Witch doctor and sanguma

WHEN a male infant of a clan leader died in my village, a witch doctor or ‘ai dokta’ was engaged to identify who actually ‘sanguma’ the baby boy.
But before that ‘ai dokta’ could apply her own investigative powers in the process to reveal and identify the sanguma culprits, the villagers decided to test out her witch powers first.
The test is very important in two respects.
Firstly to ensure that the witch doctor does not tell lies in the quest for rewards (cash and kind), and that she actually possess some real supernatural powers.
Secondly to safe guard the lives of innocent people who may be falsely accused as sanguma.
The test was that we put a live, healthy chicken in a house free of dogs, snakes, cats etc.
The door is locked while the witch doctor was put in another adjoining house and requested to kill the chicken using her sanguma powers.
The witch doctor agreed with our conditions or task given.
But the interesting part is that she told us beforehand, precisely how she will act to kill that live chicken.
Using her wasp sanguma, she said she would go into the tip of the left of the chicken’s wing, and would travelled into its heart and would squeeze and tear it apart,
The chicken would die afterwards.
That act of killing the chicken would happen in the darkness when people were not watching.
So there was tight security all night between the two houses.
In the morning, when the door of the house that had the chicken was opened, it was found dead.
The witch doctor was also brought out from the other house.
When the people unfeathered the chicken and started to skin it, they saw a six inch nail -sized hole in the tip of the left wing.
When they operated the chicken’s internals, they found its heart smashed.
The people were ready to believe what the witch doctor would say afterwards.
I had never believed sanguma story since my childhood as I was brought up in a Christian home.
When the chicken was killed by a sanguma through this test, I began to realise that if the devil is real than sanguma is real too.
Using licensed and qualified witch doctors, it’s easy to identify all the sangumas in a village or area and put them into perspective and hold them to account.

Moli Kaupa
KelemaKeli Village
Jabiru Drive