Witch!

I thought Kumba was calling Little Adama “poop,” but Hajawa translated the word as “witch.” Even though Hajawa’s English is very good, I still thought she'd made a mistake until Little Adama agreed and said, “At night I will jump  into people’s houses.”

“Even if I lock the door you will enter?”

“Yes. And I will chew people.”

The desire of witches to "chew people" also explains something Fatou Bobo had told me during our conversation about Pateh spilling the sour milk. She said people had been blaming her, calling her a person who ate people. I had been really confused. I’d once asked about a Pulaar word for cannibal (I think this was around the time I’d been reading the cannibalism chapter of the anthropology textbook) and gotten no answer, but here Fatou was talking about a person who ate people...

I'd forgotten about the cannibalistic side to witches. Or rather, I had not known that Gambian witches, like the Hansel-and-Gretel witch, are also cannibals.

I was also able to resolve my poop/witch confusion. The girls had been speaking a lot of Mandinka, so later that day I tried looking up a word in the Mandinka dictionary. I didn’t find the word I was looking for, but I did learn that “buuwa” is “witch” and “buu” is “defecate.” I really should look through this Mandinka dictionary more often; I didn’t realize how many words the Fulas were taking from the Mandinkas.


A couple of days later a child I pass on the way to Julia's house says, “Your dog is a witch.”

“My dog?”

“Yes. And Mamadou’s dog too.”

Hajawa