The Lightning Throwers
It was 1990 during the rainy season in the former equatorial Zaire (now D.R. Congo) that sits squarely on the equator. It was easy to tell time by the position of the sun in the sky or the rainy season storm clouds that formed just around 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Prudent people were home before the rain started as it was often torrential with flash flooding and the worst of it was the deadly lightning strikes that seemed alive, sinister, a real grim reaper vibe. The part of Zaire where I lived as a Peace Corps volunteer, in the province of Bandundu on the high savannah plateau, part of the Congo River Basin, suffers the most prolific lightning strikes on the planet.
It’s a terrifying sight to see twenty bolts of lightning hit the earth all at once; I regularly imagined my demise would come from attracting the firey blue-white tendrils of electricity to the top of my muzungu (foreigner) head being the highest point on a barren landscape. In Kikongo, a creole language from the Bakongo language family, the word for lightning is nzasi. It also reminds me of the term for ‘river’, nzadi (the name Zaire evolved from the word nzadi). The lighting in Zaire was big like its rivers, and the sky became a waterfall of electricity relentlessly pummeling everything below it with its might.
One cloudless day, I returned home from visiting a distant village on my Honda motorbike. I miscalculated the time of day, got a bit of a late start, and risked getting caught in the afternoon storm. I drove as fast as I could, but the dirt roads were tricky with erosion from the rain, ruts, and bumps everywhere, and if I weren’t careful, my Honda would buck me off and send me flying. This had happened before… I liked to believe my Honda had a mind of its own, like an untamed horse.
As I rode, alone in an ocean of grass as far as my eyes could see, I heard a clear and strong voice in my head say, ‘you are going to get hit by lightning today.’ Alarmed, I could feel my breath suck in quickly, and my heart rate went up a notch. Looking at the horizon, the sky was clear, and the bewitching hour of 3 o’clock storm time was still about two hours away, according to my sun clock. I questioned the premonition, but I could also hear the precise steadiness of the matter-of-fact voice in my head, and it wasn't to be argued with. Since I was a child, I have had a strong intuition and heightened awareness of when danger will happen. This gift has kept me alive in many scenarios as I have stared potential death or severe injury in the eye many times and am still winning this game of ‘chicken. Leslye 12, Death 0.
The storm clouds started forming in the sky, and I felt the urgency to get home. The sky darkened and grew more ominous as I drove on. Arriving closer to the village of Mutelo, I couldn’t kick the echo of the worrisome words of doom out of my mind. I rode up to my newly constructed mud and thatch-roofed hut and saw my domestique, Saakul, standing in the doorway with his big ‘welcome home’ smile. He saw my serious face and began to frown with concern, and I said, ‘Saakul, lightning is going to hit me today.’ ‘Mademoiselle, you shouldn’t say such things!’, he said, as if I was willing it to happen. I told him I just knew. In this area, and much of Africa, kufwa or witchcraft, was lively in society, mysterious events and beliefs were taken quite seriously, and specific rituals like dropping bits of food and palm wine on the ground before a meal were to honor the ancestors and keep them appeased. I witnessed unexplainable things with my own eyes, like one of the farmers I worked with dying and then coming back to life a day later. I grew to understand that there are realms imperceivable to our five senses and logical, linear minds.
As big droplets of rain began to fall, Saakul, his wife Bibishi, and baby Sandrine were all in the house. While my hut was being built, I had lived in temporary accommodations at the Catholic parish about a kilometer down the road — accommodations by local standards in a two-room brick building with a tin roof. My neighbors were the teachers and their families of the boarding school for children from the region. They would come for the week for their schooling and return to their home villages on the weekend.
We had just moved into my new hut a week before and were settling in. The thick thatch on the roof had to be cured and sealed by rain over time. This new roof was about to experience its first ‘cure’. The rain intensified and began to stream through the thatch like a sieve. Everything was getting soaked. We scrambled to protect food stores and anything else that would suffer from a soaking. My hut had an issue when the village men constructed it; they built it on sloping land. I watched as they made and kept wondering if they would level the dirt floor. I was grateful for their efforts and felt saying something about the problematic floor might dampen their enthusiasm to complete the job.
