Where witch tag is a death sentence

• Grey hair in Ganze and Magarini is no longer a sign of wisdom. It no longer attracts respect from the youth.
• In fact grey-haired men and women in the two constituencies (ranked among the poorest in the country) live in perpetual fear.
• They are being hunted down like wild dogs and killed over allegations of being witches. And the killers are mostly their sons and other close family members.
• The Sunday Nation tracked the fleeing old folks to the “village of witches” in Kaya Godoma.
• We talked to the villagers and interviewed the political and administrative leadership of the areas.
• The interviews paint a perfect picture of people stuck in traditional beliefs with little hope of redemption.

Mzee Kahindi Charo Ngoka, 69, begged his two sons to spare his life. They had tied him to a tree in his compound with sisal ropes.

He pleaded that he was not a sorcerer as claimed by his wife – the mother of his sons-turned-tormenters. But they would hear none of it.

“I cried like a baby as they hit me,” he told the Sunday Nation.

Four broken upper teeth and lacerations on his body are proof of the severe thrashing he received at the hands of his own flesh and blood that afternoon of January 2 at his home in Kibarani near Kilifi town.

They then trussed him up and locked him in a hut to await nightfall when they planned to burn him to death.

“I gave them life, now they wanted to take mine,” he said, reflecting on the events that have seared his memory.

After they left, he struggled and broke free from his bonds, undid the latch of the rickety door, and made it to a nearby bush from where he found the route to the chief’s office where he reported the matter.

When the police showed up, his sons had already fled. But they found his wife and two daughters who were more than willing to tell the officers why they believed the patriarch of the family was a sorcerer.

The three were arrested as accomplices to attempted murder and are currently being held at the Shimo La Tewa Women’s Prison.

Mzee Ngoka narrated his ordeal to the Sunday Nation at Kaya Godoma, where a refugee camp has been established for those banished by their community on suspicion of practising the dark arts.

The camp hosts 36 elderly people, both male and female, who have all escaped certain death at the hands of close relatives and neighbours.

The hunting down and killing of suspected sorcerers has become endemic in the Coast region.

Police say 20 people have been killed in Malindi alone in the past two years because they were believed to be witches.

They say the number could be higher since some of deaths that occur where there is little government presence are not reported.

But, even then, numbers alone do not tell the story of horrors that suspicion of practising witchcraft has wrought on the people of the region.

Wives have turned on their husbands, setting them up to be killed. Sons have turned on their fathers in what could pass as a fulfilment of the biblical sign of the end times in Matthew 10:21:

“Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death.”

Families are disintegrating at an alarming rate because of suspected witchcraft.