The mayhem of muti murders and sangomas

The scourge of ritual killings in Limpopo’s Vhembe district has reared its ugly head once more – and President Cyril Ramaphosa and Police Minister Bheki Cele have been called on to intervene as communities retaliate against suspected perpetrators.

Tensions are high at Tshikonelo village, outside Thohoyandou, where a local headman’s homestead was torched by angry villagers who accused him of being responsible for the kidnapping of a victim who was lucky to escape.

The victim returned home and informed the community that the headman and another man abducted him.

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Since last week, protests erupted in the area, where villagers also burned a library and barricaded roads with burning tyres.

Police spokesman Brigadier Motlafela Mojapelo confirmed the torching of a nineroom house belonging to a headman who was a kidnap suspect in Tshikonelo in the Tshaulu policing area.

The headman and another man were arrested and appeared in court, where residents protested outside. He also confirmed an incident at Tshaulu village where a community protested after a person went missing, only to find he committed suicide by hanging himself from a tree.

“We request any person with specific information on ritual murders and/or any police involvement to come forward,” Mojapelo said.

Limpopo House of Traditional Leaders chair Kgoshi Malesela Dikgale said ritual murders were common in Vhembe, but they had not found evidence that linked traditional leaders to them. He said such murders were rife and the perpetrators were after money and power.

“People believe that the spilling of people’s blood – and body parts – will give them power and money. “Women, girls and boys are the main targets of this crime,”

Dikgale said. But Dikgale’s assertion about traditional leaders was contradicted by an expert and community leaders, who said chiefs survived politically on the power of muti derived from human body parts.

The expert, Dr Alunamutwe Enos Rannditsheni, who did extensive research on the issue as part of his thesis for a PhD degree, counted traditional leaders and traditional healers among the five categories of perpetrators or clients.

Others were politicians, business people and religious leaders (pastors), who were all after power and boosting their businesses.

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In an interview, Rannditsheni said the majority of ritual murder victims were women, girls and boys and, in rare cases, men.

Women and children were targeted because they were vulnerable and their body parts, especially private parts, were believed to be effective as muti. The body parts in demand were particularly the private parts, but the attackers also chopped off breasts, hands, eyes, ears, lips, feet, fingers, toes, arms, legs, skulls and remove knee caps and shoulder bones.

These were delivered to clients who placed orders, or were sold at taxi ranks and businesses.

“Motives for using these body parts are power and authority. Traditional leaders want to strengthen themselves by rubbing themselves with human fat before taking the seat as a khotsi [chief]. Politicians use human fats to attract votes and pastors want to get supernatural power and to attract new members to their churches.”

The parts were also mixed with muti to attract wealth and success by users. In some instances, villagers used them to increase crop harvests and livestock.

Also, Venda culture and customs contributed to the thriving business of selling body parts and rampant murders. Traditional leaders used body parts to appease ancestors and bring peace when there was a conflict in the villages.

During the Venda traditional dance Tshikona, a cow would be slaughtered but the meat eaten by izinduna in the evening would be mixed with human flesh, without their knowledge, so as to strengthen them. Only selected cooks knew about the human flesh.

“The excessive trust in traditional healers and pastors made many people easy targets of victimisation. Ritual murders have had a devastating impact on families with social and emotional challenges, exacerbated by financial constraints and poverty.”

Rannditsheni was concerned that villagers burned the homes of suspects as that destroyed evidence that could help to convict the perpetrators in court. The perpetrators often used poor people within society to commit the crime.

Members of child-headed households or homes with no male family head would be targeted, sometimes using a member of the same family to abduct the victim for money.

“The killers remove every part they like while the victim is alive and screaming,” Rannditsheni said.

“They scream because it’s painful, but that’s what the perpetrators want as they believe it will make the muti work.”

According to community leader and businessman Phumudzo Mukhwathi, villagers had taken the law into their own hands to avenge the killing of their loved ones.

Both Rannditsheni and Mukhwathi accused the police of deliberately bungling ritual murder cases in Vhembe. They alleged some police investigators were paid huge sums of money to stop investigating such crime. They claimed ritual murder cases were recorded as only “missing persons” or “inquest murder” with no arrests.

“When you visit police stations, it is difficult to get cases of ritual murder, the records are not in order and you will be sent from pillar to post. “But the police are fully aware of the ritual killings,” Rannditsheni said.

Mukhwathi claimed the police spokespersons often hid information about ritual killings. Mojapelo, however, vehemently denied that the police were ignoring or covering up the killings, adding that there were no recent reports of ritual murders in Vhembe but only cases of people that were reported missing.

“Some are later either found dead and some return home unharmed. “This problem is not only confined to Vhembe district,” Mojapelo said.

Mukhwathi said: “As communities we are going to shut down and protest in the whole Limpopo province and Vhembe district to support all families who lost their loved ones due to ritual murders. We ask communities to refrain from supporting business owners implicated in ritual murders.”

The victimisation of women and children in ritual murders had not received the attention it deserved by authorities, despite the Ramaphosa administration’s prioritisation of gender-based violence (GBV).

Annual police crime statistics listed ritual murders under “murders” or kidnappings” or “missing people”.

Mukhwathi urged Cele to separate ritual murders from other crime categories and for heavy sentences like in other GBV-related crimes, such as rape.

Ritual-related kidnappings and accompanying disappearances occurred mainly in Vhembe in the former Venda, but the killings were also rife in Mopani, Makhado and their surroundings.

Ritual murders were not a new phenomenon in Limpopo.

A government-sponsored investigation by a task team in 2006 identified Vhembe district as a hotspot for ritual killings.

The report said: “Most villagers in the Vhembe district, for instance, have had to contend with despair and perpetual feelings of insecurity owing to this invisible enemy that lives among them. Compounding the problem has been a feeling of lack of security for women and children who occasionally have to go to streams, bushes or mountains to fetch water and firewood.”

The report said the phenomenon “has brought untold suffering and generated a state of fear and anxiety on the part of many of our rural people”.

The report said that, in some instances, women and men were kidnapped on roads or streets, at home or while hitch-hiking and children abducted while returning from school.

Attackers often lurked in the bushes waiting for the would-be victim before pouncing and dragging them to nearby bushes and mutilating them, or transporting them to unknown destinations.

Mukhwathi asked why Ramaphosa, Cele, Venda king Toni Mphephu-Ramabulana, the police and other stakeholders were keeping quiet about the ritual killings that has been going on for many years in Limpopo.

“Since we voted in 1994 for freedom and democracy, communities still feel unsafe.

“We have lost almost 1000 people due to ritual murders.

“We request government to bring back the death penalty, like Botswana did,” Mukhwathi said.

ericn@citizen.co.za