Ghana witch-hunts

After (never quite) growing up in the Peter Pan house, running away with the travellers, and ending up as a journalist embedded in a clandestine insurgent rebel clown army, I’m pretty used to living in a fairy story. But making a film for a West African campaign against witchcraft abuse was a deeply weird journey, even for me.

In fact, tt felt like a trip out to the other side of the looking glass.

When the documentary commission came in from Ghana’s Southern Sector Women and Youth Empowerment Network, I knew very little about witchcraft accusations and abuse. So I went to the library, and surfed the net, and came across justifications like the following:

“Women fetch water and give us food, so they must be evil”.

Come again? Did he just say that women are evil because they do the work that keps men alive?

“Men can also have the witchcraft spirit, but they use it for the good of the family, to benefit the community. Women use the witchcraft spirit to to gain power over others and cause sickness and death,” said another.

When our tiny crew reached Ghana and collapsed in front of the TV for a little, we discovered the role of the pastors. Like salesmen anywhere in shiny suits, they rant and rave and promise the world (that cure, that job, that visa) to vast congregations who pray wildly to God for healing and redemption and give the church plenty money… So when the impossible promises are broken, pastors rant and rave some more and blame ‘the work of devil’, ‘a witch in the family’… ‘root them out!’.

The media doesn’t always help as well, sensationalising accusations as if they were straight truth. Headlines like: @Wonders Never Cease! Woman Turned into Snake!’ accompany, for example, a report of mob violence against a depressed young mother taking shelter in a gutter where a snake also took refuge.

Airwaves are filled with ranting penetcostalist preachers, fundamentalist Christian evangelicals funded by Europe and Americ, a North-South funding stream said to dwarf development aid).

Patriarchy. Fear of the feminine. Blaming Eve. Misogyny. Feeding fear. Scapegoating. Kicking the cat in a region scarred by centuries of slavery, exploitation, racism, competing religions denigrating the old ways of knowing the earth, the ancestors, the spirits of nature and woman. Power exercised through unaccountable, invisible structures of tribe, nation, institution, corruption, mosque, church. (A productivist way of relating to the commons spreading across the land, across women’s bodies, across the family.)

And who is at the rough end of all of this?

Old women, ill women, infertile women, unmarried women, widowed women, argumentative women, even ‘overly successful’ women. Women with land, or a husband, or successful children, that someone wants for themselves. Women who someone, somewhere has a problem with and would prefer to be out of the way. Some men too, powerless ones for the most part, and children, increasingly, too.

Scapegoats all, for a generalised sense of supernatural fear, for spiritual unease, for uneducated impotence, for illness where there is no doctor, ignorance were there is no schooling, no calm quiet media to know what the cause of suffering is.

Scapegoats for no sanitation, no clean water, for no cameras, no good roads, no buses, no ambulances, no clinics, no roofs that don’t leak in the rain. Scapegoats for the world not being as we all would want it, as it should be if Jesus really loves you and Allah is a truly merciful God, omnipotent and good…

This suffering, this lack – compared to the pastors, the colonists and the corporates, the people on TV with their cars and houses and planes and lovely clothes… – any lack, any child’s illness must be somebody’s fault…

‘Living close to the earth’ is no lifestyle choice for the leisurely here.

The roads are mud, the houses mud, the anthills are the same red mud..

The people say that in the villages where there is still no electricity supply, you can see the witches flying in the small of the night. See them flying to meet in the big trees on the hill top, flying to feed on the souls of small children, flying to steal men’s penises or the milk from a new mother’s breast… and in the day they cry ‘kill the witch’. They believe that pastors can drive out the evil spirits through fearsome ‘healing’ prayer camps and they believe that old time fetish priests have the power to contain the evil spirits so prevalent in women. It takes a fetish priest with the power himself to purge the inherited witchcraft spirit, and misuse of the highly potent ‘India powers’ – sold in shrines beside the road – when used for ‘private’ purposes..

The purpose of our film was to show the conditions of elderly and ill women taking refuge in the ‘witches’ camps’ scattered across Northern Ghana. These clusters of rough thatched huts are something like involuntary, unresourced old folks homes, where the destitute and battered survive in the care of traditional authorities, especially fetish priests.

Known as ‘witch doctors’ in the West, spiritual authorities are gifted with a hereditary power to diagnose, remove and/or contain the evil ‘witchcraft spirit’ when it threatens a community. So when the cry goes up that someone dreamed about this lady carrying a weapon, or that he saw her give the evil eye to a child and now the child is dead, she may (if she is not killed by the mob) find her way – or be beaten to – one of the ‘witches camps’ we visited.

Gambaga is the best known. There are other films about this town centre encampment, and charities based there. Some locals say that the camp needs to be kept open for the chief and town to have some income, from visitors, from media, and from the charitable sector.

I wouldn’t really know… as a foreign charity film maker who visited twice… Hmmm.

Ngani is where we spent more time. It felt like a gentler and more magical place, very rural, more isolated, and so crueler, stranger too in its own way. Here we met most of our interviewees. One, a fierce hearted, beautiful woman who used to brew liquor successfully, was blamed when six of her children died and she refused to die too. Another could no longer walk after a beating left her dragging her ancient bones across a dusty threshold…

Tale after tale of woe after woe of a scale that can hardly compute. I won’t try and summarise, simply as that you watch the film. See their faces, and hear their voices tell their tales. They are strange tales, harsh.

