Juju

July 11, 2011

So last week 7 little kids from my village fell sick.  I was told they ate some fruit that was poisonous.  Monday 2 kids died, Tuesday 1 kid died, Wednesday another died, and Thursday the mother of one of the children (who hasn’t died yet) died.  Rumor was they ate some poisonus fruit, but people said it was juju.  Police investigations are being done to verify what caused the deaths.  Media came out to our villages and ran stories about the deaths.  Both our village and Bakua are greatly affected by this and everyone is very sad.  Wednesday I was taking a tro into HoHoe and could hear everyone clicking and “oh-ing” and the guy next to me told me that the 4^th child had died that morning.  One of the girls was in my afternoon class.

So yesterday (one week from when the children took the fruit) I got an update from Francis.  Apparently a man from Bakua was coming to Todome to pay back the 1,200 GHC loan he had borrowed from the susu.  When he arrived in Todome he realized the money was missing.  He took a tro back to Bakua to where he and another man were sitting before he caught the first tro.  He asked the man if he had seen the money fall out of his pocket; the man said no.  So the man who lost the money beat the gong-gong for two weeks to tell the village that the money was lost and whoever found it needed to return it to him.  No one came forward.  So the man went to a juju priest and the priest sent out juju to find who took the money. 

Now mind you, all this came out yesterday because my chief sent some of our elders to a far away village to consult the gods on why our children were dying.  The gods revealed that the second man in Bakua had taken the money and that it was the juju sent out on the behalf of the first man that was killing the people.  So our elders revealed this to the Bakua chief and elders.  They decided they needed to consult their gods, too.  Their gods came to the same conclusion, so they went and confronted the second man; he confessed to taking the money.

So Francis explained it to me like this:  juju does not kill or hurt you, but first it kills and hurts the people in your family, because if it kills you first, then you cannot make things right.  So this man who took the money, gave some of the stolen money to his wife (who did not know the money was stolen) and she bought food and cooked with it.  All of the children who died had eaten the food; they were nieces and nephews, and one son.  The man’s wife also died.  So now the man’s family will continue to die until his family pays back the missing money.  An old woman in the man’s family was taken to the hospital last night, we don’t know if it is from the juju or because she is just old.

So this is what Francis is telling me.  Also, the man who stole money tried to hang himself yesterday but the people found him and stopped him because he has to make things right or the juju will keep working.  Francis said that they will tell the police so that they will stop the investigation…the police and courts do not deal with juju, they will leave it to the community.  Also, the radio in HoHoe has been telling people not to eat the food from Likpe because their people have been dying from it because we use poisons and chemicals on our produce…so the village is mad about that, too.

I asked Francis how the man will be punished by the communities.  All the communities who had people die (the children are buried in their father’s home village) will fine the man; and since people around here don’t have money, he will be owing money for a long time.  People want to beat and kill him, but they cannot kill him or his burden will become theirs.  He will also be shunned.  People hate him because many innocent lives were lost because of his greed.  Francis said this guy was always nice and quite… “it is the still lake that kills.”  As Francis put it.

Oh, and the fruit the kids ate was Guava…which is not poisonous which is why the villagers started suspecting juju.  So if you don’t believe in juju, how do you explain these deaths?  Francis told me that if you believe strongly in God, then your spirit is too strong for the juju to hurt, but juju is very real and people who do not believe in God are very susceptible to juju attacks.  I asked what would happen to the guy who paid to have the juju sent, he said nothing would happen to him since he announced it to the community several times…he tried his best and then had to rely on juju to find the money.

So this is strange.  Francis said that this has never happened around here before…that so many people die of juju.  Very strange.

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