I have always had a very easy relationship with juju, voodoo, otumokpor, kurube, Igwo ogwu, or whatever other name it is known by. It doesn’t bother me, I don’t bother with it. Over the years, a few people not so close to me (and even some a bit closer) have tried to make me see my lack of respect forjuju (and its alter-ego miracles) as an indication of immaturity or ‘enjoyment of grace abundant’. I will soon be 60 and I have absolutely no reason to regret the way I have lived my life in this regard. Conversely, I have seen how events and actions ascribed to occultic, or ‘demonic’ powers have proved over and over to be accidents, coincidences, or nothing but scams, perpetrated on a very gullible group of people. People who often refuse to accept their culpability in the situation they find themselves but rather seek for answers from wherever they can be absolved of responsibility for their shortcomings. That is why a man would prefer to believe that his hardworking wife is using his ‘aisiki’ (good fortune) to succeed rather than blame his failure on his own laziness orhis refusal to follow time-tested principles for success. I consider such men beneath contempt. I share responsibility for my inadequacies with nobody. Not even my parents.
My disdain for Prophets, Babalawos, Seers, and such other scammers comes from experience. I have recounted some of them in my other writings, but the following was my only conscious personal interaction with a Babalawo. I bought my first car with my own money a couple of years after NYSC. My father had gifted me a Toyota Hiace van when I started Youth Service and it had served me meritoriously for 3 years. I remember it with fondness, and I had some of the best time of my youth in that old box but it had to go eventually. I bought a brand new ‘tokunbo’ Mitsubishi Tredia with ‘automatic gear’ at a time when that transmission type hadn’t yet gained popularity because of the ill-informed fear that it would be problematic. I started to cruise it around. For all of 3 months. And then I woke up one fine Saturday morning after a Friday session of Ladies Night at Fela’s shrine and strolled on to the small porch in front of the house to be confronted by a rather unexpected sight. The space where I had parked my car a few hours before had opened up again. Well, that’s not entirely correct. The space was now partly occupied by the locally manufactured pedal lock and heavy padlock which I had diligently coupled before going in to sleep. It took a couple of seconds for my brain to process what I was seeing before it dawned on me: the love of my life at that point in time had been stolen!!!
Long story short, my friends and I began to search all over. Bunmi, the Police officer who lived at the back of the house took details and promised to ‘radio all formations’. I was distraught. We searched everywhere: Ladipo, Owode Onirin, Idiroko and Seme received visits. No sight of my Tredia was reported anywhere. Then someone told me about a ‘powerful’ man whom he knew in Sagamu. He was sure the ‘man of the gods’ would help me find my car. Naturally, I was sceptical. I wasn’t ready to throw good money after bad, but he assured me he would take care of any costs since he also had something he wanted to consult the Baba about. All I had to do was volunteer to drive. By this time, I was desperate. I would have gone to see anybody if I had been assured of getting my car back. So, we drove to Sagamu and met the Baba whose looks didn’t impress me too much. He was too well-fed for the trade and had a striking resemblance to a Yoruba actor called Kanran with his ample cheeks. I pushed such disrespectful thoughts aside when I was called up to present my petition.
He had a tray of fine sand on a table in front of him. A few items intended to convey mysticism were hung around in the room where he sat and the traditional apprentice who had probably been gifted to him by the boy’s parents who couldn’t manage his mental health issues stood off to one side, chewing on a stick. He drew lines in the sand, crisscrossing the tray and grunting like he was in the toilet. Eventually, he looked up at me and announced that my car had not yet crossed the border but that it was between Owode border and Republic of Benin. I shouldn’t worry about it. It might take some time but that the car would be recovered. I should give it a few months. A FEW MONTHS! I wondered if he was crazy,but I kept my questions to myself. As we made to leave, he asked if I had any other thing I would want him to help with. At this point in my career progression, I was an Events and concerts Promoter and I had a Show planned for the now defunct Waterparks for the following day. It was headlined by one of the most popular Juju Music acts of the era and my friend and I had sunk almost all of our meagre resources intoputting it together. I looked at the Babalawo and decided that a little additional insurance was not a bad thing. He assured me that was no problem and made me promise to order for more seats and drinks as he handed over a small plastic container of water, after I had insisted that moving to a bigger venue was not a feasible option. He gave me a couple of lines to recite while I sprinkled the ‘unholy water’ around the four corners of the venue at the crack of dawn. I was to come back and give ‘sadaka’ after the unprecedented success of my show!
I guess by now you already know where this story is headed. If it had gone like the Tellytubby of a jujuman had said it would, I would have had a crowd that would still be showing up on Google search till this day. Instead, it was the worst show we ever had. We didn’t even make enough to pay the balance of the Star attraction and he had to forego it when his manager and I got into a fight. That also marked the rather sad end of my showbusiness career. Oh! I forgot to mention that by the time we drove back to Lagos the previous day, my neighbour, the Police Officer, came home with the news that my car had been recovered in Ketu and I should go pick it up at the Ogudu Police Command. The same car the Babalawo had told me was on its way to Benin Republic and which I would grow grey hair before seeing again. That experience and a few others I have witnessed sealed it for me: believe what you want, just leave me out of it.
Sadly, that is how people get sucked into what often devolves into a very dangerous and precarious life-long relationship with these people, putting themselves and other innocents in danger. If by chance and dint of the work we had put into preparing for that show it had turned out to be very successful, my friend and I would not have believed it was not due to the ‘afa ero’ (people puller) which the man gave us. We would have been converted and helped to spread the ‘gospel’, just like the other friend who introduced me in the first place. And the more successful we became, the more we would believe that it was whatever we were getting from the man and his useless sand and water that was responsible. And then oneday, we would be asked to bring a goat; then a human skeleton; and then finally, a living, breathing human! And on the other side of the spectrum, a lot of charlatans also hide under Christianity and Islam to suck in the gullible in the very same way, even if they don’t request human sacrifice directly. They have been known to destroy families so completely by setting members against each other, they might as well have put loaded guns in the hands of their unwitting victims.
I have seen too many sad stories over the past few days that bring tears to my eyes at the profound foolishness of my people. A man took his son who had a hunchback to two Pastors to extract the hunch for some money-making ritual. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the 24-year-old man lost his life in the process. Yesterday, I saw a video of a man who had been beaten to a stupor confessing rather incoherently, that he had actually stolen a man’s ‘manhood’ (apologies to my non-Nigerian readers). The victim claimed he felt what seemed like an electric shock when the accused touched him, and he felt his ‘manhood’ disappear. He was however assured the lost ‘manhood’ would make it back ‘around 4 or 5’. He just had to be patient. As I watched the video, I was quite expectant that I would finally get to see a real live pelvis of a living man with a hole or a stretch of bare skin in the position where his ‘manhood’ should have been, but this was not to be. The Policemen recording the video did not oblige. As in every other single case I have heard of disappearing ‘manhoods’ over the course of 5 decades, it was just another story without the necessary visuals. Sadly, lives have been lost to this farce. How long will we continue to wallow in this ignorance in the age of AI?
- Bakare is a columnist with YES INTERNATIONAL! Magazine