Unf*ck Yourself, Unf*ck the World. Kagiso Msimango
The car accident happened the following week. There was a lot of frantic but hushed activity at home. I could pick up from snippets of conversations that something horrible had happened. Malome Simmy had died. Thami was in a critical condition, and apparently it could go either way. Luckily for us, I’d just learned about the genie in the bottle called God that you released through prayer to grant your wishes. So I prayed for my cousin to get better, survive and thrive.
He didn’t. He died.
With the predictable self-centredness of an eight-year-old, I assumed that the hot butter I’d poured over his head had somehow weakened him and that that was the tipping point that caused his death. I had killed my best friend. Panic and guilt washed over me. This gave me extra vigour to continue praying fervently. After all, the Sunday School teacher had insisted that God could do anything. She hadn’t mentioned any Ts and Cs. I prayed several times a day, all the way until the day of the funeral. I wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral for some reason, so I spent that time praying. I was convinced the adults would come back with Thami alive and well, if somewhat dusty – the Sunday School teacher had accompanied the lesson with a picture of a dusty, freshly resurrected Lazarus. When the adults did come back, without Thami, I stopped praying.
Fast forward to 2017. I was abruptly woken up by a blood-curdling scream. I sat up in bed, dazed, trying to figure out what the sound was, when another scream pierced through my daze. I recognised the voice of my daughter, Naima, three years old at the time. I bolted down the stairs in a panic, wondering what had happened to my child. My partner, Mufasa – that’s not his real name, but I keep hoping that if I call him Mufasa he will eventually get that tattoo of a lion that I think would look so good on him – was still up, and he had reached her bedroom before I did. When I got there he was holding her in the most curious manner, as though he was restraining her. I grabbed her out of his arms, and immediately understood why he was holding her like that, with her arms pressed against the sides of her body. As soon as her arms were freed she tried to attack me, clawed fingers raking at my eyes. Thankfully, since she was so tiny, extending my hands was enough to pull my face from her reach. She looked possessed. I turned her around and held her from the back, facing away from me. She started sobbing and asking me who she was, now scratching at her own face. “You are Naima. You are my baby.” I needed to repeat this many times throughout that long night. She kept on touching her face, wild-eyed, desperately demanding to know who she was. For whatever reason, I just knew not to take her to a mirror; instead I put my phone on selfie mode so she could see herself. I later learned that my intuition about not placing her in front of the mirror was spot on.
“See, you are Naima, my baby.”
“No, I am a monster!” she’d insist with conviction. It took hours to convince her that she wasn’t a monster and to stop her from alternating between trying to scratch her own skin off and clawing at my eyes. That night we all slept in the lounge, on the couches and floor – me, Naima, Mufasa, Lebone and Aunty Jojo, our kids’ nanny. Naima slept on top of me the entire night, shaking violently, like she had hypothermia even though she was hot to the touch.
In the morning I got up really early and started doing an energy clearing on the house. I used every single trick I had learned, and some that I intuited as I was going along. I chanted a Latin phrase I had learned during my adventures as a student of a certain mystery school: “In nomini Padre, et Fili, et Spiritus Sancte. Abbe Male Spiritus. Abbe Male Spiritus. Abbe Male Spiritus. In nomini Padre, et Fili, et Spiritus Sancte. In Nomini Jesu Christi.” The energy clearing was a little more effective than I would’ve liked, because the following night as we slept, a pipe in one of the bathrooms burst and I woke to ankle-deep water. Now I had to contend with demons and an insurance company. Friend, none of this was helping with the quest for low-moderate stress levels. I have since learned to be more specific with my clearing intentions.
I chucked Naima’s possession incident in the “WTF?” bucket and we moved on with our lives. She was never possessed again, but a few weeks later she started seeing things that no one else could, and not fairies or gnomes causing mischief at the bottom of the garden. These terrified her. She would scream, run to an adult and literally start climbing like a little monkey seeking higher ground. You could tell from tracking the movements of her eyes that she was definitely seeing something. She referred to these as “lightning things”. Initially, these incidents only happened at night and infrequently, perhaps once every three to four weeks. Then, out of nowhere the frequency increased to about twice a week, then one day it happened during the day. Then it started happening while she was at school, as well. Before then, the lightning things were only tormenting her at home.
Lebone’s birthday was coming up. We had booked a spa day for her and a group of friends. I didn’t stay long because I was exhausted from the ongoing night vigils. One of the mothers who’d dropped off her child for the party was a friend, Melinda. She noticed that something was not right. It wasn’t really hard to tell – both Naima and I looked like death warmed up. She came over to my house, and I reluctantly told her what was going on. Her husband was a Christian who attended a nearby church. She offered to find out whether he knew of anyone who could help. Lo and behold, there was a woman at his church who helped people with such. I think he referred to her as a prayer warrior or something along those lines. I didn’t know the terminology, as I hadn’t been a Christian in decades. The Prayer Warrior called me. I related our situation to her. She was unfortunately not in town, but she offered to pray for us over the phone. I wanted to end the call, but I didn’t want to be rude so I let her pray. Naima was on my lap during our conversation. She’d become like an extra appendage, permanently attached to me. As the woman prayed for us over the phone, Naima released a huge fart then dozed off. By the time the Prayer Warrior was done, Naima was sleeping peacefully on my lap. I carried her to bed, but she woke up shortly afterwards and for a few hours she was back to her old, happy, adventurous self. We even managed to go out and do some shopping. Unfortunately, the respite only lasted a few hours. However, Melinda’s husband Mark had organised another group of prayer warriors, who came to my house that evening. They said loads of things that offended me. They especially took umbrage with the Buddha and Foo dog statues at the front door, as well as the creepy baby dragon one in the lounge. They interrogated Lebone about the red string on her wrist; it was an infantile friendship bracelet of sorts, nothing occultic about it. Then, of course, asked about my relationship with Jesus the Saviour. I breathed through all of that, thinking what a huge waste of my time this was; eventually, they decided to pray. As they got into it, Naima let out another enormous fart and passed out right there in my arms. They invited me to church, left their contact details, and went on their warrior way.
All was peaceful until around midnight when Naima had another episode. I was home alone with the kids, and did what all kids do when they are at a loss. I bundled my kids into the car and we drove to my mother’s house. My mother managed to calm us all down and we slept. In the morning I noticed a smell, rancid and sharp, like roadkill on a hot day. This was curious, because a few weeks before the possession I had detected the same smell in my own house. We had just adopted two kittens, Bubbles and Loki. I decided that they must have dragged something behind a piece of furniture that was now rotting. So Aunty Jojo and I went about shifting furniture, looking for the source of the smell. I was not entirely convinced by my own explanation, because the kittens were still too young to hunt anything and they hardly left the house, but I had no other explanation for it. We looked for the source of this smell for almost two weeks before finally giving up. What made it more complicated was that I appeared to be the only one who could smell it. Even though Aunty Jojo and Mufasa helped me look, they couldn’t smell anything. So I learned to live with it, vile as it was. Now, here I was, in my mother’s house and so was that smell.
Soon enough, Naima woke up and the lightning things came for her once again. So my mom did what all kids do when they are at a loss. She piled us in the car, her kid and her kid’s kids, and drove to her mom’s house in Ga-Rankuwa. By the time we reached Ga-Rankuwa, Naima clinging to me for dear life, we were physically and emotionally exhausted. My grandmother, a devout Catholic, insisted that we pray. I was more open to prayer now, as it seemed to buy us a few hours of peace. We all gathered around in the sitting room; my cousins were also at my gran’s house and they reluctantly obliged as my grandmother led us through