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We take it for granted that everyone knows and understands what it means to love and be loved

Blessing Musaririri Shelling the Nuts
I was once referred to, by the mother of an ex-boyfriend, who was of a different hue than me, still within the range of brown though, as a bush person. She herself was of mixed heritage and had attempted to spare her children the unfortunate pigment association by marrying someone of a

lighter “purer” breed.

I was somewhat bemused by this attitude as I had never imagined there would be a problem as I considered him just as black as I was, although with a bit of variety thrown in.

Culturally we were not so far removed, what with him being classed as Afro-Caribbean.

Anyway, the point of the story is, I knew that I should feel offended but to be honest I was just puzzled. What did it mean to her to be from the bush? Obviously it was a bad thing, but that was her interpretation.

However, after a particularly sensational expose in one of our tabloids a while back, I’m inclined to believe it means I come from a place where people go into the bush to do dark and dastardly deeds.

I would never have thought that with the level of education and enlightenment (in whichever form takes fancy), that young women of our generation would be in the habit of resorting to life hacks that require them to interact with foreign faecal specimens from the bush in order to make a love potion.

I give this example because it is the one that stands out the most in recent memory.

I have heard many other stories and almost all of them involving something expelled from the body, or parts of a body that have no business being around or being unwittingly ingested by another person. Why is it called a “love” potion? Surely this is not love? From my understanding of it, love does not bend another to its will through dark and dirty misdeeds. Yes love can be messy and difficult and cause levels of mesmerism and bewilderment, but this through the nature of complex human emotional exchange rather than through one party’s external manipulation of another via third parties and/or foreign matter intended to exact from the other, something they may not otherwise willingly give. This seems to lend itself more to the definition of a theft.

Could this perhaps, be the only kind of love some people are capable of? We take it for granted that everyone knows and understands what it means to love and be loved. We believe that love is an instinctual thing and thus everyone should know how to do it. That everyone should understand love involves more giving than taking and that if it is to mean something it should be given freely. So what is it?

These misdeeds, this need to possess another’s will. Survival, maybe? Is it desperation, lack of belief in the purpose of oneself? Or is it simply greed and a kind of laziness?

Who are we as a people that these are things to do in order to have a roof over our head, clothes on our body and food to eat? What does it say about our state of mind and where we believe we are headed? As I said, this particular story of the bush and faecal matter is not the first I’ve heard of such goings on, nor will it be the last. In fact, I’m sure the majority of people reading this column have a story to tell.

Sometimes it’s not about survival at all. Sometimes it’s jealousy and spite and an unhealthy level of competition. I read a book once that discussed the nature of all human interaction as a competition for energy. The premise was that we are composed of energy, and we vibrate or emit that energy at various frequencies. If someone is vibrating at a higher frequency, this means they are more successful and/or happier, and thus enviable to those who are vibrating at a lower frequency.

This then results in an attempt from the latter to harness or otherwise hijack the energy of the former, to feed their own deficiency and the “rumble in the jungle” begins.

In my understanding, witchcraft and spells are a form of manipulation of energy, an interference with ones energy from a position, not of regular competition but one that involves energy outside the realm of what is readily accessible from the levels we are generally capable of reaching. Let’s face it, there are things we see and experience that have no ready explanation. We are limited in our understanding of many things —“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”—that is us, we are Horatio.

Perhaps it all relates to the tree in the Garden of Eden, from which the fruit was not supposed to be eaten, which naturally takes us to the subject of good versus evil and the fact that in order for there to be balance, as we understand it, it stands to reason that if there is good then there is evil. We see it everyday and whether or not we want to, we believe in it to varying degrees. We call it different things.

For example, a night-guard at my brother’s company once got it into his head to try and drive one of the cars parked on the premises overnight. The keys had been left in the guard house. He had no driving experience whatsoever and as a result became confused with the clutch-brake-accelerator action required to move the car efficiently and so, drove right into the wall of the building, wrecking the car, the wall and seeing himself relieved of his position. When asked why, knowing he didn’t have the requisite knowledge, did he decide to get behind the wheel of a car and attempt to drive it. His simple answer was, “I don’t know. The devil came in.”

The devil came in and convinced him it would be a good idea to get behind the wheel of car that wasn’t his that he couldn’t drive, putting himself at risk of injury, dismissal and/or death.

Some would say it was plain stupidity and or ignorance, like the child who sees people swimming and jumps in thinking it easy only to drown because he never learnt to swim. Back home the guard’s family would maybe shake their heads in bafflement and say someone was jealous that he had a job and wanted him to lose it, thus sending an ill wind to confuse and manipulate him into behaving in a manner inconsistent with his usual good sense.

I think I may have mentioned before, the DAs: devil’s advocates — people who are doing the work of the devil. This is the person who cuts you off in traffic and causes an accident making you late on the morning of your performance review at work, this is the person who blows up at you for no reason and drags you into an altercation on a day when things had otherwise been going well.

These are the people who manage to do something, anything to negatively affect your mood. Admittedly, in the vein of “he who makes me angry controls me”, it could be argued that responding negatively makes you an accomplice to your own mood-hijack. But let’s face it, sometimes one is hanging onto their last positive thought by a thread. We cannot all be candidates for canonisation. The bottom line is some call it the devil, others call it low energy vibration others call it evil.

One thing is obvious, those people who go and seek spells and such to manipulate the lives of others, believe in the power of what they are doing, maybe because they have seen results and know that it works, albeit, for a time. It appears these spells wear off (as mentioned in the now infamous WhatsApp exchange in one local tabloid) and need to be renewed, and so begins a cycle. This puts me in mind of the fairy stories I read in my youth. The story of Rumpelstiltskin comes immediately to mind and a movie I watched a while ago starring Charlie Theron called “Mirror Mirror”.

The one constant caution, while the witchy woman was making other people’s lives a misery, was, “there is a price to pay for using magic”.

We see it all the time in the Nigerian melodramas on TV and my question is, is it worth it? Why do we do these things to each other? What happened to hunhu, ubuntu — I am well if you are well?

These kinds of activities are what make me think back on being called a person from the bush (although generally, I find it debatable whether simply being from the “bush” is in and of itself, a bad thing, as I quite enjoy being in nature).

This is the kind of thing people do in the place I come from, not to mention stories of money snakes and other hobgoblins, and I have to admit, that as much as I find myself aghast, I am also fascinated. It all sparks the imagination. Yes magic and sorcery are there in Western folklore, but as far as I know they don’t occupy a space in everyday modern living.

Of chinyakare (the days of old), I can understand, that was the way things worked then, it was all within a certain context, with its own checks and balances and everyone knew the score. In the here and now I am concerned that I am not living in a progressive and humane environment and that as much as we would like to move on and advance, we are merely muddling around in the so-called bush.