I was walking along the river near the Peace Corps hostel where I was staying, having come to teach another Sam’s Survival Session to a new group of volunteers the next day, and just enjoying the sound of the river, and the verdant valley that the river had carved. I had paused to watch Weaver Finches building a new nest of mud and sticks. It was pretty amazing. The front door was on the bottom, and it looked like the birds were actually flying upside down to gain entry. As I climbed back up the bank to continue my walk, I saw a stick on the ground that was about an inch and a half in diameter, and 6 feet long, the perfect size for a walking stick, so I grabbed it. It was very light, and, I realized, a branch of the wattle tree. Like what Moses cradle was made of. Wattle grew everywhere in the High Veldt of Swaziland, and though it sometimes grew to the size of a small tree, was really just a weed on steroids. The walk was very relaxing, and I arrived back at the hostel in good spirits.

I went into the hostel, and looked over my notes for the next day’s session, made some new additions, and then took my stick outside, and sat beneath a tree. I studied the stick for a while, and waited for inspiration on how I wanted to carve it. I knew I was going to carve it into something interesting. The top was slightly larger than the bottom end. I took out my trusty pocket knife and whittled the bottom flat. Then I worked on the top end, and carved it into crenellations like a castle tower, with a couple of parallel grooves around the circumference below the top. I stripped off what bark remained on it, and used the side of the pocket knife blade to smooth it. It was perfect.

The next day I went across the road to the Peace Corps training camp, and taught my session to the burnt out group of trainees. Peace Corps always scheduled my session in the 9th week of the 10 week training course, and I remembered well how completely exhausted that I had felt on the 9th week of my own training a year and a half ago. It was a very intense 10 weeks of studying the difficult language, and practice teaching, and history and government of Swaziland, and all the many small things that the training director felt that future volunteers needed to learn. Though it was well thought out, there were practical things that the training didn’t cover, like how to make rice, and how to live at a school that did not have electricity or running water. And how to eat a healthy diet out in the middle of nowhere. Since the trainees were so mentally tired, I tried to make my session funny and surprising and interesting. As my fundamental rule for teaching out at my school was “whatever is necessary to hold their attention”, I tried to do the same with my survival session.

Heading back to my school the next day, a lot of Swazis looked askance at my stick, which was propped up against the bus window where I was sitting. In Swaziland, it was mostly healers and sangomas (witch doctors) who carried long sticks like that, and I think it was my being an American that had them wondering.

As time went by, I carried my stick with me whenever I went anywhere. And in those times while I sat on the side of the road, waiting for a car to pass that I could hitch a ride with, I would take out my pocket knife and spend my waiting time carving on my stick. I am not a skilled carver, and though crude, my carvings gave life to the stick. The whole process sort of took on a life of its own. 

Over months, I had carved a snake wrapping in a spiral around the stick, from top to bottom. Its head stopped just short of the top end, and it had its mouth open, with fangs showing. It was after that was done, and I had used a magic marker to color the snake black, and the fangs red, that the people who saw me with it, thought that I must be a sangoma, (witch doctor), in spite of my skin color, and would come over and chat me up, to see who I was mostly, and asking for things like a spell to make a girl fall in love with them. Or a spell to give them luck when they went to gamble at the casino in Manzini. Or a spell to make their enemy fall sick. Or their wife to become pregnant.

A couple times while walking out in the bush, I came across bright colored feathers, and I saved them, and I bound them together with dental floss, and hung them from the side of the top of the stick. In a market in Zimbabwe while on a trip there, I found a small carving of a pregnant woman and bought it to put on my stick. It was carved from ebony, with exquisite detail. I hung it with the feathers. And back at my school, I took out my box of tiny beads, and made a brightly colored beaded swatch, which I also hung on the top of the stick. 

I had a small polished egg-shaped agate that I had brought with me as a worry stone, and when I was in a quandary about something, I would take it out and roll it around in my hand, while pondering my problem, and it would help me find a solution. I took a saw, and cut off the top 4 inches of my stick, and carved a cage for the stone, and put it inside, and glued the stick back together. It looked like the snake was trying to eat the egg.

For me, it was just an artsy thing to do. It served well as a walking stick, but as it got more elaborate, it got a lot of attention, both from my fellow Peace Corps volunteers, as well as the Swazis that I passed along my wanderings. I never really tried to act like I was a sangoma, or make spells for the people that asked me. I just really enjoyed carving it. By now, it had smaller carvings of elephants and zebras and trees in between the spirals of the snake body. I carved a crude eagle in flight, and if you squinched your eyes and tipped your head to the side, you could sort of tell what it was. The stick was as tall as me, and I was quite a bit taller than most Swazis, and so it looked kind of magical. Best of all, it generated conversation with all sorts of people, who came over to ask me about the stick and had interesting stories to tell me.

