โ Scribed by Elaine Murphy
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The Witch Hunters Of Maripathekong Skimming the Capetown Sunday Times in February this year as a foreign tourist idling away a relaxing holiday, I spotted the following report, by Chris Barron (1995). T h e headline ran: 'The Witch Hunters: Savage mob condemns seven grandmothers in village to an agonising death by fire'.
6 After the rains the neatly demarcated mealiefields, spreading morula trees and thatched mud-and-dung houses of Molepo in the Northern Transvaal look alluringly beautiful. But underneath this picturepostcard normality lurks a capacity for savagery. It exploded in the early hours of a Monday morning in March last year, when a group of 15 men in their 20s moved purposefully through a sub-village of Molepa called Maripathekong.
Percy Mabou was at home with his grandmother when they scaled the wrought-iron gate of their house and battered at the door shouting for 'the old lady' to come out. When old Marasha Maime opened the door, they said 'We're looking for you. Come'.
She would have recognised some of the faces. Percy himself went cold when he saw one of them. It was one of her grandsons, a lad who frequently ate at their house. 'Where are you taking the old lady?' he asked 'Listen', someone snarled, 'We are not interested in you. We just want her'.
Then they smashed her leg with a metal pipe, dragged her to the locked gate and hoisted her over. While Percy watched helplessly, they took her with them to fetch her equally aged sister-in-law, across the way. Then, on the side of the rutted dirt road, they poured petrol over the two grandmothers and watched them burn.
From there they went to the home of Dipue Molepo. 'She was the bridge-builder in the family', remembers Dipue's granddaughter, Salphina. Although she used to say she was so old that 'when the Zion Christian Church started, she was feeding from her mother's breast', she was, says Salphina, 'very healthy and active'. The youths dragged the sprightly, wise old lady to a morula tree outside her house and set her on fire. The gnarled roots of the tree still bear charred testimony to her agony.
By 3 am that Monday seven elderly women of Maripathekong had been dragged from their beds, covered with petrol and burned alive.
Last week Frank Thobejane, who is 22 and in CCC 0885-6230/95/12100744 0 1995 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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