FICTION

Witch-hunts and Virus Scans - The Similarity

Recently there’s been quite a big number of young men losing their balls in my neighbourhood that it has become quite a task to update the Lost Balls register which I have been managing since 2000. They are now getting loony by the minute. It has become like a mortuary in Baghdad, they no longer count the heads but the bodies – bloated and limbs missing.

The point behind this post is the number of boys going loony and later messing society up because they get wild and horny. First we thought it was due to illicit drugs – well we thought so even though we have used drugs ourselves and we are still sane enough to spot a mad man from a psychiatrist. So, finally after exhausting marijuana, valium, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, alcohol, mushrooms, mandrax, smack and friends we decided to put the blame on witches. Yeah, the ones celebrated on Harry Porter.

Since we ceased vigilante activity our neighbourhood has become quite a hive of witchcraft activity. There are more witches per square kilometre than shebeens. People at Zone One have gone loony, same as Zone Two and MaGraskop. We are not even going to mention Bafaladi, Dichochwaneng, GaBhani, Thabakgolo, Colombia, Kingston, Madjembeni, Mathule, Mandela Village, RDP, Violetbank, GaRelane, GaBereta, Mphenyatsatsi and Masakeng.

The blame finally falls on the plethora of witches who are roaming our streets and skies at night without any anti-witchcraft spaceship gun attempting to bring them down. They have upgraded from using loaves of bread, which makes it tricky these days since Albany sells them sliced and have resorted to broom sticks, cellphones and pot lids.

Now we were having a chat and some guy said we need to initiate an impromptu witch-hunt at least four times a year. All of us go to Mbuzini in many buses to a mngoma (witchdoctor) who will pick the witches amongst us and we expel them from our environs and incinerate their covens. Some guy said we will not succeed in a court of law because witch-hunting is a crime.

I reasoned that we will argue that the aim of the witch-hunting is not to assassinate people’s characters but what we will be doing is basically – in computer language a virus scan. We are only running the scan to target Drive C (community) and scan for viruses (witches), Trojans (tokoloshes), worms (evil spirits) and other bugs (covens).

After our Mbuzini virus scan the mngoma will ask us what to do with the people who have been identified as lethal to society. The mngoma will give us options – DELETE (REMOVE AND INCINERATE A COVEN), QUARANTINE (CHASE FROM THE VILLAGE) and IGNORE (ACT LIKE THE POPE).

In our case we shall choose DELETE, and chase the motherf*ckers out of our hood. And we might burn the house and yell in the tradition of American protest “don’t want no water let the muthafucka burn”