kind of like a ghost story (kind of like the crucible?)

A few months ago I was talking to my 10-year-old neighbor, Hawa, and she told me that her primary school had closed down one of the choo (latrine) stalls because it was, if I understood her properly, haunted by an angry spirit that was causing students to faint and speak in tongues.

This morning I asked her if the choo in question was still causing problems and she informed me that it isn’t. I asked her why not.

“The teachers prayed,” she stated, as though it were obvious.

“Where?”

“In the choo.”

I took a moment to visualize this. I imagined candles and elaborate costumes and leather drums. As Hawa described the prayer session in more detail, though, I realized that it probably involved more cell phone MP3 players and fewer tribal trimmings. Oh, development.

Apparently both the Muslim and the Christian teachers prayed together, because you never know if the spirit is a Muslim spirit or a Christian spirit. Hawa, who is Muslim, firmly believes it was the Christian teachers’ prayers that did the trick, though she was unable to explain why.

Regardless of whether it was the work of psychosomatics, Allah, or Jesus, being rid of the evil choo spirit is super good news for the primary school. There aren’t enough choos to accommodate all the students even when none of them are being frequently by angry spirits.

The bad news is that the spirit from the haunted choo has somehow traveled to the secondary school, becoming the latest in a series of unfortunate events preventing my Appropriate Technology Seminar from following anything resembling a schedule. The spirit has changed its tactics—rather than attack the unfortunate attendants of a choo at the secondary school, it takes the shape of “genies” that seem to prey exclusively upon girls.

The teachers informed me that the genie possessions occur about once a day now, and sometimes the girls will become possessed in pairs. Most of the genies have names and are capable of speech, albeit accompanied by a lot of foaming at the mouth and convulsing. Rumor has it that these possessions are also taking place at the secondary school in the next village over. That village is pretty sure that they have found the woman responsible for the curse that is causing all these possessions. She is allegedly the former mistress of a man who (again, allegedly) has a habit of “going with” secondary school girls.

I asked one of the teachers about this story and wrote down his answer word-for-word—mostly because the way he speaks English makes everything sound like a Bible story and I love it.   

“It is said that people who are religious came to know that this woman is not a human being and they warned the man and he decided to chase the woman away,” he explained. “The woman promised that the man will suffer and will be facing things which are not good. So it is said that every woman who runs with that man will get this problem [of losing consciousness and becoming possessed]. It is said that the one student who fell [today] had been with him for two days in the past. This is just what is said.”

The possessions have become so routine that the daily drama is played out without fuss or excitement among the bystanders. Rather, the genie attacks are treated with, of all things, a cautious lightheartedness and sense of humor.

Here’s how it usually works.

A girl faints in the middle of a lesson. Sometimes she starts screaming immediately; sometimes she goes limp for a while first. Either way, she is carried out of the classroom and placed on the floor in an empty classroom or under the shade of one of the few scraggly trees that grow curiously out of the desert-esque landscape of the school campus. At some point, the girl’s eyes roll to the back of her head and she starts foaming at the mouth, twitching, maybe convulsing and some of the girls look like they are legitimately having seizures. It’s pretty terrifying the first time you see it, but as cold hearted as this may make me sound, you get used to it after the first few times. Some of the girls start to kick and scream and have to be restrained by several male students. At this point, they finally start responding (sort of) to the stimuli around them, but will usually do so in the character of another person—the “genie,” they call it.

This is the fun part for the observers lucky enough to be permitted to leave class to help their friend regain consciousness. With a lackadaisicalness that seems a little out of place in this situation, they start asking the genie questions. What’s your name? Where do you come from? Why are you possessing so-and-so? Do you have any special powers? Does the God of the underworld demand that the teachers cancel exams, by any chance? Sometimes the genie just screams and yells profanities. Sometimes the genie tells an elaborate story about who she (or he?) is and what she’s doing here. One genie likes to demand a soda as sacrifice in exchange for the girl’s spirit. That genie gets laughed at more than any of the others.

