A Bulawayo-area widow has confessed in a chilling first-person account published by Bulawayo24 News that she slowly poisoned her husband to death with herbal concoctions she secreted into his evening meals, believing she was administering a love potion that would keep him faithful. The man, whose kidneys collapsed after doctors found traces of mercury in his blood, died at Mpilo Central Hospital while his young wife, then 22, stood by consumed with a guilt she says she will carry to her grave.
The account, published on 3 November under the title “A Sangoma can be a witch at the same time Pt 2”, is a confession that reads like a warning. It lays bare the deadly trade in illicit charms that continues to flourish in our townships, preying on desperate women and destroying families, while the so-called healers who sell these poisons count their money.
How a MaStanda kitchen became a killing field
The woman, who recounts her story without giving her name, describes how a neighbor she calls the “herb aunt”, an illicit n'anga operating in Bulawayo's Makhokhoba, supplied her with concoctions after she complained she could not stand sharing her husband with a second wife. For weeks she laced his relish at the evening meal, watching his face peel and his body waste away, convinced the “medication was working.”
When the dying man sought help, the same “herb aunt” turned on him as a fresh source of cash. Throwing her bones, she declared his illness was caused by jealous workmates and sold him a protective charm for $500. Two months after returning to work, he collapsed and was rushed to Mpilo, where kidney failure and mercury poisoning finished what the love potion had started.
The widow's account of the aftermath is devastating. She describes standing apart from her husband's hospital bed, afraid to hold his hand, unable to cry properly when the police delivered the news of his death because guilt choked her grief. Neighbours pulled down the curtains and hung the red cloth of mourning in a house where the real mourner was also the murderer. Nobody suspected her. The death was recorded as kidney failure, and she escaped with her secret.
Friends talked, she acted, and a man died
The cruellest twist in her confession is the discovery she made at the funeral. The friends with whom she had discussed “feeding” husbands with herbs were all there, their own husbands healthy and carrying the coffin. They had talked; she had acted. They knew the concoctions were poison. She alone had been the fool.
“One must be a witch to do that to a husband even if there were problems in the relationship,” she writes. “It is nowhere an answer to destroy one's life in this manner, cruelty at best, barbarism at last.”
Her account also exposes the rot behind the marriage itself. She says her husband raped her repeatedly throughout the four-year union and that she never once consented to the marital bed. She was a Form Three dropout, discarded by her parents after falling pregnant, married off into a relationship she describes as four years of rape. Her second child, she states, was conceived through rape. Here is the other side of the tragedy: a society that abandons its daughters, then expresses shock when those daughters turn to the witchdoctors.
From widowhood to the University of Zimbabwe
What makes this confession more than a morbid tale is what followed. Cast out and left with two toddlers, the widow rebuilt herself with a stubbornness that speaks to the Zimbabwean spirit. In 1974 she took a teaching post at an Anglican school deep in the Nkayi District of the former tribal trust lands, studying for her O Levels by correspondence in a lonely rural classroom.
By 1980, the year of our independence, she had passed her A Levels and won a place among the first intake of students at the newly renamed University of Zimbabwe, the intake that struck the name University of Rhodesia from the gates forever. She studied political science, supported her children from a distance, and never let another man near her life.
“I had considered myself a social write-off long back,” she writes of the day she walked into the country's highest institute of learning. Her story is proof that no Zimbabwean woman is finished until she says so herself, that even a guilt-ridden widow from the reserves could rise to the university that our liberation made ours.
The n'anga question Zimbabwe cannot dodge
The confession lands in the middle of a debate this country has never honestly settled. Traditional healing is a lawful and respected practice in Zimbabwe, governed by the Traditional Health Practitioners Act, as Wikipedia's overview of Southern African traditional healers records. But the “herb aunt” of this story is no healer. She is a merchant of mercury who took $50 from a desperate wife, then $500 from her dying victim, and walked away untouched while two toddlers lost their father.
The widow herself names the contradiction plainly, and her words deserve repeating: a sangoma can be a witch at the same time. The woman who throws the bones for you in the morning can be the one draining your life savings and your husband's kidneys by night. Our ancestors distinguished between the healer who serves the community and the witch who feeds on it. We insult that heritage when we protect the poisoners under the banner of tradition.
Where is the enforcement? Where is the crackdown on the illicit n'angas of Makhokhoba and every township like it? A man died with mercury in his blood, paid $500 for a charm two months before the end, and no one asked a single question. His widow says the guilt is as fresh as yesterday. The quack who sold the poison, meanwhile, is presumably still in business, still laughing with the next desperate young wife, still stuffing the money into her apron.
Her two children, now grown, still do not know how their father died. She writes that she wonders daily what they would do if they ever learned the truth. Perhaps this confession, published decades later, is her way of finally telling them, and telling every young wife in Zimbabwe: the love potion is not love. It is murder with a receipt.