In a nutshell / An African successor to Grandma’s Lye Soap

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/04/2011 (5332 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MAGIC potions and lotions and elixirs are probably as old as human credulity itself. They are offered by their inventors as the answer to everything from plague to penis extension. Most of them don’t work, as their hopeful users could tell you from sad experience, if they were not too embarrassed to talk about it.

Readers of a certain age may remember Grandma’s Lye Soap, the virtues of which were extolled in a popular song:

Mrs. O’Malley, out in the valley,

 

 

Suffered from ulcers, I understand,

 

 

She swallowed a cake of Grandma’s Lye Soap,

 

 

And she has the cleanest ulcers in the land!

 

 

 

I don’t believe that Grandma’s Lye Soap was ever actually on sale — like masculine enhancers, it remains just a fond and distant dream — but it was claimed to be a remarkable cure-all for everything from dirty children to dirty dogs. In lieu of the lye soap, however, Ambilikile Mwasapile’s Magic Potion is now on the market, if, that is, you can get to Samunge, a village in Tanzania near the Kenyan border, the only place it is available at the moment.

Mr. Mwasapile is a retired 76-year-old preacher who is selling what he calls a “miracle” cure for just about everything. It can, according to the pastor and the hundreds of people who have flocked to Samunge seeking help, fix illnesses and ailments from the common cold to cancer and he only charges about 30 cents a pop for the potion.

Like Mrs. O’Malley, Esther Lally suffers from ulcers. She tried a dose of Pastor Mwasapile’s potion and now she has the cleanest ulcers in the land — well, maybe not; who’s to say? But she does say that her ulcers no longer bother her. The miracle cure worked. It “tastes like tea without the sugar,” she says, but you have to have faith, you have to believe it will work for it to kick in. The Tanzanian government, while making no claims for its medical efficacy, says that the elixir is safe for human consumption, Mr. Mwasapile’s followers swear that it works and at 30 cents a cup, even Pharmacare would probably cover it. No word yet, unfortunately, on whether it works as that elusive magic elixir that men have been looking for since Grandma’s Lye Soap let them down so painfully.