Africa: The enduring power of witchcraft

last updated 8 January 2015

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.

For a case study in the horrors of witchcraft, it’s hard to top the saga of Liberia’s Samuel Doe, said Kofi Akosah-Sarpong in Sierra Leone’s Standard Times. Doe, who served as president of Liberia in the 1980s, was so “blinded” by his dependence on juju mediums, he had female virgins sacrificed so that he could ritually bathe in their blood. With that sort of mind-set, it’s no wonder he plunged his country into a vicious 14-year civil war from which it is only now recovering. But belief in witchcraft isn’t confined to uneducated thugs like Doe. Its malign influence is felt in relatively advanced African countries such as Ghana, where even educated people in the cities are so terrified of juju that they refuse to get involved in rural development projects. Ghanaian academics and human-rights activists are joining together to try to eradicate the scourge. But without more dedicated state support, it’ll be a long time dying.