As much as I’d like to take the credit here, the following story is not about me. It is a story about a young man named Liam, who has, on his numerous travel adventures, found himself in a variety of situations, ranging from hysterically funny to definitely quite scary, not forgetting to pass downright weird along the way. Because of this, I can’t resist telling a few of his tales – I’m sure he won’t mind.
Moving to Ghana had seemed like the obvious choice at the time. Liam was aiming for as culturally far away from the UK as possible. And he’d got it. Ghana was very, very different. After a few months he felt pretty unshockable, though. He didn’t think it was really going to get much weirder than seeing a chicken strangled in front of him or having mice eat his headphones.
But. It was time to tackle the Ghanaian justice system.
Liam was living as a volunteer out in a very rural village. He was slowly getting used to being the only white person around, and, as such, receiving a totally undeserved level of reverence and respect. But soon, another volunteer joined him. His name was John, and he’d worked in Ghana before. John soon settled back in, and after a while he took a couple of days off to spend in the nearby city, Kumasi. And a very nice time he had, too, by all accounts; only problem was, when he returned to his village, his room had been broken into and some of his stuff had been stolen. Not that there was much there worth stealing, but whoever had burgled the place had gone out of their way to make sure they picked only the bizarre things that they would have no use for: a water filter (what for? What born-and-bred Ghanaian drinks filtered water?) and sun screen (again, because...? Worried about getting sunburnt, are we?) among the items. But either way, theft is theft, so Liam and John decided to go to the nearest village with a police department and see if anything could be done about it.
The police station was tiny, way out in the countryside. Apart from being slightly more sturdily built than the other houses in the village there wasn’t much to distinguish it as a building full of people who upheld the law. The policeman wasn’t overly concerned about John’s story. In the end, John and Liam paid him to come out to their village and investigate, after which the policeman suggested that they pay him some more to write a report about it. And that seemed to be an end to the enforcement of justice. Liam and John stared at him blankly. Probably conscious that these strange, white Englishmen seemed to expect something more, the policeman had one more suggestion. The alternative method of crime-fighting in West Africa. A witch-doctor.
(I asked Liam later what on earth had induced him to follow the policeman’s suggestion. He looked at me blankly. “Wouldn’t you have? Witch-doctors, Sophie!” Good point.)
By an absolutely staggering coincidence, the witch-doctor lived just outside the same village as the policeman, and since they’d come all that way... well, why not? First, they took a brief pause in their mission for justice to have a beer. They sat, sipping their drinks, as the policeman informed them further. They must, it seemed, take certain things with them for the witch-doctor. Money, obviously. But that aside, he explained earnestly, they must also take a strand of a broom made of palm (“As in, what you sweep the floor with?” Liam asked. The policeman gave a solemn nod. “Hmm” mused Liam), a live chick (“That’s never going to end well,” muttered John) and a dead lizard. Oh, and some alcohol. Nothing fancy, just the local gin would do.
“How are we going to get a dead lizard?” Liam wondered aloud.
Their eyes were caught by a young lad walking past. He was carrying a slingshot. They jumped to their feet and caught him up. Ten minutes later they had discovered that shooting lizards with a slingshot ain’t that easy. They were hot and frustrated, and had done a fabulous job of scaring the habitually lazy gecko population into hiding behind rocks. The young lad waiting patiently behind them just shook his head sadly at the obvious ineptitude. Finally, out of pity, he stood up and gently eased the slingshot out of John’s fingers. He picked up a stone, placed it into the slingshot, flexed the elastic, and stood, frozen and alert, waiting. Liam and John had shut up by this time, realising that they might just be in the presence of a master. An eight year old master. All was quiet as the three of them stood, rooted to the spot, absolutely still. Suddenly, there was a flurry of movement about ten feet from them. A gecko had decided to take its chance, and was scuttling across the ground. Moving so quickly they could only just follow his movements, the boy swung the trajectory of the slingshot around, pivoting his body round 90 degrees, and let the stone fly. The gecko was struck with a small thud and instantly lay still. There was a moment of suitably awed silence. Then the boy turned to them, gestured to the lifeless gecko lying forlornly in the dust, smiling proudly. “Dead,” he pronounced. He spoke with such confidence and certainty that Liam was sure he’d been practicing the word in his head ever since he’d handed over his sling shot. They cautiously approached the little lizard, which was either dead or stunned to the extent that it soon would be. They grimaced at the inert body. Neither reached for it.
“After you,” Liam said, politely.
“Why me?” John enquired.
“It was your stuff that got stolen, and we’re taking the witch doctor a dead gecko to try and get your stuff back, so you should carry it.” Liam explained.
Put like that, it made perfect sense.
“Fine. But you can carry the live chick, knowing that the cute, warm, soft ball of fluff is going to its doom in your hands.”
“Fair enough,” Liam agreed.
The chick proved easy enough to get hold of, and they ended up buying a whole palm-branch broom in order to get just a strand of one. As for the gin, they purchased a glass coke bottle-full from the original beer house, where they found someone kind enough to volunteer to take them into the wild to find a witch doctor. They were led away from the village, through some seriously overgrown vegetation, their shadows extending in the gradually setting sun, until they came to a fairly ramshackle looking house. Their guide grinned at them and pointed to it.
