African Witch: A Modern Tale of Magical Harm

Kenya in its golden age, the safest, sexiest and most wildly popular playground in Africa. Westerners flock there. There is just one problem: Westerners have also been dying there. Now and then, here and there, one or two, in the most bizarre and chilling ways. While Kenya's top investigators triangulate theories, word on the street has had the mystery figured out all along: a witch is at work, there could be no other explanation. It's "orogi", the darkest kind of ancient magical harm. No one wants to mess with this woman. The Nairobi tabloids have dubbed her Mama Mamba (Crocodile Woman). Her real name is Beatrice Wakeawa, an aged, half-crippled veteran jungle fighter and Mau Mau spy, a master of disguise and dialect, who has never given up the struggle, never quenched her thirst for justice. Drought, disease, poverty, starvation, all the ills that plague her beloved blue-hilled land go back to the grieving ghosts of ancestors and innocent dead who have yet to be fully avenged. Two American sisters have come to Kenya for different reasons. Crossing paths with Mama Mamba was never part of their plans.

Christopher West Davis is a journalist who lived in Kenya and now lives and works in the New York City area. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reader's Digest and other publications. In 2005, he was named Aerospace Journalist of the Year by the Royal Aeronautical Society (London). Katherine Stirling of The New Yorker called his previous book, "Letters from Moritz Thomsen," "An utterly engrossing story... these marvelous letters and the attendant chronicle of the relationship that developed over their course is a story that is at once fascinating and quite moving, a hard balance to strike, in writing as in life."