If the girl is Christian, a teacher will donate his cell phone so her friends can play her MP3s of hymns translated into Swahili and accompanied by what sounds like a foreign missionary’s idea of “African” style music. If she hasn’t been cured within a few hours, the Pentecostal minister (who happens to be the Headmistress’s husband) might come to attend to her spiritual needs.

If the girl is Muslim, her friends will attempt to cast off the genie by reading certain passages of the Quran that are, apparently, good for this kind of situation.

Sometimes things get complicated. One of the girls who suffers from these attacks is a Christian, but she becomes possessed by a Muslim genie named Fatuma. Fatuma is, according to the girl’s unconscious outbursts, a princess from an underwater kingdom ruled by a man named Hamadi. His second in command is named Shaarif, and there are a few other members of the underwater royalty whose names and descriptions she can recite consistently when prompted. One of the princes (or something like that, I don’t have the lineage down exactly) is intent on marrying her (the student, not the genie) and is trying to carry her spirit down into the underworld with him. She doesn’t snap out of the possession until her teachers and friends grab hold of her and somehow convince her that they want her to stay here in this world.

In a school system that still teaches almost entirely through rote memorization, I’ve never seen such creativity from a student—conscious or otherwise.

         
You may be wondering whether the Christian student possessed by a Muslim demon can be cured with Christian or Muslim prayer. The answer, according to the teachers, is that you have to address the student, not the demon, in trying to bring her out of the possessed state. While explaining why this is, one teacher said that he believes the girls are just pretending and therefore there’s no point trying to pacify a non-existent spirit. I thought it was kind of odd that he believed prayer was necessary to cure the girls, even though he believed their ailments to be entirely psychological in nature.

The more I think about it, though, it’s beginning to make sense.

The teachers and I have launched a private investigation into the “genie situation.” We began by trying to find a pattern—what do these girls have in common? Pretty much every student at that school is dealing with what we Americans might call “serious issues at home,” but some issues are more serious than others. One of these girls recently suffered the death of her mother, another lost her brother, a third is discriminated against for having been born out of wedlock, etc, etc, etc. Even if these attacks are being caused by genies, our investigation team determined, it seems that the genies are particularly attracted to emotionally vulnerable girls.

This is a culture where crisis and trauma are expected to be forgotten and moved on from almost immediately. The young woman whose brother died a few months ago would not be expected to burst into tears and rush out of the classroom on occasion, the way that an American teenager might as she goes through the grieving process. But when that girl becomes rigid, collapses, starts speaking in tongues and demanding soda in exchange for her soul, no one is particularly surprised. She doesn’t get gentle pats on the backs and assurances like “we’re here for you” and “it’s ok to still miss your brother”; she gets a roomful of spectators who watch (and sometimes giggle) as she foams at the mouth and screams.

But really, what’s the difference? What the girl wants, and gets, is attention and the assurance that her peers and teachers love and support her. Every time her friends beg her to remain here on Earth rather than follow the genie Fatuma to the underwater Kingdom, they are reminding her that she is wanted here, she is loved. I want to believe that every time this girl comes out of her possession and rejoins our world, she is one step closer to growing more confident with herself and more able to ignore the horrible things the village gossips say about her.

Alas, this style of community psychotherapy is seriously disruptive to the learning process (and my appropriate tech project). One way or another, the genies have got to go. The various religious and spiritual communities are working on the issue from their end (though I desperately hope their chosen cure doesn’t involve sacrificing the “witch” who is supposedly responsible for this). Meanwhile, some of the teachers and I are looking into the possibility of holding group therapy sessions with the doctor from the local clinic, who luckily enough happens to be a rather young women who knows how to talk to teenagers.

           

I debated a lot about posting this blog… felt a little bad, like I’m somehow fetishizing or objectifying Tanzanian culture by telling you all about this particularly “exotic” situation. But, really, it’s not so exotic, is it? Everywhere in the world, teenagers are struggling to find ways to deal with the terribly difficult task of growing up and learning to express themselves when no one wants to listen. I know some of this is funny to us “Westerners”, but in between chuckles I want us to see that, even in a situation as seemingly strange as an outbreak of genie possessions, there is a common thread of humanity that holds us all together as one flawed but beautiful human race.