The reason I got to know about voodoo was that many years ago when I was much younger I lived with my family in Nigeria due to the fact that my father had his job there.
It was a fascinating country and left a very big mark on me which I think will last for the rest of my life because undoubtedly, and confirmed by other people who have lived there, Africa has a special magic about it.
Unfortunately, it also has another magic and that is the magic that is created by the witch doctors which in that area was called voodoo and is bad magic whereby someone can go to a witch doctor to ask for harm to come to one of their enemies.
One day my father went to his office to find a cut off monkey’s paw lying there on his desk. He asked one of his African employees what that thing was doing there to which they replied with a very frightening face that someone hated him and had put a spell of voodoo on him and that he was going to be in danger of dying.
Well, my father was quite a down to earth man and didn’t believe in those sorts of things so just threw the monkey’s paw into the bin and thought nothing more about it.
The Road Incident
Two weeks later he was driving along in his car to find that the brakes had gone, they didn’t work at all and my father was always in the habit of driving very fast because in those days (the 1960’s) the speed limits of today had not yet been put in force. Nevertheless, he was lucky in that he was a good driver and eventually managed to stop the car without causing any harm either to himself or to anyone else, but it was nonetheless a frightening moment for him.
The Accident on the Ocean
Another week on and he had taken out his speed boat out onto the creek and was driving it around in circles while he sat on the edge of the boat instead of in the seat. He hit a ripple of waves which had obviously been made by his very own boat and the act of hitting them set him flying over the side of the boat. He was now in the water and in the middle of an uncontrolled boat that was going round in circles with its propellers threatening to catch my father and tear him into shreds
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All the natives on the beach rushed to tell my mother that my father was dead as everyone on the shore had seen the incident but had not seen any more signs of my father and so they all presumed that the propellers had caught him and that he was dead. My mother proceeded to pass out and we, his children continued to see this wild motorboat speeding round in circles without anyone controlling it. Eventually, it edged its way to the shore and on hitting the sand it finally stopped although its motors kept roaring on.
We were all stunned when suddenly we saw my father waving his hands in the air to say that he was alright. Apparently every time the motorboat had been heading for him he had dived down as far as he could to the bottom of the creek in an attempt to avoid the propellers and it had worked.
Going Back to London Penniless
A little later on my father lost his job, we lost our house and we had to leave Nigeria penniless and without any of our possessions. We went back to our family apartment in London and my father, and we, his family survived, only due to the fact that he had a very nice bank manager who gave him a very good loan.
He kept on trying to find another job but as he was already in his fifties it wasn’t proving easy at all as it seems no company wants to hire anyone that is over the age of forty. He had gotten to the point that he had holes in the soles of his shoes but to him, that was the least of his worries. There were more important things like paying the electricity bills etc rather than fixing holes in one’s shoes.
Breaking the Curse
I myself was working in central London with a company called Avon and had made friends with a very sweet Chinese girl. I told her about all the bad luck that my father was going through and she told me that he had obviously had a bad spell cast on him and that the spell had to be broken and that the only way to do it was that my father had to have a bath with seven flowers and one lemon in the bath and that then he had to collect the flowers and the lemon and throw them down on the floor of a crossroads.
I worried about how I was going to tell all of this to a father who had never believed in any of this stuff but in the end, thought ‘what the hell” – I would tell him about it and then it would be up to him as to whether he put it into practice or not.
I can tell you that by that time my father was so desperate that he actually did all the things that my Chinese friend had suggested and to the letter.
Well believe it or not within one month one of the jobs that he had applied for accepted him and at last he seemed to be free of the spell. He got the job, started to make money again, paid back his debts and his bank manager and he was at last free of the voodoo that had been cast on him.
In Africa voodoo works very well at killing off quite a number of victims simply because the victims know about voodoo and get so nervous when they know that they have been singled out that they make serious mistakes in their everyday life, due to their hysteria, which quite often results in their death, but it is obvious that there is something quite strong in voodoo when it can even affect a person that doesn’t even believe in it.
