The scene is too benign to carry all that It does. To do such heavy lifting. So commonplace, it's a setting shared by many In their far-flung reaches of the world. You know the story: Grandkid in the city gets a text carrying a word from home. He tries to parse out the M meaning. To find room for its context in the burnished surface of the city. Reluctantly, hurriedly, he throws some clothes in a bag and sends a few goodbye messages to friends. Some friends he'll tell the story in ugly fullness. The rest understand that he's off to sort out some unnamed family admin, opaque In meaning, rushed In urgency.
A few hours and one hot, uncomfortable drive later, he's In the cool of his grandmother's house in rural Kaloleni, Mombasa. There's a bowl of mandazi on the table. Chal cools In three cups around It. One cup for our protagonist, the grandson Karlsa. One cup for his father seated on the edge of the couch, to the left of his mother and one cup for Karlsa's grandmother, the reason we are all in this room with fried dough confections In a round silver thing in front of us.
"Are you going to church?" Grandma Kamango asks the child of her child. There's some friendly jostling. A few bold proclamations made about the bible. Karisa’s father, no longer willing to account for his dedication to the faith, walks out. "That's not a sin," he says, a short while before making his abrupt exit. "Not going to church," he continues. "What sin is that?" The camera pans to a dolly that decorates a chair In the room, Jesus on the cross in its centre. But the grandmother will not give up her argument, so he calmly gets up and leaves the room as his sister walks in, carrying in her hand an old family picture.
She lives In a multi-storied house across from her mother. To get here, to this room with doily- adorned couches, mandazi and sweet tea, she must walk across the dry, brown space between the two houses, passing over the veranda where we later see Karlsa and Grandmother kneading dough.
We hear a news report: ”For close to two years now, Kilifi County has been troubled by the frequent reports of gruesome murders of elderly people. In all these instances, the killers claimed the old people they were attacking were neither witches or wizards whose activities had caused them financial or other miseries.
"This all started with your uncles next door," Grandmother Kamango is seated on a plastic chair, pushing away into the large bowl of dough in front of her. "They say I'm cursing them, so I should be punished. Uncle Steve even wrote It on Facebook. It saddens my heart. After I helped raise them... this is how they thank me."
Some stubborn pieces of dough have attached themselves onto her hands. She scrapes them off with a spoon. "How could they say lies.. I bewitched them? Every time I hear that word... It really hurts."
The Letter, Kenya's 2020 Oscar contender is an Intimate and heartbreaking documentary that follows Karlsa, who travels home when he hears of a threatening letter sent to the family, accusing his grandmother of witchcraft Carefully shaped by husband and wife duo Chrlstopher King and Mala Lekow, the couple stumbled on the story while researching Mekatlllli Wa Menza, a Kenyan Freedom Fighter who led an armed uprising during the first World War. Arrested by the British 100 years ago, she was persecuted as a witch and villainized to her people.
"And so then we were trying to find more stuff about her but then there really wasn’t much written or much documented and no one had a photo of her" Lekow, on the other end of a Zoom call, is explaining how they happened on this story. "So, we thought, okay let's go on a mission and do a documentary and record more of her story. And so we spoke to a lot of elderly people, a lot of cultural groups along the coast of Kenya, which is where she was from and where my father's side of the family is from... We're from the same tribe. And as we were speaking to these elders, them saying 'yes, we can tell you that story but there's a problem that's happening now that we'd really like to share with you."
"And the crazy thing was that the British had persecuted Mekatilili as a witch and had turned the population against her, they locked her up and they kind of crushed the uprising," King jumps in, adding to what Lekow has just said. They riff off each other with natural ease. Consummate professionals. They've done this kind of thing before. "There weren't any photographs of her or much. It’s just kind of in the oral history. But when we learned about this thing happening, a hundred years later it kind of felt like a modern manifestation of what she was fighting for with the land struggle, the way the missionaries had come in and just demonised..."
In 1925, Kenya enacted the Witchcraft Ordinance (which formed the basis of the Witchcraft Act} that all but banned witchcraft, criminalising acts such using or trying to use charms or witchcraft to "cause fear, annoyance or Injury to another In mind, person or property.
