I HAD A VERY RICH FRIEND WHO POIS0NS HIS FRIENDS TO MAINTAIN HIS WEALTH

When Silence Becomes Survival: A Lesson I Never Wanted to Learn

This festive season, at the very beginning of December, I went home to relax and reconnect. Like many people do during the holidays, I spent time with friends at a local groove—music, dancing, laughter, and the familiar comfort of people I’d grown up with. I didn’t know that night would leave me with a lesson I still struggle to process.

While we were dancing, one of my friends—very wealthy, at least by our community’s standards—bought us drinks. He waited for another friend to open his beer. Once the beer was opened, he casually sent that friend to his car to fetch a power bank. Almost immediately after, he sent me to the counter to buy more beer.

As I walked away, something caught my attention. From a distance, I saw our wealthy friend lean toward the opened beer and blow something into it with his mouth. I can’t explain it fully, but my instincts screamed that something was wrong. It felt off. It felt dangerous.

The line at the counter was long, and panic crept in. I was afraid the friend who had gone to the car would return and drink from that beer before I could warn him. I kept watching the entrance instead of the counter, my heart racing. When I finally saw him coming back, I rushed toward him and told him exactly what I had seen.

Instead of listening, he exploded.

He insulted me, accused me of jealousy, and ran straight to our wealthy friend to report what I had said. Together, they turned on me. They told me people had always warned them about my jealousy. In that moment, my concern became an attack on my character.

To “prove” his innocence, the wealthy friend took the beer he had blown into and poured it onto the ground. Looking back, I believe he did that because if anything had happened to our friend, it would have confirmed my warning. That act didn’t clear my name—it buried it.

A few days later, everything changed.

The same wealthy friend began showing signs of severe mental illness. He ran around the village claiming he was extremely rich, that he took people’s lives, that he sacrificed them to a snake. This was someone who had once been kind, generous, and deeply involved in helping the community. He wasn’t greedy with his money. He uplifted people.

Now he was unrecognizable.

Instead of compassion or concern, the community looked for someone to blame. They found me.

People started saying I was so jealous of him that I bewitched him. Everywhere I go, I am cursed, whispered about, condemned. No one asks what really happened. No one considers mental illness, stress, or unseen struggles. In their eyes, the rich cannot be wrong—and if something goes wrong, someone poorer must be responsible.

This experience taught me a painful truth: money is power, and power often decides who is believed and who is silenced. It doesn’t matter what you saw, what you felt, or what your intentions were. When wealth speaks, truth becomes negotiable.

I’ve learned to keep quiet—not because I was wrong, but because sometimes silence is the only way to survive in a world where justice listens selectively.

This is not just my story. It’s a reflection of how quickly communities can turn fear into accusation, how mental illness can be misunderstood, and how easily truth can be drowned by power.

And it’s a reminder that doing the right thing doesn’t always protect you—but it still matters, even when the cost is heavy.

Watch Gogo Maweni’s video