The Gods So Decide
Image link here. Amara was still shaking. The village juju-man, Opowkri, was baffled by the blatant refusal of the evil spirits to bow to his incantations. Did the spirits aim to ridicule him? And in front of the entire village?! Well, he was having none of that! He cast a furtive glance at her parents who were huddled in the corner and quickly turned his attention to the shivering girl lying on the thatched mat in his dimly lit mud hut. The room was smoky from the tiny calabash filled with dry, burning herbs and he had to refrain from coughing as the smoke choked him. He was, after all, the intermediary between the gods and the people. He took the white speckled fowl he had asked her parents to bring and raised it to the sky. He implored the gods of hale and hearty health to prove the uninvited spirits wrong; to show he was stronger than these spirits. The fowl cackled, seeming to know that its end was near. Its loud crows were nothing compared to the cacophony Opowkri was making. He finished his incantations and in one fell swoop, pulled out the head of the fowl from its neck. Blood spurted everywhere. He quickly directed the spurts towards the naked body of the girl. In normal times, her parents would never have allowed their daughter to be naked in front of a man but these were not normal times. He had insisted that they removed her clothes so he could work his voodoo. And as expected, they quickly obliged. She was their last surviving child; having watched six of their children die in the last three months. They didn’t want to lose her and at that point, they would have done just about anything. Opowkri rubbed the blood all over Amara’s body, pausing ever so slightly on her breasts and trying his best to hide his arousal. As his hands traipsed over her body, he muttered incantations that were only understood by him and the gods. The fetid smell of fresh blood mixed with smoke from the burning herbs was enough to make anyone retch; and that was what he was going for. On cue, Amara raised herself up and retched, only managing to miss hitting him by a few inches. ‘Yes! Get out of her you evil spirit! Get out of her! Remove him from your body my child!’ And he went into more incantations. He started dancing around Amara, chanting, beguiling and asking the gods to show them strong. ‘Wa….wa…I ne…eed wat…ter.’ Amara croaked. The juju-man paused in his dance and shouts and watched her for a second. Her parents scrambled to give her the calabash filled with dirty stream water. ‘NO!’ The juju-man bellowed! Her parents cowered and froze inches over her face. ‘The spirits are getting weak and they need to increase their strength! She will not be given anything!’ Her parents retreated to their corner of the hut and held each other. The ‘dance-cantations’ continued for two hours; two hours where Amara progressively got weaker, threw up five more times and croaked for water over and over again. The filth was not cleaned up nor was her thirst quenched. The smell in the room was worse than the village outhouse at the edge of the forest. The last time Amara vomited, she didn’t even have the strength to raise herself up. She just threw up and gargled in her own vomit. After that, she stopped shaking. She was no longer hyperventilating or as Opowkri came to find out, breathing. Her parents started screaming. ‘Get out!’ The juju-man shouted so loud, her parents fled the hut. That didn’t stop the whimpers of her mother from filtering into the silence of the hut. He checked Amara and saw she was perfectly still. Her skin was losing the hotness that it had a few minutes ago. For the first time since she had been brought to him three nights ago, she looked peaceful, finally at rest. He didn’t need a fancy white cloth and a rope around his neck like that missionary medicine man in the village square to know that Amara was dead. This was the twelfth child he had seen die in the last two moons; and all of them in his tiny hut. He had told the parents that the gods were punishing them for taking the little drops of evil liquid from the missionary medicine man. The evil man had invoked the anger of the gods when he said the gods were non-existent. He had gone further to say that diseases were not from the gods to punish them but as a result of their dirty environment. He said he had a thing that could prevent diseases and that was when he convinced some parents to take those little drops of his own type of voodoo. It didn’t matter that every child who wasn’t sick before they had taken the city man’s evil medicine was still hale and hearty. It didn’t matter that the families who had made certain lifestyle changes like weeding the grass in front of their houses, boiling and filtering their water and using his fish net to sleep were healthier than those who didn’t. It also didn’t matter that the man had insisted that Amara was suffering from the disease of the mosquito and dirty water and that he had something he called ‘drugs’ for them. What mattered was that he wasn’t going to allow any other medicine man take his place in this village. His father had been the village juju-man as had his father before him. He was definitely not going to allow a twit from the city come up and outwit him. His mind made up, he got up from his kneeling position in front of Amara and wiped some vomit off his knee, unaffected by either the smell or the grossness. He turned to the door…and walked out. The people gathered around him. He shook his head and
