I was down in my woodworking classroom one morning about six months after I had started teaching, sweeping up the ever present berm of bat poop around the perimeter that was deposited nightly by the colony of bats that lived in my rafters. As bad as the bat excrement smelled, I was glad to have them. They were the only hedge against the hordes of malaria ridden mosquitos that came out each night and tried to bite me while I was sleeping under my mosquito net. In the months that I had been teaching there, every day I swept up the bat poop, and swept it all off the edge of the loading dock in the back of the classroom. It had made a pile of poop about 5 feet in diameter and maybe a foot tall on the ground. I always thought about how people pay a lot of money in the garden shops back stateside, for a small bag of poop like this, to use in their gardens and compost piles. Bat poop is a powerful fertilizer, and I had tried to talk the local mothers into using it on the community garden, but so far, had just horrified them by suggesting such a thing.

“Use the excrement of animals in soil for growing food? Oh, Maseko, you Americans are so strange.” They weren’t using the ubiquitous cow patties from the free ranging cattle either. Maybe that was why the garden only produced swiss chard and cabbage.

Walking around straightening workbenches, and the stools that my classes had built as their first project so we would have something to sit on during class, I came across a small ball of fur and bones, in the middle of the floor. I remembered learning in Boy Scouts as a kid, that these were called Owl pellets, and were from the owls regurgitating the unusable parts of the rats and snakes that they ate. Well, that must mean that an owl had visited my classroom, and I looked around up in the rafters, and sure enough, spied an owl, sleeping on the top of a rafter. He was a pretty little thing, maybe a screech owl, and had gained access thru the broken clerestory windows at the top of my front wall. It made me smile. Owls eat rats and small snakes, of which there were many in Swaziland in the low veldt, and in fact, were the only wildlife other than birds that I had yet seen in this arid and dusty environment. Goody, anything that ate rats and snakes was my friend.

A couple weeks went by, and I picked up owl pellets daily, and threw them out onto the bat poop pile. Every day I would look up and see “hooty” as I came to call him, sleeping soundly during the heat of the day. Then one day during class, Hooty must have been having a bad dream, and he made a muttering sound, and fluffed his wings up, and one of the boys heard it. He looked up, and saw the owl, and shouted something in siSwati, and all of a sudden, the whole class got up and rushed out the door, racing helter skelter into the bush. I ran after them, but they were boys, and were long gone by the time I got outside. I had learned that in Swaziland, owls were considered to be a harbinger of death, and people were very afraid of them. For the rest of the day, not one boy showed up for the rest of my classes. Evidently, word had gotten around. And so it went, for the next 3 days, not a single boy came to woodworking class. 

On the third day of no students, I was walking around the school wondering what to do about this, and spied some of my woodworking boys sitting under a tree talking, off in the distance. I turned around and raced around the outside of the shop, coming up behind them. As I did, they saw me, and all but two of them got up and disappeared into the bush. I walked up to the two that were left, and sat down with them.

“Nkosinathi, why are the students staying away from woodworking class?” I asked one.

“Sir,” he said, “it is the owl in your classroom that has made us stay away. We are sad that someone has taken a chicken to the local sangoma (witch doctor), and he has sent an owl to kill you. We like woodworking class, and are sad that you are going to die.”

“Die? Look at me. I am fine. I don’t feel like I am dying. And owls are our friends. They eat rats and snakes.”

“Sir,” he said earnestly, “When the sangoma sends an owl, it comes and sits in a tree near you. And when you come outside, it makes a noise, and when you look up, it LOOKS you, and after that, within 3 days, you will be dead. We are wondering what will become of the woodworking class after you are dead.”

“In my country,” I said, “we treasure owls because they eat pests, and we even go so far as to make small houses in the trees for them to live in. (this made the boys gasp, and look at me intently) They come out and hunt right at sunset, just like the bats. And they sleep during the day.” 

“No one wants you to die, Mr Maseko, but once an owl looks you, there is nothing we can do.” Nkosinathi was serious, and looked sad. “And we do not wish to be looked, which can happen accidentally, so we are staying away until you are dead.”

I didn’t know what to think about this development. I didn’t feel like I was dying. And I walked back to my house, pondering.

