At school, I once had a heated debate with my class teacher about witchcraft. I said witchcraft doesn’t exist, period, and she said it does. I remember we went back and forth, raising points to support our statements, but, when it seemed we weren’t near reaching any form of an agreement, she said something that even today has stuck with me. She said that for the mere fact that the word ‘witchcraft’ exists, it is enough proof that there must be witchcraft. After that, I did not have any come-back, so we ended our debate there.

Years later. someone close to me got so sick that we had to take him to the clinic and then to the hospital. When we got there, the doctor and the nurses couldn’t find anything wrong with him. He was a fit, young man who exercised a lot. So they, too, couldn’t understand what was wrong with him. He was coughing a lot. We thought he had TB, judging by how severe his cough was, but the doctor ruled it out after the tests. They assumed he had asthma because of the way he was coughing. It was like the air couldn’t pass on his throat when he was coughing. It sounded like he was running out of breath.

So, of course, he was given pills. A lot of them. Most of them were so big that I wondered if he will be able to pass them down his throat. But still, his condition didn’t improve. His mother was then advised by the people in the township to take the traditional route and discard the western doctors. She did that. The traditional healers they took this boy to all said the same thing. They said he was bewitched by a neighbour. The traditional healers gave him a lot of concoctions to drink and some to bathe with, and he did that. I testify that his condition showed great signs of improvement. It was clear that these traditional healers were spot on about him being bewitched. I mean, they managed to cure him when doctors couldn’t, so that means they were correct, right? Right.

It didn’t end there. One traditional healer told this boy that in the beginning of that month, there would be a person who would ask him for money, and he shouldn’t give it to him. Indeed, that happened. When the boy refused by saying he didn’t have money, this person insisted. He even reduced the amount he’d asked for. At first, he asked for R10. When the boy refused, he said ok R5 will do. The boy still refused. You could tell that that person was furious that he wasn’t given the money. So from these experiences, I started to fully believe in the existence of witchcraft. I believed from there that there are people among us who are witches.

If you ask me now if I still believe in witchcraft, I would say I am not sure. What changed, you ask me? Well, there are a lot of discrepancies to witchcraft, which need urgent clarification. Like, why is it that it is always women who are accused of witchcraft and not men? Why is it that when we open the news, it is always the old women who are torched to death by their community members because they were suspected of practising witchcraft, and not the old men? Are men, especially old men, not capable of practising witchcraft? What is this, then, saying to people? That women are dangerous, especially when they are old and living alone?

It is because of these questions that I find it hard to believe in witchcraft. I can’t believe in something that is used as a weapon against women. Witchcraft seems to always find women and not men, and if I believe in it, it would say a lot about me. Old women in this country who are widows are not safe in their villages. They are targeted in the name of witchcraft. Their properties get burned down and destroyed, and that’s if they are not killed first. I don’t want to talk about those old women who are battling with mental illnesses because theirs is even worse and heart-searing. In Soweto this year, one woman by the name of Jostina Sangweni was murdered because she was found in someone’s yard at 11 PM, lost. People said she was a witch as she didn’t know where she was and how she got there. It was later found out that she was schizophrenic.

Have you ever heard of such cases but with men as victims? No. It is always women. A man can cheat on his partner, and if something bad happens to that woman he is cheating with, they will accuse the one who was cheated on of bewitching the mistress. If it is the other way around, they will accuse the mistress, saying she is trying to eliminate her so she can win the man. They never accuse the man, even if is clear as daylight that he is in the middle of it all. Like a compass needle that points north, the society’s accusing finger always finds a woman, just to paraphrase what the international acclaimed Afghan-American author, Khaled Hosseini said.