Kutlwano Magazine

SATANISM myth or reality?[Part 2]

Source : KUTLWANO

Author : Mothusi Soloko

Location : GABORONE

Event : Investigve Feature

In May I made a fervent promise to continue my search for the devil and his cohorts. I even talked to the intelligence chief, Isaac Kgosi, about giving me a lead as well as dared confronting some of the so called Satanists in the darkest corners of Gaborone.

However, this month as I sat tapping on my computer to put together this piece, Bono`s (U2) voice kept on echoing in my ears as if to constantly remind me that “I still haven`t found what I`m looking for”!

Incidentally, the subject nearly earned me the wrath of my superiors, in particular my former sub-editor, Gregory Kelebonye. On one Wednesday morning I bumped onto Greg along the corridor to my office. Unlike of him not to say “Hi Mothusi”, he pulled me aside and with an air of authority warned me that I was playing with fire.

“Satanism is not a joke, you are worse than the guy who is fighting the Syrian regime,” he said poignantly and constantly punching the air with his fist for emphasis.

“There is no fear in my heart, do you see it in my eyes?” I responded. For a while we stood there arguing divergently until he dragged me into my supervisor`s office for a lecture on Satanism that dragged on for about an hour. Greg narrated what he believed were terrifying stories about Satanism so much that my heart nearly skipped a beat.

He talked about people mysteriously disappearing only to be found in caves with open skulls. The topic switched to his own “brother`s encounter with the devil,” the supposed little girl in Maun who was possessed by an evil spirit such that anyone who tried to exorcise her of the spirit died instantly.

“There is a young boy who comes from a heavily Christian family,” so he said. “This boy was given a rosary by a colleague at school. One day this boy and his brother woke up in the middle of the night to find the rosary floating in the air”. As the pastor was praying, he continued, a blue flame shot up from the rosary towards the boy but the pastor swiftly pulled him out of the way. If Greg thought I would be convinced, nope!

Nonetheless, I listened to all the stories so attentively. Greg painted gory pictures about the works of Satanists that unfortunately failed to tickle the digestive system of my mind but simultaneously allowing curiosity to weigh down on my thoughts. “I tell you, you will never succeed with your search, it`s either they will recruit you or they will harm you,” he warned rather sternly. In the days that followed, the words echoed endlessly in my mind. I thought of Armstrong, the first man to land on the moon, the Wright brothers who invented the aeroplane. Had they cowed in the face of death, we could not have discovered the awe of life. Regardless of the dangers, someone must be bold enough to pursue nature to its hiding places, I said to myself.

Topics like these fatigue the feelings and only add to the store of already too great of man`s troubled sensations. I am willing to pay the prize, just for a moment to shelve fantasies that I have indulged in for so long a time and go after the thrilling horrors of our nature.

In the days that followed, my adventurous urge landed me in Kanye, where I was introduced to a certain young man named Raymond Motlhokakgang who I learnt gave a moving testimony in church about his encounter with the devil. I paid for all his expenses to travel to Gaborone where I felt comfortable talking to him in an exclusive interview.

As he sat before me in my office, I looked beyond his flesh, my eyes piercing right through what was seemingly an opaque figure. And I would say inside him I saw what I would call a fever of the soul, a fragmentation of the spirit. He looked like a man whose existence was bound by miserable reflections and praying bitterly for peace to revisit his mind. I searched for any marks of sin on his face. There was none. He was intact and still retained his purity of youth. Then the stories that made me gnash my teeth began to roll out of his mouth.

He claimed to have been initiated into Satanism by a friend who promised him a zest of life through his association with the devil. The lure of the fantasies and all that which accompanied them was too strong to resist, he claimed. He said he joined and recruited 600 other people, a claim that I took with a pinch of salt. He claimed to have been issued with a pot, some beads, rosary and the attire and soon learnt the prayer of the devil.

By his own account, last year alone he caused seven car accidents at the Kanye circle, where he collected blood from the victims. The tale of how he performed such acts was too much of a puzzle to an average mind but at the same time easy to decifer and simply dismiss as a lie. He would wake up early in the morning to go to the Bangwaketse filling station where he would randomly choose cars that he wanted involved in accidents through protracted stares at their registration numbers, he claimed. Then on the way such cars would either roll over or collided with others. “Most of the cars collided at the Kanye traffic circle and with the aid of the stretch ball I would fly there to collect blood before anybody else arrived,” he told me.

I invited him to do the same trick on my car, he declined, something that even heightened my feelings of doubting everything he said. I asked if we could visit Satan headquarters in Tlokweng, he flatly refused claiming that going there would only serve to reignite his painful memories.

I asked for contacts of those he claimed to have recruited into the cult but he said they would not feel comfortable disclosing that he tried recruiting them into Satanism. Until recently when he started developing a guilty conscience moving amongst the innocent, Raymond never came across as one bent on hell.

But since then he has been on his knees praying fervently for salvation. But then Bono`s voice pierced sharply through my ears, reminding me that while the young man claims to have “broke[n] the bonds, and...loosed the chains..of [his] shame...I still haven`t found what I`m looking for”. I still await my date with the so called Satanists. ENDS