mother TV

A blank TV face can reveal all sorts of things.

Back in the farm days, my father-in-law had just invested in a sewing machine to stitch together the tobacco bags. It saved a good deal of time and work so he was pleased with his purchase. It'd only been used for a day when it disappeared. The farm manager hit on a plan: he'd go to consult Mai TV (Television's mother) in the Nyanga mountains. Mai TV could recover stolen goods, so the rumour went -- without moving a step from her door. True to her name, Mai TV had a TV in her shack, a turned-off TV with a blank face. The manager explained the problem. Mai TV looked into the dark face of the TV for a while. "You'll get it back tomorrow," she said. She gave the manager strict instructions on which route to take from Nyanga to go home if they wanted to get the machine back: definitely not the way they'd come but via Rusape. The manager did as he was told. Hey presto, the next morning the machine turned up, lying on the sandy path between the workers' compound and the tobacco shed.

"That's nothing," said my father-in-law's friend, now also an ex-farmer. He called in a n'anga (witchdoctor) when some of his property went missing. He had his suspicions among his workers but couldn't pin them on anybody. The n'anga lined all the employees up by the farm security fence and asked for a chicken. A chicken was brought. "You pass the chicken along the line," he ordered. "When the chicken gets to the guilty one, it will die." The chicken was solemnly passed from worker to worker. When it got to the cook, it died in his hands. "He was the one I thought was guilty," the friend said. The n'anga appeared to have proved it.