The next morning, as I was sweeping the classroom, there was no owl pellet, and when I looked up, it appeared that Hooty had moved on. And miraculously, at first bell, my boys were back.

Classes went on, and tho the boys looked sideways out of the corner of their eyes at me, I obviously had not died, and the issue of my imminent death seemed to have been put on the back burner.

2 weeks later, I was walking across the bush, to visit the family of one of my students, to find out why he had been frequently absent from my class. As I passed a homestead, I shouted a greeting to the young man who was there working on something.

“Sawubona bhuti!” (hello brother!) I greeted him. He smiled and returned my greeting. I noticed that what he was working on seemed to be feathered, so I went over to see what it was. Well, it was Hooty. He had skinned the owl, and was fastening the head skin to the ball end of a knobkerrie with glue, resurrecting the head of the owl. I asked him what he was making, and he told me that it was a magic fetish, that he hoped to sell to the local sangoma when it was finished. The knobkerrie had been painted with red and black and white designs down the 18″ shaft, and with the head skin glued on, it looked like a serious magic object. In a macabre way, it was a work of art. I asked him how much he hoped to get from the sangoma for his effort, and he told me that he thought it was worth about 20 emalangeni. I wanted it, so I told him that I would give him 40 emalangeni if he sold it to me instead of the sangoma, to which he quickly agreed, and I paid him, and found myself the new owner of an owl head on a stick. I asked him if he had a younger brother that was in my woodworking class, and he said yes, in fact, it was Mfanawenkhosi, the other boy that I had talked to under the tree a couple weeks ago. I called him out of the house and asked him what he knew about the owl.

“Sir, after talking with you, Nkhosinathi and I returned to the school at sunset, to see if the owl would fly out the windows. When it did, we closed our eyes and threw stones at it. And when I opened my eyes, Nkhosinathi had run off, and the owl was laying in the dirt. I took off my shirt and covered the owl so he could not look me, and brought him home to my older brother, so that he could make a fetish to sell, and we could buy some food with the money.”

As it had gotten to be late in the afternoon, I abandoned my trip to the family of my absent student, and took my fetish, and headed back to my house at school. 

To get around in Swaziland, you walked. There were paths everywhere, and it was rare to walk these paths without encountering other people also walking to get where they were going. When you would meet someone along the way, it was the custom to greet them and go thru the whole greeting ritual with each one you met.

“Hello brother!” (or sister, or mother, or father) 

“Hello Maseko!” they would reply. Everyone in the community knew who I was. I was the only white person for 60 km in any direction, and even those who didn’t know me personally, knew that I was the woodworking teacher at the school.

“How are you?”

“I am fine. How are you?”

” I am fine also. How is your family?”

“They are well. And yours?”

“They are well also. It is hot today.” It was hot every day, but still, you had to say so.

“yes, it is very hot. The crops are dying. And the cattle are starving because there is no grass for them to eat.”

“Yes, that is sad. I hope we will get some rain soon.”

“Yes, I do too. The people went to the mountain this past saturday, and prayed for rain.”

“I hope that God is listening because we need rain to save the crops so that we have food for the dry season.” I had been there for 6 months, and it had never rained. In fact, there had been a drought for the last year and a half, and there was not much growing. The school soccer field was a dusty flat space. The tree branches and leaves had been eaten away up to about 6 feet by the starving cattle and goats. 

In walking around, you had to go thru these greetings with everyone you encountered along the way. If you passed them without speaking, then when next they encountered someone, they would caution them that ahead of them on the path was a tsotsi (thief), because only a criminal or a thief would pass without greeting them. As I walked back to school, I did not encounter even one person, which was so rare that I started wondering about it. Then as I got near the school, I noticed that off in the distance on the path, people would see me, and duck off the path into the bush so that they would not pass me. Swazis had great eyesight. And it occurred to me that I was walking along, carrying an owl head on a stick, and this was probably why they were avoiding me. I arrived back at school, and went into my room, and tried to find a way that I could put the owl stick that it would not crush the feathers. I had, hanging on a nail from my bed frame, a christmas stocking that my sister had sent me back at christmas, and it was just right to put the stick end in, and left the owl head sticking out, looking off at an angle. I didn’t think about it much after that.

