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David Mungoshi Shelling the Nuts
If you have ever lost your way in the middle of a forest you will definitely know how it feels to be adrift; and to feel that you are nowhere familiar – that you are going round and round in endless circles. And just when you think you have solved the puzzle the promising little track that you were banking on thins out and disappears and you are back where you started.

When I was studying theology at university I learned a rather interesting expression from Mr. Prozesky, our New Testament lecturer. He is the same fellow that told us the curious story of a certain Count Otto Von Zinzendorf who wrote a love letter to God and let it fly from a tall building. He was posting his letter to God.

On one occasion, Mr Prozesky vividly described the feeling that people experience in places where they feel the presence of an otherness to which they can put neither shape nor purpose. Most of us experience these things from time to time. Your hair rises and your skin shrinks in the potent silence that is a camouflage for something breathing down your neck, whispering to you about a deep kind of pain that you cannot even begin to imagine.

This strange presence is what Mr Prozesky called “a sense of the numinous”. No doubt some people have their own explanations. They call the places that give them this feeling holy. DomboraMwari in Epworth where there is an imprint of a mysterious foot on the flat rock is one such place. Local folklore says God came walking there one day and left the imprint of His foot there for all to see.

Funny how you think about such things when you really ought to be worrying about your present predicament and how to escape it. One day I took a walk from our place in the country to a neighbouring farm to visit. The path that I used was so well-known to me I could have walked it blindfolded. I had been along that same path a countless number of times without incident. There wasn’t going to be one today either!

But right there before my apprehensive eyes was the imposing anthill whose crown of thick vegetation gave it a never-ending sense of being more than what it seemed. People said a boy called Shadreck had seen a lion there once. But of course there were no such things in our area. Not even the hyenas that today sometimes wreak havoc in Comrade Joseph Chinotimba’s constituency in the dry lands of Buhera.

Concerning the incident, Shadreck said he had seen a mhondoro (spirit lion) sitting on its haunches at the bottom of the anthill just before the well-trodden path.

On seeing him the spirit lion dug into the soft earth with the sharp nails of its front paws, and scooped some of the soil up with its mouth before spitting it into his face. The humus hit his face like a shower of ants. For a moment, he and the rich soil were together as one. Suddenly feeling confused and disjointed, Shadreck fled to his mother’s smoky kitchen where he fell down and lay prone – wordless!

At the anthill the world was suddenly quieter and calmer than usual and a thick but invisible blanket of gloom hit me in the face and flooded my heart. Shadreck could not be wrong entirely. He must have seen something or felt something there on that fateful day.

Before I could make sense of what was happening, I found that I could neither lift my feet off the ground nor walk. I was like one trudging by in concrete boots. My neck was stiff and tense – ready to snap. Something seemed to be holding me down and keeping me rooted to the spot.

Something sighed and yawned like an omen. The eerie sound was like the one made by a branch splitting. The lights went out in my head and there was a sharp sting in my left eye. Everything around me became blank and hazy. This had to be the day of my epiphany I was thinking. My hair stood on end and my whole being was on edge as my pounding heart hit against my rib cage with the force of a gale.

In a jiffy everything had cleared, and I made my way out of the maze towards the neighbours. From somewhere up a tall musasa tree I heard a crow say, “Aaah…” and I knew the moment had passed. Yet I spent the next several hours walking clueless like an automaton. Every path I followed led to nowhere. Some malevolent spirit must have been playing games with me.

Beware the numinous.