Life will not always show us its best and brightest. Sometimes the colors of violent desperation filter out the light that lives within all of us. RELATIVTY OnLine’s elder statesman Lute wa Lutengano takes our readers into the darkness of an African night in Makambako, Tanzania. As always, he speaks to the reader not like an outsider who knows little or nothing of his part of the world, but like a next door neighbor flatly telling us about what’s going on in our tiny global village. With witch doctors, iron bars and spilled blood, Lutengano opens a window into a world that for many seems so very far away – expect for those of us who live with a little RELATIVTY.
I arrived in Makambako one cool evening and proceeded straight to Durban Hotel for an overnight rest. For those who do not know Makambako, Durban Hotel is the flagstaff of the town. It is a modern, efficient, 15 or so well furnished rooms hotel with conference facilities, ample car park, a well catered restaurant and a well stocked bar.
Among the added attractions at the hotel is a free car wash everyday, for those with cars, and that every evening the housekeepers replace, whether used or not, the small toothbrushes, toothpaste and soaps they stock in every room.
Initially I did not know about this total replacement. But after staying at the hotel more than twice I am in the know of this interesting perk. No wonder when I checked out of the hotel this time after some ten days, I had with me in my small bag, ten new toothbrushes, ten new toothpastes and ten unused soap pieces. And I can assure you, this made me happy.
This time around I had to also alert my colleagues, the famous Samora, a.k.a. Joachim Kitally and Evans Nkonyi, both from Arusha of this special hotel arrangement. I believe Nkonyi who had already been at the hotel previously ended up with a bagful of toiletries. However I am not sure about Samora who seemed surprised every morning to find a new set of toiletries in his room even when he had not touched the previous day’s stock.
Later that evening, to stretch our legs, we decided to visit the nearby Midtown Hotel which enjoys ample accommodation facilities with a bigger restaurant and bar. Here I was surprised to notice that this very popular joint was without the usual group of customers, the many Makambako-based businessmen, senior officials and visitors.
I loudly expressed my impression to the Mbeya-born bar lady. It is the deadly iron bars which have emptied all the watering halls in Makambako, she explained.
Later I was to learn the full ‘iron bars’ story from the employees and customers of both Durban and Midtown hotels. It seems for more than a week or so, some strange and fatal episodes claiming a score of lives had engulfed the town.
A group of young and middle aged men, allegedly from Songea town had been preying on customers and employees coming out of bars and hotels at night. They have then been ambushing them, hitting them on the head with iron bars and killing them. Strangely they have not been stealing anything from the corpses.
My visit to Makambako was during the peak of these killings. The men were complaining that this might be a conspiracy by their wives who do not want them hanging out late at night. The women on the other hand had been wondering whether this had something to do with jilted lovers.
It was only when the men threatened to burn down the Makambako police station that the law enforcers swung into action and managed to arrest two groups of the alleged criminals. The first group was arrested inside a Songea – bound bus while the latter was arrested at the Makambako bus station.
Both groups had with them bag loads of blood tainted iron bars. And after ‘thorough’ interrogations the men admitted that they had been commissioned by witchdoctors and some people in Songea to travel to Makambako, from which base, they were required to bloodily clobber people to death with the iron bars which would later be effectively used in voodoo activities.
I was shocked. But following the arrests and as I was leaving, life in Makambako had returned to normal. That is to say that the spectacle of drunks wobbling their way home after midnight in the dusty and dark streets of the town was back.
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