And then back into town for the community workshops, educating villagers not to blame an illness on their aunty or bad luck on a kid. This was another strange experience for a former street activist accustomed to being pushed, pulled and generally disprespected by police back home in London. Here I was on the same side as the police, promoting the rule of law, the place of evidence in judging guilt, the rule of law against assault and women’s rights to be human. We also filmed health officials propagating science and western medicine – less challenging for me as a scientist, but still odd, for me as a shaman raised on the feminist version of the European witch hunts: male doctors and pharmacists ousting the wise women, herbalists and midwives from their place at the heart of society. No, nothing is simple, everything is to discover.

SOSYWEN’s challenge to quacks, abusers and woman haters is also a challenge to western feminists like me. If our sisters back home were to stop sweating the little stuff and pay some more attention to the lives and deaths and knowings of our sisters to the global South, emancipation for women worldwide might really get underway. .. In that I include south – and other parts of London, where west African evangelical churches are spreading and women and children, like Kristy Bamu and Victoria Climbie, are tortured to death for Eve’s sins.

Meanwhile there’s a need for research on who pays for the missionaries and propaganda of fundamental monotheism. Are religious charities of Europe and North America feeding a plague of hatred and violence in god’s name? Are there acts that can be taken, back in the cities of the west, to root out this stream of ‘evil’ at its source – where priests are trained and supported, where funds are raised for churches and the fantasies filling West African airwaves with religious mania?

If witch hunts still seem like a fairy tale, maybe it’s because we’re choosing not to see what happens in front of our noses.
http://www.zoeyoung.net/content/what-i-used-to-know
Zoe Young


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5 Responses to Ghana witch-hunts

    1. Great post, very informative. I ponder why the other specialists of this sector do not realize this. You must continue your writing. I am sure, you’ve a huge readers’ base already!|What’s Going down i’m new to this, I stumbled upon this I’ve discovered It absolutely useful and it has helped me out loads. I’m hoping to give a contribution & assist different customers like its helped me. Great job.

      Comment by how to pray effectively on 5 March, 2012 at 1:14 am
    2. “We also filmed health officials propagating science and western medicine – less challenging for me as a scientist, but still odd, for me as a shaman raised on the feminist version of the European witch hunts: male doctors and pharmacists ousting the wise women, herbalists and midwives from their place at the heart of society.”

      And this is not what science about European witch-hunts tells. There is no evidence for a considerable assault on midwives nor herbalists. In some countries like Latvia only men were targeted. And the accusers were female very often. Also doctors and pharmacists were mostly quacks at that time without a strong standing in society. Law was rather executed by local institutions. The “feminist” version is either scientific or a mere projective construction. The competition between hospitalized childbirth and midwivery is a phenomenon of the 20th century – and midwivery also has contradictions that it does not like to talk about the same way as it scandalizes the contradictions in hospital medicine.
      Western medicine just became halfway effective in the 20th century. But then it did outmatch traditional medicine. And we have to contribute to that fact.

      Looking forward to your documentary!
      Bests,
      Felix

      Comment by Felix Riedel on 7 March, 2012 at 10:50 am
    3. “Meanwhile there’s a need for research on who pays for the missionaries and propaganda of fundamental monotheism. Are religious charities of Europe and North America feeding a plague of hatred and violence in god’s name? Are there acts that can be taken, back in the cities of the west, to root out this stream of ‘evil’ at its source – where priests are trained and supported, where funds are raised for churches and the fantasies filling West African airwaves with religious mania?”

      Both no and yes. There is quite a good amount of ethnographic literature on charismatic churches in Ghana. Churches just deeply comply with local mindsets. The american and the african witchcraft-beliefs and beliefs about magic are closer than they would like to admit. Charismatic christianity allows them to stick to magic belief while being good christians.
      And also charismatic churches are not black and white. Some are feminist, some really tackle the problem of isolation and fragmented individuals and create a surrounding extremely pleasant to those who are afraid, alone, without hope. You can go to the church at any time to pray if you can’t sleep. There will be others with whom you can sare your suffering. To utter wishes to a god might be a relief – they are allowed to wish something better than their actual life. The problems of charismatic churches regarding witch-hunting are in no case JUST the problems of charismatic churches, other churches and religions have the same mindsets what magic concerns. And in northern Ghana there is no evidence for witch-hunting inspired by charismatic churches. (But this is the case in urban areas and large parts of Africa between Nigeria and DRC). It is easy to detest charismatic churches for their cheap propaganda and authoritarian approaches and their open fraudulent behaviour. Once it comes to magic and witch-hunting it is no longer that easy.

      Comment by Felix Riedel on 7 March, 2012 at 11:35 am
    4. Also have a look at the Witchhunt-Victims Empowerment project WHVEP of Simon Ngota at http://gushiegus.wordpress.com.
      Another project is situated in Gambaga, a relaunch of the Gambaga Outcast Home Project by Gladis Lariba.
      Local sporadic initiatives also take place. In Gushiegu and Kpatinga this was World Vision or Global Vision and the catholic church of Ghana which donated a borehole.

      Comment by Felix Riedel on 7 March, 2012 at 11:37 am
    5. Thanks for the comments Felix, valuable and informative. Agreed it is always more complex, I could write and rewrite indefinitely on this topic and still not begin to give the full picture. It is hard because the people who know the most are so deeply inside the belief system, they find it hard to express in a way that is clear to those outside. and for those outside the cultures where we find the witch hunts, there is either an academic dispassion to the research (which is useful) or a passionate engagement with some or opther part of the human rights and/or spiritual and/or anthropological elements, (which is powerful) but neither quite seem to speak to the other, or give the fullest picture…
      Much to learn. More more more to learn. All ways.

      Comment by zoe young (@zoeyou) on 8 June, 2012 at 4:55 pm

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