Goats and Catholics

The goat has been sick for a while – monts and months, with bony hips that stick out showing the hollowness of his sides, and a tumor-like growth as big as his head that hangs from the underside of his belly.

« You know, » Kokoutsé said to Bogavi in Ewe, then translating for my benefit, looking at the goat speculatively, « maybe a charlatan got to him. » The two teenaged boys leaned back and prepared to go on with their game of checkers. I demanded an explanation.

« Well, sometimes the feticheurs want to do something bad to a person. But they don’t know if it will work. So they’ll send the bad thing to affect an animals first, to see if the spell works. »

« So it’s not intended against anyone in our household ? No one is trying to cast a spell on us or anything, right ? » I asked.

Kokoutsé made the deep noise in the back of his throat that means No. We sat in silence.

« Unless…. » he started again. « Unless… sometimes, if they want to send evil onto a person, but that person is a believing, practicing Christian, the evil can’t touch them. So it wil go to an animal instead. »

There you have it – African Catholicism, so deeply intertwined with voodoo and black magic that, unlike the West, Togolese Catholics don’t reject the uncanny and the unnatural. Rather, they believe their God is stronger than other gods or the forces of the voodoo and that the Holy Spirit surrounds them with armour. Forces of good and evil coexist to such an extent that sometimes you cannot tell where one ends and the other finishes, and you are forced to merely trust that as long as you have done your duty and gone to church with a calm and believing heart, then God will figure out the difference for you and prevent devils from touching you….