Morubisi: An unfortunate \'associate\' of witches

Source : Kutlwano

Author : Mothusi Soloko

Location : Gaborone

Event : Interview

From time immemorial, across the globe there has been a tapestry of stories describing the owl as a bird of ill omen and a carrier of evil spirits. In Cameroon if you do not want to get in trouble, you simply refer to the owl as “a bird that makes you afraid.”

 In France the sight of an owl by a pregnant woman is an omen that the unborn baby is a girl.  If you are  Chinese and you see an owl you have to run for your dear life because lightining might strike next to you anytime.

Here in Botswana, the owl is widely regarded as a messenger of the witch, a bird with magical powers that witches can send to drop muti at another person`s yard. If the owl hoots at night next to your house chances are that witches are in the vicinity. The stories are too many and their source is as mysterious as the stories themselves.

Is it the wide starring eyes or the hooting that make people associate the owl with bad things or these are just stories of a fearful people trying to explain their environment.  If she had her way, 65 year old Kemoeng Gobona, the owl would have no place in society.  Having grown up hearing stories about the owl, it was not until 2007 that she had her own personal experience with the bird.

She says with great confidence how they used to wake up to footstep like sounds on their rooftop of their house at Lobatse. “The sounds were too many. Sometimes it sounded as if someone was throwing a stone on the roof and at times it felt like footsteps, we just did not know what was happening,” she says.

 One day when her grandsons visited the family she asked them to find out the cause of the sounds on the roof and to their surprise they found eight baby owls in the nest.

 “The boys killed the owls and the following day my mother died. She did not fall sick, she just died in her sleep,” recalls Gobona. “Immediately we found the owls we knew something bad was coming because one is not just supposed to see the owl,” says Gobona.

Tuka Letsatle, a traditional healer based in Tsolamosese, dismisses the stories of the owl as hogwash. “We have heard those stories, they are baseless. The owl is just a harmless bird. The reason they associate it with evil is because it hunts at night and its hooting sound scares them. Tell me just how witches can communicate with birds. It`s impossible,” he says. Although he admits that it is widely known that the owl is a bird that brings bad omen, he says, there is no proof to it.

Further, he says, even when traditional doctors make muti, there is no part of the owl that they use. “Morubisi ga o na pheko, ke nonyane fela e e ijelang dipeba, Gape ga o jewe,” reckons Letsatle.  Kabelo Senyatso of Birdlife Botswana says the owl is a friendly bird.

“We have had instances where people shot this bird based on these false beliefs,” he says, adding studies indicate the owl population is declining. He assures the owl is actually one of the friends man needs to survive. To prove this, birdlife has approached the Ministry of Agriculture to use the owl to guard against rats in ploughing fields. “We want to put owl nests in ploughing fields so that they eat rats that destroy crops,” he says. Ends