 1959 when colonials might spend a week sailing around the lake, calling at ports in Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika while being well fed and marvelling from the afterdeck over a sundowner on the magnificence of this imperial domain. I settled into a seat at the bar with Nostromo, a cold Safari and a sense of deep contentment.
Impressive though they were, simple dimensions did bare justice to the Nyanza. Roughly rectangular, it was 230 miles at its longest point from north to south and 160 miles in breadth. Its area of 25,285 square miles could contain Wales three and a half times. More than size though, it exuded an elemental power.
Environmentally, it was a mess. Once an evolutionary biologist’s dream, with a range of hundreds of tiny perch-like fish called haplochromine cichlids that offered a unique laboratory for the study of Darwinian theory because they were descended from a common ancestor, the lake had been infested by alien flora and fauna to pernicious effect. Nile perch, Lates niloticus, a large, voracious species, was introduced in the 1950s to stimulate fishing but had caused ecological disaster. The cichlids, potentially more significant for evolutionary studies than the finches of the Galapagos, had been severely reduced in numbers.
Another invader, the water hyacinth, had spread across the lake like an oil slick from a breached tanker. This floating mass of weed, Eichhornia crassipes, appeared in the Nile swamps of Sudan in the 1950s but only reached the lake thirty years later. Since then it had become a plague to those dependent upon the lake for their living, obstructing fishermen, choking ports and disrupting the generation of hydro-electric power.
For the dugout fishermen who had worked these waters for millennia, the Nyanza was the giver and taker of life. Its appearance of calm immensity was deceptive, as storms came blowing out of the darkness with terrifying suddenness and force. Their world was described by John Roscoe, one of the earliest and finest