CRASH-LANDING FLYING WIZARDS

by Martin Walsh

When I get round to writing a book on the urban (and rural) legends of East Africa -- yes, I can see you all pointing to the pigs in the sky -- it will definitely include a section on crash-landing flying wizards. Last night I was sifting through a pile of press cuttings made in Tanzania a decade and more ago, and came across the three items that are the subject of this post. Witchcraft and sorcery can be a serious and deadly business, and many of the cuttings that I made at the time were about the ongoing witchcraft killings in Sukumaland (cf. Mesaki 1994) and the moral panic surrounding rumours of a transnational trade in human skins (cf. Sanders 2001). Recent attention has rightly focused on the killing and mutilation of albinos for their body parts, a very real horror that has forced many Tanzanian albinos to seek refuge or go into hiding. By contrast the reports and exchange reproduced below are a reminder that not only is there widespread scepticism about some beliefs in the occult, but that witchcraft narratives can also be the butt of good humour.

The first two items, shown here side-by-side, are the original reports published on Monday 6th January 2003 in The Guardian and Nipashe newspapers. Both articles were evidently written by the same correspondent, Mary Edward, working in Dodoma for Press Services Tanzania (PST), a news agency owned, like the two newspapers, by Reginald Mengi's IPP Media. They are about the same incident involving a flying "wizard" or witch who was alleged to have fallen to the ground, landing near-naked amidst a group of Christian worshippers in Kongwa in Dodoma Region. The reporter herself claims to have been in the congregation and witnessed the incident, though whether she actually saw him fall to earth before hearing his subsequent confession is left unsaid. The Swahili article includes some details not given in the English version. Its title makes it clear that the wizard's "flying saucer" was a circular winnowing basket (ungo), the favoured mode of witches' transport in mainland Tanzania. And the scene of the incident is identified as the yard of an Evangelistic Assemblies of God Tanzania (EAGT) church. This is an important detail, because the fallen wizard's confession is just the kind of testimony that can be heard during conversion to pentecostalism.

Readers can judge for themselves whether or not these articles were written and published tongue-in-cheek. The response on the "Opinion" page of The Guardian two days later (on Wednesday 8th January 2003) certainly was. It comprised a letter to the editor from an "Earthbound regular Guardian reader" in Mikocheni, Dar es Salaam, and was accompanied by a cartoon drawn for the page by David Chikoko:

At the beginning of this well-crafted lampoon, the writer alludes to the fact that belief in "flying wizards" is widespread in Tanzania, and cites a case of alleged naked night-flying in Muleba District in Kagera Region. This is clearly a hazardous pursuit, and I remember seeing other articles in the Tanzanian popular press announcing winnowing basket accidents. Some reports are from further afield and predate the 2003 story, like the 2001 Pan African News Agency article 'Zambians traumatised by crash-landing flying wizards', which related that "More than 30 stark naked people suspected to be wizards "crash-landed" on rooftops of houses owned by families, institutions and filling stations in Zambia last year, leaving the population puzzled." (Landing on the roofs of petrol stations has a certain logic, if not in terms of the need to refuel, at least in view of the large flat area they might offer to wizards descending in an emergency.)

It is quite likely that published narratives such as these have influenced reporting, both by people claiming to know of incidents and by journalists reporting on or inventing these reports in turn. A quick search on the internet suggests that stories of occult flying and its failure are now circulating more readily than ever via Tanzania's rapidly growing blogosphere. One favourite from last year was the tale of an old hag from Mwanza who was said to have crashed, quite literally, into the funeral of the actor Steven Kanumba. Given that the funeral was attended by tens of thousands of mourners, it is perhaps not surprising that narratives of this kind should emerge. What is more disturbing, though, is the fact that these beliefs can also generate violence, and result in the death of people suspected to be witches who have crashed to earth. There's a distressing video on YouTube of a naked man killed by a mob in Kimara, Dar es Salaam, for just this reason. It was uploaded in May 2010 (I won't link to it), and the attached description notes that the alleged witch was rumoured to be en route to the Seychelles for a witches' convention. It's easy to find humour in fictions like this, but not in such tragic consequences.

References

Anon. 2003a. 'Wizard' drops from heaven. The Guardian (Dar es Salaam), Monday 6 January 2003: 3.

Anon. 2003b. Teach widely wizard's flying skills. Letter to the editor, The Guardian (Dar es Salaam), Wednesday 8 January 2001: 6.