As they worked, I just imagined the possible drawbacks of living in a home with a sloping dirt floor. Before I moved in, I received a furniture delivery from the mission: a single bed frame and a table with four chairs. Once the table and chairs were situated, I could only laugh as anything round in shape just rolled right off the table. Chairs tipped easily. It was like being in a funhouse at an amusement park. I am pretty adaptable, but this was pushing things too far. I mentioned the problem to the catholic mission as I was serving in their agricultural extension program, and their remedy was to make a two-floor mud hut with cement floors. I had myself a bi-level mud hut!
The cement floor turned into a swimming pool as the rain poured in. Bibishi and Sandrine sat perched on one of the wood chairs as Saakul, and I stood in at least two inches of water in our care feet, frantically sweeping the water out under the gap of the front door. Then. BAM! Lightning hit right outside the front door; the crackling tendrils of pure sizzling electricity lit up the water we stood in. Saakul and I got zapped. The intensity of the shock threw us both to the ground. We didn’t lose consciousness or get burned, but we were stunned, ears ringing, the mind trying to grasp what just happened. Thank God Bibishi and Sandrine were safe on their wooden chair perch and were spared from getting an electrical shock.
The storm passed, and immediately after, our neighbors from across the road, the Swikidisa family, came to check on us to make sure we were ok. The Swikidisa’s were well-off compared to just about everyone for quite some distance. They had a five-room home made of cement block and cement floor and a tin roof, and they owned a commercial truck for transporting local harvests to distant markets; they owned the only vehicle for many miles around. I spent a lot of time with this family, sharing meals and playing games with their eight children. Our homes were not directly in a village but situated between two villages. They looked after me, and I supported them when I could, like watching over their kids when the parents traveled.
After the Swikidisas arrived, a few more people came; once they saw I was OK, they began to ask who I upset, did I make someone angry? Perplexed, I said I hadn’t made anyone mad that I was aware of and questioned what that had to do with getting zapped by lightning? They educated me and said the kufwa, the witch doctors, could throw lightning at me on behalf of whomever I had angered. When it was ruled out that I hadn’t angered anyone, the next question was, ‘did you cross paths with an oranger lizard?’. I saw where this was going; the lightning in their understanding was not natural but supernatural. I assured them I had seen no orange lizards leaving them perplexed.
The next day, remedies were put into place to ensure my house wasn’t struck by lightning again. Swikidisa and his boys buried an old battery and some heavy scrap metal in my front yard, explaining lighting would hit there instead of my house. Next, nkisi, medicine, in the form of green medicinal herbs and powder, was put into the thatch rooves of the hut and kitchen, warding off any future run-ins with lightning.
A few days later, I was deemed innocent of my action that might have caused the lightning strike. It turns out there was a battle between the witch doctors of the two villages my home was sandwiched between, and they said one of the lightning bolts fell short of its target and hit in front of my house. I rolled with it. I was relieved that there wasn’t someone angry at me engaging the services of a witch doctor to get back at me!
This was a very violent electrical storm that moved through. Many were affected. A kilometer down the road in the parish of Mutelo where I first stayed, the house I had lived in was also struck by lightning, and part of the tin roof was blown off, and part of the brick wall crumbled. The German priest, Pere Hagen Mueller, happened to be in residence in his home near the church — he was sitting at his desk, and a bolt of lightning came in through one window, blew up the lamp on his desk, and exited out the other window. One family down the road from me was blown through their kitchen wall by lightning, and a herd of twenty cattle was killed.
To this day, my mind is boggled by those storms; they felt and behaved in what appeared to be a supernatural manner. In my present-day life, so little surprises me as my mind is wide open to the possibility of just about everything. Perhaps science can explain some of the phenomena I have observed in this lifetime, yet I am pretty sure that many mysteries are not solvable by science as they are ruled by the unseen and perceived by the heart and spirit.
