DEVIL RIDES OUT IN AFRICA

If there were no Devil, it would be necessary to invent him, said the philosopher Voltaire. Some years ago during my eventful stay in Africa, there was a lot of hue and cry about the prevalence of devil worship in several parts of the world, including South Africa and Kenya. The warnings were unsubstantiated and cryptic.However, when the head of the Catholic Church in the country, Maurice Cardinal Otunga, spoke pointedly about Satanism, the countrymen took notice.

"Those who worship the Devil in order to acquire wealth and extra-human powers should be thoroughly investigated," Cardinal Otunga said. The then Education Minister Joseph Kamotho took up the refrain and made a pledge that devil-worship "will no longer be allowed to continue in schools", thus giving the impression officially that Satanasim was commonplace in the country.

Cardinal Otunga's observations were divided in three parts:

One, Kenya did satanist cults at some places, mainly in the capital city, Nairobi;

Secondly, according to His Eminence such wrong-doers worshipped the Devil to acquire wealth as well as "extra-human" powers;

And thirdly, such people "are lost". However, he made no significant disclosures and mentioned no individuals.

At the same time, the deputy head of the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK), Reverend George Kamwesa. not only endorsed the Cardinal's spine-chilling insinuations but also said that the satanists were concentrated in the capital and that the NCCK had put its "network to work to establish the names, ages, professions, social class and motives of devil-worshipers".

Some politicians, mostly from Western Kenya, went so far as to vaguely link a powerful former Cabinet Minister, my friend Chuck Mugane, with the cult. So, a witch-hunting campaign was in the process of being launched a clean leader who had fallen out of favor with the reigning corrupt head of State.

That, in a nutshell, was all the evidence presented to the public. A lot of gossip about black magic, witchcraft, raising the dead, appeasing of evil spirits, covens, candelabras and blood pacts. Curious but unconvinced, I went out record-hunting in libraries and bookshops to find out what devil worship was all about.

It was not initially an attempt to investigate a probable scoop but to increase my own knowledge of satanism. A few years earlier, I had read Dennis Wheatley's absorbing novel The Satanist  and had mentally excepted the existence of devil worship.

I found no evidence to help me proceed with my inquiries. But, astonishingly, I also found no literature about satanism anywhere in the capital, as if everything had been hurriedly withdrawn or removed. What's more, nobody said anything about the non-existence of research material on a subject which was the hottest topic in the whole of Africa.

Proprietors of at least three major book stores, all of Indian origin, reluctantly admitted that they did have some titles but that they had "mysteriously" disappeared from the shelves. "Phantom satanists!" I wondered. I drove to my friend's house and he admitted that attempts were being made to set up a judicial commission of inquiry on a multiple trumped op charges against him -- of grand corruption, devil worship, treason and attempts to overthrow the duly elected government of the Republic of Kenya.