Edward, Mary. 2003. Adaiwa 'kusafiri kwa ungo'. Nipashe (Dar es Salaam), Monday 6 January 2003: 3.

Mesaki, Simeon 1994. Witch-killing in Sukumaland. In Ray Abrahams (ed.) Witchcraft in Contemporary Tanzania. Cambridge: African Studies Centre. 47-60.

Mulenga, Mildred 2001. Zambians traumatised by crash-landing flying wizards. Pan African News Agency (Dakar). Online at http://allafrica.com/stories/200101060031.html [no, I can't see the full text either...]

Sanders, Todd 2001. Save our skins: structural adjustment, morality and the occult in Tanzania. In Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders (eds.) Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. London and New York: Routledge. 160-183.

MUMIANI AND CHINJACHINJA

Mumiani and chinjachinja were once the very stuff of urban legend in East Africa, and they haven’t entirely remained in the graves that historians implicitly consign them to.

Although Luise White in Speaking with Vampires (2000) claims these two terms for blood-takers to have been synonymous in everday use, etymology and distribution suggest that this hasn’t always been the case. Mumiani is a coastal Swahili term with an Indian Ocean pedigree that can refer both to the imagined drawers of blood as well as the medicine made from it; while chinjachinja and its variants is a a rather more literal name for the supposed perpetrators of these and other crimes. The reduplicated Swahili verb kuchinjachinja means ‘to slaughter, cut throats again and again’, and by extension ‘kill repeatedly, commit mass murder’. I first heard stories about the wachinjachinja of the colonial era and after in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania in the early 1980s, and it’s a name that seems to have a much wider currency up-country.

In October 2000 I asked a 34 year-old Zanzibari woman what she understood by mumiani and chinjachinja. There is, she said, an obvious difference. The mumiani take blood and sell it, but don’t kill their victims, leaving them with some blood in their bodies. The chinjachinja, however, kill and cut up their victims for their own purposes (whatever these may be). She remembered mumiani from Zanzibar. When she was a child there was a European couple living alone at Gymkhana (near Kilimani and the cemetery), where they had a large garden with a lot of trees in it. They were said to be mumiani and children were told not to pass there at dusk or after. This warning was repeated by a lot of people; and in the same context she and other children were also told not to let strangers escort them anywhere.

More recently, in the last couple of years (i.e. between 1998 and 2000), she had heard a story about chinjachinja in Dar es Salaam. A rich man with a large house in Oyster Bay (she didn’t know whether he was European or not) was said to have helpers who enticed women there with money. He has sex with them, then drugged, killed and cut them up. He kept the heads, breasts and genitalia of his victims, but chopped the rest of their bodies into pieces and flushed them into the sea down a drain. One day a woman who was a habitual drug-user brought to his house. One of the guards there had some connection with and knew her. When her host slipped pills into her drink she was unaffected, and while he was taking a bath she saw the heads of previous victims in his fridge. The friendly guard came and told her to run away with him, and she did. They told the police who went to the house that same night. But the killer was long gone, and only some of the evidence of his killing remained – the body parts that he kept.

My Zanzibari informant heard this last tale in a hair salon in Dar and relayed it to me in a hotel on the Msasani Peninusla, just round the corner from one of the city’s most notorious expatriate pick-up bars and a road leading down to Oyster Bay that turns into a mecca for kerb-crawlers after dark. Whereas her memory of mumiani in post-revolutionary Zanzibar conjured up warnings from the colonial (and perhaps even precolonial) past, this story of a chinjachinja in Dar had all the flavour and ingredients of a contemporary urban legend – and what better place than a modern hair salon to hear it. There’s nothing about ‘vampires’* or blood-suckers here – who knows why the killer wanted to kill and dismember his female victims in this way? The parts he is said to have kept suggest a sexual motive, and make this a moral tale about the exploitation of vulnerable women by wealthy (and often foreign) men, a reflection of the setting in which it was told. And the gruesome picture it paints is uncomfortably close to the known practice of real mass-murderers, including the case of Bradford’s ‘crossbow cannibal’ that is filling the British Sunday papers as I write.

* Speaking with Vampires is a catchy title for a great book but Luise White’s generic use of ‘vampire’ is open to question, as are a number of her observations on etymology and translation. And she is wrong when says that “[t]here are no words in the languages of the people I write about for blood-drinker or blood-taker” (2000: 10). Swahili mnyonya-damu, ‘blood-sucker’, is one for a start.