Murder Is A Quality Of Life Issue

Whenever I think about murderers, I think about Mogo. Mogo was a peasant farmer in Kenya, a little under a hundred years ago. Peasant farmers worked for a landowner, but were allowed to build huts and graze whatever livestock they owned on the landowner’s grounds. And what I think about is Mogo’s very bad day. This was the day he was summoned to the landowner’s residence and told that he was fired. Because he was a wizard.

This was the rumour that had become the bane of Mogo’s life on the farm. People thought he was a wizard. People wouldn’t talk to him, because he was a wizard. They wouldn’t give him food, because he was a wizard. And, finally, his very presence was causing such ructions on the farm that he was fired for being a wizard.

So Mogo went back to the huts, gathered his few possessions, picked up a spear, went to the hut of the first person who’d accused him of being a wizard, and killed him. He killed his wife, who wouldn’t sleep with him because he was a wizard, and he killed his daughter, who withheld food from him because he was a fucking wizard, and he killed nine other people who wouldn’t bloody shut up about his being a wizard.

The massacre was noticed, of course, and the landowner sent for the police, accompanying them to the huts. There, they found Mogo readying his livestock for travel away from the farm. On being asked whether he might possibly have killed some people, Mogo cheerfully lead the little troupe to each of the bodies, and then turned to the landowner and demanded the wages he was owed before being on his way.

What Mogo did was to take ultimate action to improve his quality of life. This is at the root of murder. We kill people to make our own lives better. We kill them because they are obstacles to our desires, because they make us unhappy, because they burden us, or because they keep calling us fucking wizards. Murder increases happiness.

Notes for a talk at Studio-X, NYC, November 2013

CONNECTED:

• Shooting Ghosts: Vancouver Island Murders And Hauntings
• Apparently We Just Give Up And Call It Magic Now
• FOLKLORE OF ESSEX, Sylvia Kent