“Witch doctor!” he declared. He ushered them towards it. Liam and John walked ahead of him, and as they approached the door, a man peered out of the gloom. He looked at them, then to the guide behind them. The guide gave out a few short, explanatory sentences, and the witch doctor’s gaze swung back to them, changing from one of suspicion to interest.
“You have presents?” he asked. They quickly held up their offerings, Liam feeling the little bird fluttering between his fingers, John feeling the clammy reptilian skin that had warmed up in his palms. The medicine man nodded, and gestured for their guide from the village to leave. He immediately turned and tramped off, not even waiting for a dollar for leading the two out there. With a swift jerk of his head, the medicine man beckoned them into his home. They followed, somewhat apprehensively.
Inside, they sat together on stools.
“Thief stole your things?” the witch doctor asked, abruptly, cutting straight to the chase.
John nodded.
“We do spell. We take the spirit of the thief and we bind it. Then he must return to the village and bring your things back. You put gifts on table. You wait.” With that, he got up and called out a quick command. From outside came a woman. She carried a bowl of thick blue liquid. As they watched, she dipped her fingers into the bowl and spread it across his face, covering his skin in the paint. Her fingers moved over the contours of his cheekbones, and under his eyes. When she had covered his entire face, up to his hairline, she stopped and nodded to him. She then calmly lit several candles in the gloom, and moved towards the open entry, closing the flimsy door over it. Liam placed the chick, the lizard and the palm branch on the table. As he did so, his eye was drawn to the gun laying on one end of it.
“You have gin?”
They handed over the bottle silently, and he eagerly reached for it. Turning his back on them, he poured half the bottle into a bowl, and started pouring in liquids from various other bottles, adding a pinch of several powders from jars. John raised his eyebrows at Liam as they watched him. Liam shrugged. Finally the witch doctor turned back to them and joined them sitting forming a triangle. Keeping eye contact, he raised the bowl to his lips and drank from it. A shudder ran through him, and then he held the bowl out to John. John’s eyes widened.
“What’s in it?”
“You must drink. You drink potion, we make spell,” the witch doctor intoned.
John glanced at Liam, then shrugged and drank from the bowl. He automatically made a face, tried to cover it up, then handed the bowl to Liam. Liam was obviously more prepared for the concoction to taste absolutely rancid, and was going to give it his best shot to keep his face absolutely blank. But as he raised the bowl and the liquid hit his tongue, the bitter, overpoweringly strong taste made him want to gag. He fought his impulse, drained the remainder of the potion, and handed the bowl back to the medicine man, who nodded sagely.
The witch doctor sat, the light of the candles illuminating the vivid blue of his painted face. He closed his eyes, and began to hum a long, low note. The note grew in intensity and volume, and then suddenly stopped. He opened his eyes and began a chant. He recited his mantra steadily, rhythmically. The woman, who had been watching from a corner, rose and brought to him the lizard, chick and palm strand. He took them solemnly, all the time slowly and deliberately intoning his chant. As Liam and John watched, he wound the strand around the lizard and the still-fluttering chick, binding them together. He pulled the strand tighter and tighter, straining it against the two tiny bodies, until suffocation finally got the better of the chick, and it was still. The witch doctor fell silent. The woman glided almost silently up to him from behind, carrying a long piece of rope. The witch doctor set the bound animals on the floor in the centre of the triangle, and sat perfectly still as the woman began to coil the rope around him. She wound it loosely around his torso, around his arms, around his neck. She tucked in the loose end of rope, and the witch doctor rose to his feet. He nodded to the pair to rise, and walked majestically to the door. The woman opened it reverently for him, and they could see that the sun had now fully set, and darkness was upon the land. The witch doctor strode out of the door, and the two men followed him, trailed by the woman who carried with her two of the candles.
Outside, the man started to chant again. This time the chant was more urgent, and he started to dance. The dance became more and more vigorous and frenzied. As he moved, he mimed struggling furiously with the rope, working it loose, but all the time in combat with it. His dance became more dynamic, and he began to jump around, freeing himself gradually as the rope became more and more slack. Finally, with one last big effort, he pulled him free of his restraints, and fell, exhausted, to his knees. He sank there, breathing heavily, as Liam and John watched in horrified fascination. At length, he lifted his head and rose wearily to his feet.
“The spell is done,” he announced. “The thief will come back and confess to your village.”
Liam and John looked at each other.
“You will pay me,” the witch doctor added, “and you can take pictures.”
The slightly more normal note brought them back to earth, and they hastily rummaged in their pockets for some cash. The witch doctor held up the tangled rope triumphantly as they took some photos, his white teeth glinting in the midst of his blue mask. After many murmured thanks, Liam and John turned and starting trudging back the way they had come, through the foliage. It was dark, and the track wasn’t easy, but the two didn’t speak a word to each other until they had marched all the way back to the village and had collapsed on a couple of stools in the beer house. Halfway down their first glass, they judged themselves able to talk about it.
“That was weird,” declared Liam.
There was a meaningful pause.
“And quite scary,” he added.
John nodded, sagely. After a few moments, he said, “Think it’ll work?”
Liam looked at him. “Are you serious?”
“Nah. Well, kind of. You have to admit that it was pretty... effective.”
“Yeah, on us. Not on some bloke who pinched your water filter.”
“So you have no belief in things like that?” John asked. Liam peered at him. John was, it seemed, perfectly serious. Liam sighed.
“Honestly, mate, I think you should resign yourself to the fact that you’re going to have to buy some more sun screen.”