Sooo, witchcraft is pretty huge here. Even though it is well hidden and people deny subscribing to it everybody seems to believe in it. Just the other day one of my favourite co-workers (a highly skilled health care worker) told me how her nine siblings and parents were all killed by her father’s jealous girlfriend using witchcraft. She explained that they all had mysterious deaths and that the family is certain that a witch threw a jugey (sp?) into the house (a small, negative charm), resulting in the death of her entire family.
From the aforementioned taxi driver I heard a similar story of witchcraft. This man divorced his second wife because he had found that she was putting charms in his food to make him love her. He explained that he could not tolerate such tricks and dishonesty. My Czech neighbours (Katerina, the anthropologist) actually has been doing a lot of research about witchcraft in Zambia and even visited a witchdoctor. It’s very interesting and almost always involves charms and love triangles. Although I don’t at the end of the day believe that witchcraft is real I can’t help but wonder. At the very least I understand why people believe in it. When life is so unexplainable I imagine it provides an understandable explanation. Fortunately for me, us foreigners seem immune to witchcraft (otherwise the spells would have been used against colonial powers prior to independence). Very interesting business. I’ll let you know how my spell casting goes.
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