For many Westerners, “witchcraft” may seem a “benign form of New Age spirituality,” said John L. Allen in the U.S.’s National Catholic Reporter. The chaplain’s handbook for the U.S. military even recognizes Wicca, a modern form of witchcraft, as a “legitimate religious practice.” But in Africa, witchcraft is an evil that continues to flourish with devastating consequences. In Angola and Congo, seriously ill or orphaned children are often accused of sorcery and abused or killed. Secretive cults on Nigeria’s university campuses, with names such as “Black Axes” and “Pyrates,” often practice juju (black magic) to terrify their rivals. Hundreds have been killed. Here in Tanzania, said Mwanamkasi Jumbe in The Citizen, witch doctors have been telling their clients to use potions made of albino hair, blood, or body parts as a means to get rich. As a result, in the past two years at least 45 albinos have been killed for body parts. The 7,000-strong albino population now lives “in constant fear of death.”
It’s when Africa’s leaders are infected by superstition that things get really ugly, said Charles Onyango-Obbo in Kenya’s Daily Nation. When a favorite aunt of Yahya Jammeh, the Gambian president, died unexpectedly about a month ago, Jammeh was convinced she’d died from a witch’s curse and launched a witch hunt. Witch doctors imported from nearby Guinea have since been roaming villages with armed police in tow, rounding up elderly suspects and hauling them off to detention centers, where they are beaten and forced to drink hallucinogenic potions to make them confess. Amnesty International says that more than 1,000 have been detained; some have died from poisoning, and hundreds have fled the country.
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