Untouchable: Why Ugandan witchdoctors now send bees to catch thieves

As the Christmas season draws near, Ugandan traders have enlisted a new breed of guards who cannot be bribed to connive with thieves to steal their merchandise.

This week that just ended, two guys who stole were apprehended by, wait a minute, bees!

Those of us who don’t believe in black magic, white magic, yellow magic or whatever colour magic may take, are still trying to comprehend the whole thing.

The first video to hit social media last week was of a guy who had stolen electronics from a shop in the western region of Bunyoro.

He took the music equipment home alright, but could not even sit down because a swarm of bees attacked him.

He quickly figured it that the bees had come to arrest him. We are not party to the details before, but by the time video enthusiasts turned up, the muscular man was already making his way back to the shop, carrying the music box with him.

The muscular fellow was filmed after he had thrown off his shirt – apparently it is better to fight the bees when they are not operating from inside the shirt, making it easier to chase them away.

But the bees as seen on the video were not ready to go away. They stayed with the thief as he cried and carried back the stolen equipment.

Soon, he had a considerable number of people following him and he was confessing his crime loudly, promising not to steal again.

A couple of days later, another ‘victim’ of the mysterious guardian bees was filmed looking for the owner of a car he had refused to pay after buying it on short term credit.

He was freely describing himself as a thief, telling the facts of the case against himself and pledging to buy his victim a new car if only the bees could be called off.

So, do we now have real voodoo kings in Uganda at work deploying insects on complicated missions of tracing and apprehending thieves?

The insects are doing more work than the police. They are also taking over the judiciary responsibility because after apprehending the culprits, they try them and get them to plead guilty and even prescribe their own punishment.

But are we supposed to believe that the bees are really detecting thieves and arresting them? My suspicion is that the traders are hiring the services of expert bee handlers.

 These then bring out their tame bees, maybe after dowsing them with something to make them passive, pose as scared thieves, and go begging the shop owner to be forgiven.

They are then led to a backroom where they pack their bees and come out thanking the shop owner profusely. The thief’s ‘family’ then brings the ‘fine’ and ‘pay’ the shop owner with wads of cash he has secretly given them earlier. That way, only a suicidal fool would ever try to steal from that shop again. Complicated situations call for complicated solutions.