Recent reports in The New York Times and the Guardian have noted that at least one-quarter of Gen-Zers believe in the idea that you can attract the things you want — luck, money, love, anything you want — by repeating certain mantras. The practice is called “manifesting.” Most of these believers are devoted adepts of Rhonda Byrne’s self-help mega-seller The Secret, which appeared in 2006 and has been translated into fifty languages. Byrne urges them to understand the “hidden untapped powers” within, and pledges that these latent powers will help them to “eradicate disease, acquire massive wealth, overcome obstacles, and achieve what many would regard as impossible.” Ask, Believe, Receive — so goes the mantra. Answers are available within you; you need only will them into existence. My Gen-Z daughter, a thoroughgoing skeptic, tells me that I should check out something called witchtok (a subdivision of TikTok), where people of her generation “do witchcraft” to prevent bad things from happening to them. The keyword has over six million posts and over fifty-five billion views — many of which were apparently made during the Covid-19 lockdown when this kind of magical thinking flourished. Occult practices, it seems, are not primitive or medieval, but a large part of modern society everywhere: Ask, Believe, Receive. 
On almost every telephone or electricity pole in Nairobi or Mombasa, on almost every bare scrap of wall, hang slapdash advertisements promoting the services of a mganga. The crude ads, usually printed on cheap office paper and pasted to any bare surface, confidently offer sources of help for any ailment, physical or otherwise — they promise cures for the sick, business boosts, love potions, help in resolving land issues or recovering stolen items, even remedies for erectile dysfunction. If you’re suffering from bad luck, an antidote is available. Waganga (plural) is the umbrella Swahili word for diviners, spiritual healers, traditional herbalists, or night runners. If, for instance, you think you have been bewitched, the mganga you would most likely consult is a diviner (pejoratively referred to as a “witch doctor” in the lingua franca), someone who could — ideally — mobilize supernatural powers to undo whatever malevolence might trouble you. If, more prosaically, you simply feel sick or depressed, you would seek out a mganga who practiced spiritual healing or traditional herbalism, someone whose remedies rely less on the occult. For the most part, though, the kind of waganga who peddle the services advertised on the roadside posters claim to be diviners, and their remedies rely on the cryptic and the uncanny. The ads that the waganga have plastered everywhere have succeeded in making the citizens’ pathologies public. In fact, they have become primary documents of urban culture and have drawn the attention of serious Kenyan artists. For example, Onyis Martin, in his series of paintings on Kenyan urban life, “Talking Walls, 2021,” incorporates the boastful promises of the waganga onto the surfaces of his paintings. Worn away, covered with graffiti or other makeshift notices, the remnants of the ads still surface in his paintings to remind us of the waganga’s guarantee that they can heal our modern problems. The textures of Onyis Martin’s paintings are gritty, thick with roughly applied impasto that reflects the cluttered walls of the urban landscape. The colors tend to be muted greys, tans, and browns, and the canvases are strewn with fragments of printed text, spray-painted numbers, slogans, and torn portraits. Occasionally a child’s eyes stare out from a tattered ad, beseeching us from the scraps of text. Overall, the canvases present us with a palimpsest that records the indecipherable chaos of the streets; each is an archeological site of sorts, an archive, and the more we try to piece together the fragments of the worn waganga fliers, the more we can see the changing nature of Kenyan politics, economy, and culture over the last three decades. Onyis Martin was born in Kisumu and raised in Nairobi, and for some time now has been collecting waganga posters for his art. “I remove a whole bunch every day, but there are lots of fresh ones the next day. So, someone must be responding to the message in them,” he told me last year. “People are desperate. The government doesn’t provide basic needs, so people go to a mganga for help.” But the mganga is rarely the first resort, according to Martin. “People in distress start off by going to church, thinking that God will solve their problems. They pay the God-damned preacher who claims to be connecting them with God. When God doesn’t respond favorably, they turn to the mganga who promises to link them with magical powers.” He continued, shaking his head, “But, unlike God, this mganga is a real person, so if you are desperate, you end up paying him, hoping that he will solve your problems. But as soon as he takes your money, he disappears. It’s about hope and desperation.” It is hard not to share Onyis Martin’s cynicism. I, too, wonder why these ads have become more and more visible over the last few decades. Kenya is not the only place where the waganga business is booming. I have seen similar ads in almost every African country that I have visited — Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Cameroon, South Africa, and Senegal — so enough people must be responding to justify the ads’ continued presence. Waganga seem to be drumming up enough business to cover the continent with their posters. Surely, all these waganga can’t simply be conmen, and it is tempting to scoff along with Onyis Martin. But it is still the case that a quarter of Kenyans, both Christians and Muslims, “believe in the protective power of charms or amulets, and that they consulted waganga on a regular basis” — at least according to a Pew report published in a local daily newspaper in Kenya in 2014. The phenomenon has not gone unnoticed by academics — according to scholars such as Adam Ashforth, James Howard Smith, Kate
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