I ate human flesh: Woman

she ate human flesh

The arrogance Gugulethu Mayuni exuded on her first visit to the newsroom had vanished and in its place a remorseful and troubled countenance had set in when she walked in for the second time recently.

And before this writer could offer her a seat, she announced the purpose of her unannounced visit. She wanted to make peace with her victims, living or dead.

"I want to make it very clear, without equivocation or ambiguity that I am really sorry, terribly sorry for all the evil things I did to all the people, living or dead, whose rights, innocence and peace I defiled through my satanic and evil powers.

"To the souls of the dead whose bodies I tampered with in the cemeteries I say rest in peace; I did everything under the evil spell my cruel grandfather cast on me as a young girl of five," she said as she laboured to breathe and contain her emotions.

A clear testimony of the torment her soul was going through. Gugulethu confessed that she had done a lot of soul searching, thanks to the counselling she is getting from traditional healers and churchgoers sympathetic to her situation.

Gugulethu’s horrendous story started 19 years ago and only came to light recently when she was hauled to court by a traditional healer who had been trying to heal her.

Her hideous story has left both civic society and lawmakers shell-shocked when she confessed to practicing witchcraft in the company of her grandfather and her mother’s two sisters.

She says it all started when her parents divorced when she was five and was moved to stay with her mother’s people in the Woodlands, Bulawayo.

Two years after her relocation, she was initiated into a cult that was to decide all her actions for the 19 years that followed.

"My grandfather, Stephen Dewani Mayuni took advantage of my grandmother’s absence to invite me into his room on the pretext of needing my services for some minor chores.

"My grandmother was South African and used to make regular visits to her native country leaving the girl in the custody of the grandpa. The girl’s mother was working and staying elsewhere.

"I did not suspect anything and was only surprised when he told me that he wanted to be intimate with me but that was after he had inserted his organ into my mouth and ejaculated," she said.

Gugulethu was seven by then.

She remembers how the grandfather had proceeded to rape her before threatening to kill her if she revealed it to anyone.

She had been initiated into his cult in which he would sleep with his two daughters at a nearby cemetery.

"He would be intimate with his youngest daughter first then I would follow using the graves as bedding and this ritual became a routine.

"We would fly to the cemetery on broom sticks, each of us armed with some goblins and an owl.

"My grandpa would ride on his hyena with the same arsenal as ours but for the spear that he would stick on freshly dug graves before performing his ritual to open them," explained the evidently distraught Gugulethu.

She recalls how the grandfather would pierce graves with his spear, sprinkle some black powder around the grave, do some chanting in his Chitumbuka language (he is originally from Malawi) after which the ground would quake and the graves would open.

After this the old man would enter the grave with two goblins, his hyena and some owls.

He would wash the feet of the dead persons using water mixed with the black powder before cutting off the head and private parts and getting some congealed blood for later rituals.

He would then emerge with the human parts and go to the head of the grave where he would repeat his Chitumbuka ritual for the grave to close.

"This was the point at which he would prick us in the palms or feet using the spear collecting our blood into a clay plate, take his powder and sprinkle it onto the blood before dipping the human parts from the grave. The most harrowing experience was when he would make everybody drink part of the mixture and so would the goblins.

"After this ritual he would proceed to sleep with the youngest daughter, after which the eldest, would use the mixture to clean her sister’s private parts. The same ritual would also happen to me," confessed Gugulethu.

The youngest daughter and Gugulethu would then be ordered to turn their backs on the grave while the old man and the eldest daughter would perform the last rituals. They would then take everything and fly home.

On arrival the senior daughter would cook human flesh and everybody would eat. The remaining loot would then be used whenever we wanted to deprive a victim of his or her luck, potential and even riches, she further narrated.

Part of the arsenal was kept at the old man’s shrine behind the chicken run in a clay pot wrapped in a red cloth with human bones and skulls (presumed to be his parents’) strewn around it. The fetish is always buried in the ground but appeared with every visit to the graveyard.

He consults it for every key decision he makes regardless of the contributions of his family members, said Gugulethu. And so the rituals became inextricably entwined into her life. Everything was normal and she saw nothing out of the ordinary in her situation.

"I did everything under the old man’s spell and I was deeply immersed into it that I was not in control of my actions at any given time," confesses Gugulethu.

Gugulethu has two children from a failed marriage. She stayed with the younger one while her mother took care of the other, the older one to be specific.

Sadly, the second child could not escape the tentacles of the old man.

"My baby was initiated to work as a goblin and did everything real goblins did at the graveyard and would even eat from the same plate with them.

"She would sleep surrounded by the goblins at the graveyard every time she went to sleep," said the mother.

The child consequently picked up an illness that made her unable to speak properly and would always be drooling and behaving weirdly, added Gugulethu.

Things came to a head when one day a traditional healer noticed the child and her spirits possessed her and revealed the kid’s precarious situation.

"The healer also revealed that I needed to be exorcised of the spirits together with my child before undergoing some rehabilitation and counseling at her homestead," Gugulethu said.

Gugulethu alleges that the other goblins alerted the old man of the development and he was very cross and so tried to fortify his hold on the rebellious duo.

Grandpa Mayuni allegedly made Gugulethu turn against the healer and even tried to kill her and the rest of the healers who had joined the crusade to rid her of the evil.

Fearing for her life too, the benevolent healer had dragged Gugulethu to the police on allegations of trying to bewitch her, which later culminated in Gugulethu being taken to court. The police could not detain her for lack of evidence.

"Witchcraft is not an area that lands itself to police scrutiny. How do you verify an evil spell? This is a matter of spiritual faith, not a matter of empirical evidence," police spokesperson Wayne Bvudzijena once said.

The police and the courts consequently ordered Gugulethu to go for rehabilitation and counselling at the traditional healers’ and instructed her never to engage in acts of sorcery again lest she would be arrested and sentenced.

She is now staying in the custody of the healers waiting for the dust from her horrendous experience to recede and settle in the distant horizon.