`I have one last condition,' said De Sampa on that third day of our long-drawn negotiations. His earlier `conditions', including the handsome black goat, were nowhere in sight and I wondered whether he could still refund them if this last request was too much for me to pay.
`What is that?' I asked.
`You must not reveal any of my secret spells or potions,' he said.
De Sampa was a wiry, middle-aged man with a penchant for damask print shirts. He was bald and wore a neat goatee. There was not a speck of paint on him – nor did he have any of those eccentricities for which his profession was notorious. For a witchdoctor, he seemed particularly harmless. If there was anything odd about him, it was his unsettling stare, but I had been staring at him for three days and I was no longer unsettled. `What if I find out that it is all bullshit?'
`It is not,' he insisted. `My grandfather…'
`Let's just suppose that after the four weeks, I decide that it is? That there are no real potions. No magic mantras… that it's all a mind game?'
He pulled out a tiny beaded amulet from his pocket and shook it in a cupped palm, like a ludo player contemplating a critical throw of the dice. `You can't write about that either,' he said eventually. `That's my final condition.'
So what was the whole point of being a witchdoctor's writer-in-residence, I wondered, if one couldn't even show up his scams! Yet the smell of fried goat meat still hung heavily in the air. And on my fingers. I knew the provenance of the hospitable plate of meat I had just eaten. The `conditions' I had already satisfied were non-refundable and this was no time to get finicky over the small print: I was talking to the only witchdoctor left in the whole of Waterside and if I wanted to write the expose of my dreams I had to deal on his terms.
So we shook hands on the deal.
Then he brought out his choka, which gleamed dully from dried cockerel blood, and insisted that I swear an oath on it as well. I wasn't too keen on that one… but it was just a lump of old wood… and I couldn't very well endanger my literary project over an empty oath on a broken branch, so I swore away. But De Samba got carried away: ten minutes later we were still at it.
`May you be as impotent as a wet rag if you betray my secrets,'
`Ami,'
...
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