Black Magic Woman

Black Magic Woman

We have moved around 3 times since coming to Qolora village.  Initially, we stayed for about 5 days at the first place which was at the awesome open field/braai spots but there wasn’t any water there (well ok there was a river mouth within walking distance) but we were a bit far from the village and we weren’t really getting to meet the locals by living on the outskirts of town.   Except one night when we got a bit spooked by three Xhosa women who could have put a spell on me.  Picture this, dusk settled over the deserted valley.  The wind pumped at a hectic speed strong enough to blow dogs down the hillside and even the cows hooked their horns into the bushes to keep from lifting off the ground and flying off.  We stayed inside while the caravan rocked and swayed.  Then we heard a faint drumming coming from across the river.  Earlier that day we had seen 3 Xhosa ladies dressed to the nines in their traditional outfits, the one woman was kitted out in a crisp white wrap around dress with a matching turban like headgear wrapped a half a meter above her head.  They spent a few hours across the field from where we were camped and I was dying to know what they were up to.  They walked around waving their arms in the air, shaking their sticks at invisible things and seemed to be anointing spirits in the way a priest performing an exorcist does in those PG18 movies when some poor child raised by obsessively religious parents living in a wooden double storey house with long creaky passages needs to be saved from evil demons who take over the child’s body and write coded messages across her stomach and spin her head around 360 degrees before making her vomit green stuff 6 metres across the room. But I digress.  These women blowing around on the field, flaying their arms and chanting, reminded me of something ominous is all I mean.  Then later when the sun slipped behind the hill, the women disappeared and that’s when the drumming started.  It beat rhythmically throughout the whole night while we lay there wondering whether there were people with sticks through their noses dancing around a big black pot suspended over a fire  and if so what was inside the pot?  Then we wondered how far away from us this scene was taking place.  It was pitch dark outside, and the howling wind and the beating drums were our only company in the dead of the night.  At 3am I eventually must have dozed off, deciding that if anyone wanted to cut out my kidneys for a ritual sacrifice there was nothing I could do about it.  The next morning we awoke and the landscape was still the same.  The wind had died and birds sang their morning song in the bushes, although how they managed to still have feathers and not look like pink crinkly naked newborn chicks after that wind sure beats me. Much to my relief, no dead goats’ heads dotted the field and no evil spirits evoked by the Xhosa women had entered my body through my nostrils while I slept.  We did find out a few days later that the women were indeed traditional healers but the night time drumming remained a mystery to us.          

Soon after, we moved from the field to a stunning little enclosure under lush vegetation behind one of the white peoples’ holiday houses.  There are about 20 such houses here, probably of which 5 are permanent residents. Anyway we loved our little Jamaican campsite under the palm trees, 5 meters from a quiet, pristine beach where Theo started catching fish more regularly and which tasted awesome.  Problem there was once again no water but we also were still not part of the village yet.  My idea of having the children visit me to help them with homework and practise their English would probably not likely happen if were settled in the “white” part of town.  We had asked the chief if we could move into the rondavels which we spotted when we first arrived in town but in Africa things happen at their own pace and we were still waiting for their response.  Eventually, after another meeting with the sub chief (the big chief had died the week before we arrived so that also left the villages with more important decisions to make than finding a home for us) we were given the go-ahead.  We could move into a rondavel and have free electricity in exchange for teaching at the school.  I was happy to pack up and move again, having just gotten my strength back after being down for 9 days with tick bite fever. It was my 3^rd time in 3 years and someone had told me that if I pushed through without antibiotics my body would fight it off for good.  I bravely sweated out a continuous headache, aching body and insides that felt like perhaps those women on the hill had removed my kidneys when I wasn’t looking.  You do think of strange things in the middle of the night when you become a bit delirious after 9 consecutive restless nights.       

So finally it was off to the rondavels which offered loads of potential in the way of getting involved in helping the villagers.  We spent two days moving into our wonderful hut with cow dung floors, grass roof and tiny windows overlooking the village on the one side and more open fields on the other.  The water pipe has burst but eventually we will get water but we have electricity, cellphone reception, some furniture and we are in the heart of things.  This is home.