Politics need not be like witchcraft, or brazen banishment of its practitioners

When I was very little, I witnessed the lynching of a witch. Whatever the case, the account below is how my mind has filed away and maintained the record of the event that was captured from a distance, without full understanding of the proceedings, or an appreciation of their significance and implications.

One afternoon after school, we youngsters perched ourselves upon a stone to loaf about in the late afternoon sun. We frequently used the vantage to perform our principal existential assignment: watching over cattle as they grazed.

From this lofty perch, which seemed to us a vast granite plateau, we could survey portions of our village rarely visible given our microscopic statures, and follow the comings and goings of persons on the gullied dirt road 50 metres or so from us, and catch up on the latest.

On this day, we saw a crowd pursue a solitary figure up the steep flank of a ridge that rose up from the river, all the way to another road, perhaps three kilometres away as the crow flies.

The rugged flanks in those days were thickly vegetated, and the thatched conical, smoke-blackened or sun-bronzed roofs of homes peeped out of thickets like mushrooms popping out of tall grass. Often, these homesteads were surrounded by clearings which comprised natural stockades.

Three farmsteads, each on an interlocking spur, converged at the thin sinuous stream that gingerly meandered its way to meet a famous river, perhaps a secondary tributary of the Nyando.

Two belonged to brothers who had been enlisted from school to serve in the King’s African Rifles during one world war or the other, one in Burma and the other in Palestine. The latter brother was nicknamed Jerusalem, since his tour had taken him to the fabled metropolis. The third farm was the site of the remembered proceedings.

My recollection captures the crowd hotly pursuing a hapless figure in full flight, who was captured in due course, and violently punished at the clearing. Sticks and stones, clubs and staffs were involved.

Because unfinished business sits uncomfortably in the mind, I recently asked an elder if she recalled these terrifying proceedings. It turns out that owing to my childish misapprehension of events that took place four decades ago, which at any rate succumbed to a tendency of memory to fill gaps in the record with passages borrowed from stereotypes, my account differed from better considered memories to a degree that may fairly be described as wild.

Cruel strategies

Indeed, two adult sons of an elderly lady had become tremendously disenchanted with their maternal unit, and resorted to various cruel strategies to banish her from their father’s land, or altogether from the earth. Only their father stood in the way.

In those days, various treatable and preventable medical conditions were rife, afflicting both beast and human with devastating aggression. Thus, infant mortality was higher than it is today, and villagers often succumbed to curable maladies.

The poor old lady’s dear boys resolved to outsource their murderous task by enlisting the anger of outraged villagers. They accused their mother of casting malevolent spells over assorted bomas in order to decimate their human and animal inmates by way of harrowing death through malignant sicknesses.

Such accusations are often received with profound skepticism, except where the family, and especially very close blood relations, propagate the charges. Herein lay the diabolical genius of the matricidal fraternity’s strategy. In this case, a majority of sons had condemned their mother for truly reprehensible offences, making a formidable case against the poor woman, whose only witness was her husband.

The verdict and sentence were prescribed by tribal custom, and involved a ritual to curse and banish the convict and her accomplices, while simultaneously absolving the members of the community tasked with this unpleasant function.

Eligible adults, armed with white batons made from wood stripped of its bark, stood in two rows. The condemned had to pass through the tunnel formed by the solemnly irate parade.

As the convicted passed, each person raised their baton and gently tapped it upon her person, before hurling it in her wake, and walking away without looking back. For the condemned, the corridor comprised a one-way passage into oblivion.

This is what took place. The childish mind preferred more dramatic accounts of pursuit and violence. The elder who assisted me in reconstructing this memory was nevertheless so astonished that I remembered the event at all, given my tender age at the time of the incident.

Ancient communal policy set out elaborate and rigorous mechanisms for ostracism, banishment and exile.

Such events affected the integrity of the body social of a community in the manner of an amputation: excruciating, traumatising and permanently disfiguring, and therefore to be exercised strictly as a last resort.

It is, therefore, quite shocking that certain aspects of the competitive politics which define our democracy appear to permit public conduct tantamount to brazen witchcraft and its sentence, voluntary self-banishment or exile.

Mr Ng’eno is an advocate of the High Court.