I was very young when I was visited by snakes. My mother used to find them rolling themselves in the bed next to me. I was only two years old.

She said that her friend did this. Her friend was the one who wanted me dead because she wanted to hurt my mother. The witches had a late night meeting where they discussed which target they had to kill. I was one of those targets, along with my family.

Those witches were our neighbours, but it took time for us to realise who was destroying our family. We were supposed to die like cattle, one after another.

My mother told me that she didn’t understand why I am still alive because the big anaconda came almost every night while everyone was sleeping. The witches had killed many people in our area. Though we knew their names, we were told not to tell anyone; otherwise we would be calling death upon ourselves.

In that place, everyone lived in fear and doubting ‘God’ had become a normal thing. People had turned against Jesus because they said that they couldn’t see his miracles anymore.

The Eastern Cape had become a land where the witches performed their mysterious evils and cast of spells on people, but my family was still holding on. Only prayer kept us going. The witches were scared of prayer; it chases them away and causes them to faint. In the Eastern Cape you don’t walk in the dark. If you did you were a dead man walking.

When I was still young my mother had decided to go to a sangoma. She was told that the only reason we were still alive was because a member of our family that had died long ago was protecting us. I believed her when she told me, because we have escaped so many deadly accidents that would’ve taken us all to emkhathini.

People believe that emkhathini is just a joke or a lie in the Bible, but it exists, truly. My mother was attacked when she was pregnant. She was sleeping, but then a strange thing happened. She was being taken from the hospital. She thought she was just dreaming, but she heard voices of people crying and she saw me holding a snake. Such vision is proof of its existence.

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Tell us what you think: Do you believe in such things as witches and emkhathini?