NEWS BRIEF ON ELIFASI MSOMI'S CONVICTION: THE KEY WEST CITIZEN, OCTOBER 29, 1955
Fifteen people were dead in the valleys of southern Natal, and the man convicted of killing them blamed a spirit. In Key West, Florida, on October 29, 1955, that story reached American readers as two sentences, set without a headline among the short items on page 9 of The Key West Citizen. The brief named Elifasi Msomi, gave his age as 45, called him a Zulu tribesman, and reported that he had been convicted and sentenced to die in Pietermaritzburg for fifteen murders with an axe, a one-man "reign of terror in South African villages."
The second sentence is his defense, and the brief passes it on almost without comment. The crimes, Msomi claimed, had been committed by "the spirit," conjured up by an African witch doctor, and he had only gone along while it "collected samples of blood from the victims." Behind that sentence stands the tokoloshe, the malevolent spirit of Zulu belief that Msomi, a sangoma who had failed to make a living as a healer, said had come into his life when he went to a more experienced sangoma for help. At his trial he said he had been nothing more than its instrument.
The killings began in August 1953. His victims were poor rural people, many of them living far from any police post, and several were children; some came to him looking for healing and were led out along lonely paths. He was arrested and escaped twice, and he credited the spirit for his freedom. In the end he was picked up for petty theft, and the stolen goods turned out to belong to the dead. Two psychologists told the court he was of well above average intelligence. The sentence the brief reports was carried out at Pretoria Central Prison on February 10, 1956, with nine Zulu chiefs and elders among the witnesses.
The item is a two-sentence brief without a headline or a date for the verdict, printed in Florida, and it is neither a court record nor a report of the trial; it does not name a single victim. Its span of two years is looser than the record of the case, in which the killings ran about eighteen months from August 1953. Msomi was convicted of fifteen murders at his trial in 1955 and hanged on February 10, 1956. The witch doctor and "the spirit" are his own account, and it did not save him from conviction.
The Key West Citizen of October 29, 1955, falls in the period for which the Library of Congress believes its newspapers are in the public domain but warns that they may contain some copyrighted third-party material. This brief has no byline, credit line or agency mark, yet it sits among short foreign and domestic items of the kind a wire service or feature syndicate supplied, so a syndicated origin cannot be ruled out. The scan is the Library's copy in Chronicling America; the citation and rights statement are under it.
The brief was transcribed word for word from the scan, and none of it had to be marked illegible, although the type is battered in a few places, among them "Msomi claimed," where damaged letters are read as the words they plainly are. The paper's spacing is kept as set, so "two - year - long" and "ax - murdering" carry spaces around their hyphens. The spelling "ax" is the paper's own, and "persons" its word for the dead.
Transcription
Transcribed word for word from the page scan. Original spelling, punctuation, capitalisation and typographical errors have been kept exactly as printed. Unreadable words are marked [illegible]. Nothing has been modernised or corrected.
A 45-year-old Zulu tribesman, Elifasi Msomi, who provoked a one-man, two - year - long reign of terror in South African villages by ax - murdering 15 persons, was convicted and sentenced to die in Pietermaritzburg. Msomi claimed the crimes were committed by "the spirit" which was conjured up by an African witch doctor, and that he accompanied "the spirit" while it collected samples of blood from the victims.