According to Kenyan Lecturer Mercy Muendo, in an article published on The Conversation, the provisions of the Act are:
"...ambiguous and a clear definition of witchcraft is not given. This has made it easy for authorities to prosecute a wide range of cultural practices under the banner of witchcraft."
In South Africa, the South African Pagan Rights Alliance has a page called "Remember their names" dedicated to people who've been attacked and/or killed for accusations of witchcraft between 2000 and 2020.
The last report is dated March 2020:
"Eastern Cape, South Africa: An 83-year-old woman was assaulted, drowned to death In a water drum and her body was torched in her rondavel In the Majuba Village, outside Sterkspruit in the Eastern Cape. Police spokesperson Brigadier Tembinkosi Kinana said the mob tortured the woman of being responsible for the death of a young man In the area who was buried on Saturday. On Sunday, a group of men then allegedly assaulted her held her head in a drum of water until she died and touched her rondavel. Her 23-year-old grandchild escaped when the paraffin they poured on the child's body failed to Ignite. The grandchild is under police supervision. A man has been arrested for the attack and will appear at a local court soon. Kinana said the man would appear in the Sterkspruit Regional Court on charges of assault with the Intent to cause grievous bodily harm, arson, murder and attempted murder Eastern Cape police commissioner Lieutenant General Liziwe Ntshinga has deployed a team of detectives to the area to find the perpetrators."
King and Lekow met Karisa, the film's protagonist while interviewing older people on the coast of Kenya for the film on Mekatilili wa Menza. They attended a festival held In Wa Menza's honour, where many of the people spoke Giriama, a language not too familiar to the two filmmakers.
"We were looking for someone who could help us translate that footage," explains Lekow. "He was so shocked to see that other elders were going through the same thing because his grandma had just received that Facebook post of her family accusing her of being a witch. And that's then how our journey with Karisa and his grandmother began."
"So essentially he was translating footage about the festival and about the culture but also a lot of the elders we had spoken to were sharing their stories about what had happened to them or to people close to them. A lot of these elders... people were chasing them away from their homes or killing them. They were accused of witchcraft because of their land, inheritance, polygamy, jealousies. Any kind of excuse under the sun."
The letters are many. Hand-written on A4 lined paper in red ink, in black, in blue. Embellished with drawings of coffins, crucifixes, pangas, knives, axes. They play-mimic colonial-era ordinances, with all the assumed pomp and self-styled authority. ‘WARNING. WARNING. WARNING. We’re giving you seven days, no longer. Or else you’ll see what happens” begins one letter, sent to a man just two days before Karsa arrives to speak to him.
“If the rain hasn't arrived by the 12th,” says another. “I will start doing my job, and you know what that means. I won’t say much but I expect the rain to come before that, the 12th.”
Another letter: “ I have come from far. I am now behind your house. I will finish all of you. By April, my job will be done.”
This acetous colonial inheritance, propagated by early Christian groups, is constantly reanimated, dredged by certain parties to control people through fear and dominance, and almost 100 years after the promulgation of the act, just an accusation of witchcraft is enough to warrant murder.
“So The Letter is about a 90-year-old grandma, with a fearless spirit and her grandson. Grandma is accused of practising witchcraft by her stepsons, who… let me stop there. And her daughters are the ones protecting her. And that for us was very interesting because in a patriarchal system, the fact that this story also was owned by these extremely strong female characters was amazing and super important to document for us.”
But really, the film is about what happens when colonial wounds are left unaddressed and are not brought to restoration. When we are foolish enough to believe that that past has the decency to stay there. In an interesting confluence of knowledge, the aggrieved families - both accused and accuser - resort to decolonial methodologies to try to bring some resolution to the situation, albeit an uneasy resolve. The film also works to depict how, contrary to many documented narratives, African women have always been the head and the heart of resistance movements. There is the bitter patrimony of this post-colonial violence, but there is also the spirit of Mekatilili wa Menza, thick in the arteries of Grandma Kamongo. Full in the veins of her daughters.