3 weeks later, I was coming out of the woodworking shop after a day of classes, and there was a mother sitting on the sidewalk. I knelt down and greeted her. She returned my greeting, and looked uncomfortable. I asked her how I could help her. With a very uneasy manner she told me a story.

“I am embarrassed to tell you, Maseko, but my son, who is a primary student, was cutting class yesterday, and snooping around the teachers quarters, and he was looking in your windows because he was curious about how white people live, and he looked in one window, and saw your owl head, and it looked him, and he is at home dying, and I wish you to come to my homestead right now, and take the spell off of him, so that he will live.”

Wow. What could I do about that? Since I had gotten here to Elulakeni, a number of people had mentioned that everybody knew that white people had no magic. And yet, here was a woman who was asking me to take a spell off of her child. And I have learned that laughing at, or discounting someones belief, accomplished nothing. It seemed that I was going to have to do something. The mother was serious, and very upset that her son was dying. So I walked up to my house, and picked up the most magical looking thing that I owned, an egg shaped amethyst, that I used as a worry stone. When I was troubled, I would hold the stone in my hand, and roll it around, and think about what was bothering me, and the action would often help me to see a solution to the problem. I followed the mother across the bush to her homestead about an hour away, all the while thinking, “If Peace Corps ever hears about this, I am toast.” They were fairly inflexible about volunteers causing problems in their communities, and it would result in a plane ticket stateside.

We arrived at her homestead, and went into a round mud hut, and around the perimeter stood the whole family looking sad, and a small boy in the bed there, with a mound of blankets on him, and he was sweating profusely, and looking as pale as I had ever seen a brown person look. Among the family were two girls with the uniforms of my high school. I didn’t know them, but I knew that they spoke english because in high school all classes were taught in English, the second language of the country. I was going to have to do something convincing. I went over and felt the boys forehead, and other than being sweaty, was not hot, like he had a fever. I pulled off the blankets. It was 95 degrees. I had noticed the temperature while in my room getting the amethyst. I had a post card there, which had bands of color hidden behind a black face, and the temperature would cause the band of the temperature that it was ambiently, to light up. It had been the blue band showing, which meant that it was between 95 and 100 degrees. So I took out my amethyst and touched the boy on his forehead with it. As far as I could tell, the boy was having a psychosomatic reaction to having seen my owl head. In order to overcome the cultural belief about the owl head, I was going to have to do something believable.

So, in the deepest voice that I could muster, I started slowly reciting the Jabberwocky, while passing the amethyst slowly up and down his body, returning each pass to touch his forehead again.

“Twas brillig in the slithy toves, did gyre and gimble in the wabe. All mimsy were the borogroves, and the mome raths outgrabe. Beware the jabberwock, my son, The jaws that bite, the claws that catch. Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun, The frumious bandersnatch.” I had memorized it back in high school, and wanted something to say that was more magical than abra cadabra. Everyone was staring at me. As I finished what I could remember of it, I sat the boy up, and sent one of the girls for some drinking water, and had him drink a full glass. I touched him again on the top of is head with the amethyst, and turned to the mother. 

“This boy will be fine,” I said, “give him plenty of water, and some food to eat, and he will be ok in the morning.” And I took my leave, and trudged back across the bush to my school as darkness was falling. The whole time I walked, I was thinking, “One of two things can come out of this. Either the boy will be fine in the morning, if I did a convincing job, and from then on, people will think that, yes, in fact, this one white man actually has magic, or, the boy will be sick or die, and the people of my communtiy will ride me out of town on a rail.” I was greatly relieved the next morning to see him running around by the primary school as I walked down to the high school to go to class, apparently in good health and spirits. 

Peace Corps never found out about it, but after that, for the rest of the time I was in country, people would stop by my house randomly, to ask me for a magic spell, for luck, or for a person to fall in love with them, or for their wife to become pregnant, or for all sorts of things. I would say, “You have told me that white people have no magic, why are you asking me for this?” One day, the whole group of school prefects came to my house to ask for a spell to be taken off them, that was making them fall sick one after another. It was more likely amoebic dysentery from the fecal matter in the local river, where they got their drinking water, but that is another story.

Magic matters. 

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