Twice, the stick seemed to have saved me from the attention of people up to no good. Once I was walking back from a movie in downtown Mbabane, the capital city where the Peace Corps office was, and it was about 10 o’clock at night. I was walking with a couple of volunteers, and we were going through one of the dark areas of town. Mbabane didn’t have much in the way of street lights. All of a sudden, a man jumped out of an alley with a large butcher knife in his hand, and stooped to scrape his knife back and forth along the curb, like he was sharpening it, and stood up and brandished the knife at us, demanding money, our shoes, and our ubiquitous backpacks. It startled us all. We stood there not knowing what to do. On a whim, I stepped forward and slammed the stick on the pavement, making the beads and stuff rattle against the stick, and said in SiSwati, “You should run away little man, or I will put my muti (magic) on you.” His eyes got huge looking at my stick, and he took off running into the darkness.

Another time I was at my house in the teachers quarters at my school, grading papers like usual. It was just after dark. The houses were not well built, and you could hear the conversations of the people who were passing. I heard some men walking around my house, and it sounded like they were discussing if I was home. I jumped up, grabbed my stick, and went to my front door. I flipped the lock and yanked open my door, and seeing three startled young men outside, smacked my stick against the concrete floor. 

Me: Yes, I am home. What do you want?

It surprised the heck out of them. They talked among themselves in rapid fire SiSwati.

Me: (in english) Siphiwe! What do these men want with me?

I said it loudly.

Siphiwe was my closest neighbor, a primary school teacher, and my good friend who had a wonderful sense of humor. We had sat and talked many evenings before dark, on the bench in front of my house. She was well read, and had shrugged off many of the cultural limitations that rural Swazis had not. 

As I said, you could hear conversations outside from within the houses, and we often shouted at each other back and forth from within our houses without going outside. The men, who evidently didn’t have much English, looked at me like I was speaking in tongues. I was looking at the blank wall of a house, and there was nobody there.

Siphiwe: (replying loudly in English) I have been listening to them Maseko. At first they were talking about robbing your house, and then one of them said that he thought that you were a sangoma.

Her voice was coming from the blank back wall of her house. The men looked at the wall, then at me, then at my stick, and then at the wall again, and back at me. Their heads swiveled in unison. It was like a scene from Blazing Saddles. I figure that they thought I was conversing with the ancestors, which is what a sangoma would do. They were all on edge, and looking like they were ready to run away.

Me: (in Siswati) What do you men want? Why are you bothering me when you should be home and inside your houses?

Swazis, at least the ones at and around the school, would go inside their houses as soon as it was dark, and would lock their doors and stay inside until morning. I, on the other hand, being an American, and not afraid of the dark, would often go walking around after dark, to my woodworking shop down at the school, and sometimes, just to walk off sleeplessness on the many footpaths in the countryside around the school. I never ran into anybody out there. I was hyper aware of snakes, and watched vigilantly for them, because they were everywhere. But the walks always calmed me down, and I would get back to my house sleepy, and would go to bed.

One of the men: We would like a spell to make our neighbor sick.

Me: That is a terrible thing to want. I don’t make spells like that. Maybe you should talk with your neighbor, and work out your problems instead of making him sick, and then you both would win.

The men looked totally confused at the concept, shrugging their shoulders at each other,

Me: I will give you a spell to help your children do better in their classes at school. That is all that I am willing to do for you.

And I went into my room, and fetched a small polished stone from my collection. I came back to the door, and rapped the stone sharply against the head of my stick a couple times, and held it out to them. They looked kind of scared, but one reached out timidly. and took the stone.

Me: Now go back to your families, and go inside, and stop bothering people in the night.

They left, walking quickly away into the darkness without a word. I stood there for a couple minutes until I couldn’t hear them any more.

Siphiwe: (giggling from within her house) I heard you shake your big stick at them Maseko. I don’t think they will come to your house again.

Me: I don’t think so either. I looked at them very sternly the whole time. Like Mrs Ngambule. (Mrs Ngambule was the home ec teacher, and glared at her classes, most of whom were scared of her.)

Siphiwe and I laughed.

I think it is all in the presentation. Those who were not up to something negative, would come and ask me about the stick. And we would have a nice chat. Those who were not there to converse, would just blurt out what they wanted.

Magic is what you decide to think that it is.

I miss my stick. It brought interesting people into my life.