Features
Witches and family revolutions
It is now quite fashionable to collapse your own business and blame witches. You only have to sharpen a cutlass and chase your grandmother out of the house and everyone blames her for the financial virus that has infected you.
It is not quite certain, however, whether Satan should be held responsible for every misdeed of man. A pastor rapes an eight-year old girl and quickly blames Satan to save his neck, knowing that Mr Lucifer would not be around to defend himself.
A man deliberately takes four powerful quarters of local gin and goes directly to his mother-in-law to slap her on the eye. At the Sanhedrin, he blames Satan. “The devil made me do it, he’d grin like an idiot.
I think one of these days, Satan would have to appear on the scene in person with a horrifying face and declare: “As for this one, I don’t know anything about it. I am tired of being blamed for every bad thing. Henceforth, I’ll appear to defend myself. If possible I’ll bring along a demon who has a Master’s degree in Law, to act as my defence lawyer.”
We all know that the devil is not a straight-forward individual. At best he is as crooked as a snake suffering from diarrhoea. According to the Bible he was someone of noble birth until he misinterpreted, misquoted and misrepresented the heavenly motto “ORDER IS THE FIRST LAW IN HEAVEN”.
The devil in fact changed it to mean “CONFUSION IS THE FIRST LAW IN HEAVEN”. This was tantamount to staging a coup d’etat.
Although the devil pleaded not guilty, the trial was swift. There was no ‘I put it to you’ business, and a ready conviction saw the descent of the evil one from heaven to earth. Since then, he was supposed to be the cause of every bad thing on earth.
If there is a lorry accident as a result of wrongful overtaking, he is blamed for it. When a man is jilted by his girlfriend, the devil made her do it.
A man suffers from constipation and the devil is surely responsible for it. The devil must have put a “road block” in his rectum and cemented it.
I guess the day Jimmy Satan would be brought physically to a court or tribunal, the charges against him will be uncountable.
He knows it, so he won’t dare appear in the dock to listen to constipation charges. Even if he’d enjoy free legal aid, he won’t.
But let’s come down to this devil-blaming matter. Satan is surely destructive and red-eyed demons can cause havoc of unimaginable proportions.
However, is it reasonable for a man to blame the devil for his own carelessness or senselessness as in the case of a reckless driver getting maimed in an accident?
The reason why most people do not progress in life is that they are quick to blame their failures on others. A man who mismanages his business and the enterprise collapses on his head has no justification going to blame his grandmother for it. Not when he spent half the capital on women, and the profits on booze and takeaways.
As it were, some of our beliefs and superstitions are not helping us. When a typical Caucasian’s business is collapsing, he takes pen and paper and honestly lists the possible causes of his failing endeavours. If he can’t do it himself, he hires the services of a consultant. The business is, therefore, examined in all its forms through crevice, from all facets an angles.
It has nothing to do with witches flying at night, and at the end of it, the business rises up again. This is because the businessman has done some introspection and has got to know that he may have been misapplying his capital on a lousy woman. So he’s got to choose between saving his business or keeping the woman. The choice is entirely his and his grandmother has nothing to do with it.
A superstitious African would look at it differently. First, he doesn’t want to blame himself for his failings. Second, he has been indoctrinated to Revolutions doctrinated to believe that witches and demons can make and unmake.
Third, that old relatives are friendly in person but dangerous in spirit especially at night. And four, that there is a common witch behind the fall of every business, behind every incidence of poverty and behind every daily constipation.
So when he is not managing his business properly and is losing money, he begins imagining things. Instead of sitting down and calculating how much he has been milked by the waist-swinging lady in his extra-marital life, he’d start frowning at the old lady at home.
When she greets him, he’d growl, “Leave me alone, you witch! At night you won’t sleep. You’ll be flying from North to South. You’ll see!”
This is a prelude to the sharpening of cutlasses to launch a family revolution.
The papers report it every day. Young men are butchering their mothers, grandmothers, mothers-in-law, sisters-in-law for their poverty, their illnesses, whatever.
Witches can cause some of these things, but it would be fallacious to assume that they are responsible for all our woes when in eight out of 10 cases we should be blaming ourselves.
In any case, if you believe a witch is making you poor, why not go to Jesus instead of butchering your old lady? The battle against the devil is not a physical one.
It is not a heavyweight contest or a kenkey-weight brawl. Neither is it a cutlass palaver. It has to do with prayer and nothing else. So go to Jesus The Christ.
If you are a Muslim go to Allah. And surely go to Budha if you are a Buddhist. Whatever it is, stop butchering the old ladies!
This article was published
on Saturday, October 19, 1996
Merari Alomele’s