Public Agenda (Accra)
Felix Riedel
2 November 2009
opinion
Inside Ghana, as throughout Africa, a civil war is going on. This civil war does not have clear opponents. It is supported or accepted by most, perpetrated by rackets and mobs and aimed at the freedom of anybody while killing selected victims.
Due to a dream or the consultation of a pastor, a fetish-priest or a Muslim authority a person is accused as a witch or wizard. They are blackmailed, harassed and an unknown number of people in such cases are tortured, brutalized and murdered. Sometimes the murders happen with the agreement of the whole village or people around. The perpetrators feel justified to throw stones at a woman or a man. Sometimes it is the organized youth or even children who are incited by adults to kill a person accused as "Sonya", "Bayi", "Anyen" or "witch".
There are reports from desperate survivors of these witch hunts who ran away for days through the bush, not eating or drinking and frightened to death. Some tried to commit suicide to avoid being brutalized, while those who were lucky to live were rescued by a brave relative or a friend who dared to talk against the blood-thirsty and self-righteous mob armed with stones, cutlasses and sticks.
So far in Ghana, there are seven settlements in Northern Region that act as refugee-camps for victims of witch-hunts. These settlements are witnesses of the brutal acts that are perpetrated again and again. More than 2,500 victims of witch-hunts live there under circumstances even most Ghanaians would decry.
At Tindang near Yendi, about 1000 people live in poor clay-huts scattered along a hill without access to health-care, education or shops. Children sometimes help weak old ladies, others totally depend on themselves, begging for the food the stronger ones harvest on nearby fields. In Kukuo, another very large settlement containing again more than 1000 victims of witch-hunts, the conditions are just slightly better as more young people help the old and weak to survive. But the stories of those whose lives as free persons end there are not less disheartening. It is common to find an old lady who lives in the same hut that was once shelter to her mother and her grand-mother who were all accused as witches and chased away - sometimes by their closest relatives.
The remaining five smaller settlements at Gambaga, Kpatinga, Gushegu, Nabuli and Bonyanse shelter between 81 and 7 outcasts. Some persons struggle hard to get funding to suport these old ladies surviving the hardships of crop-failure and diseases. Even the famous and international well-known "Gambaga Outcast Home Project" that takes care of the Settlement for victims of witch-hunts in Gambaga has for unknown reasons run out of funding, leaving the old ladies totally dependent on the hard work on the fields of the chief or on some alms from the citizens of Gambaga. Some are lucky and are provided with help from relatives who do not let down their beloved mother or grand-mother.
But as in the majority of these settlements, a priest does some ritual to declare the accused person guilty and then cleanses her or him of "witchcraft". But all of these people bear the stigma of being once labelled as a witch by a "spiritual" authority.
This is why there is no public outcry against the practice of witch-hunting. Most people think: if even the chiefs, the pastors, the mallams and the shrine-priests in Tengzug say that these persons are witches, why shouldn't they be punished for their "witchcraft"? The senior is always right and unfortunately, democracy is far away.
All this frenzy is backed by most Ghanaian movies that mysteriously always show pastors as heroes who exorcise cheaply visualized "witchcraft-spirits" with methods most Psychologists would describe as psycho-terror and torture. This is the as the same psycho-terror and torture that really takes place in churches where persons labelled as witches are chained, imprisoned, and exorcised through slapping and shouting until the victim gives in and confesses anything the pastor wants to hear to end the torture. It is backed by story-books that channel the crude fantasies of one person into the hysteria of a wider public - which is the one-day lynching so-called "penis-thefts"; and the next day slaughtering hunchbacks for naively supposed hidden treasures inside the hunchback. It is backed by a public that is very eager to sacrifice some individuals to release the aggressions of all.
Unfortunately, this happens throughout Africa. Thousands are killed each year and many more go through humiliating and painful rituals. In South-Africa more than 5000 people were killed after being labelled as "witches" during the 1990's; many were burnt to death by youngsters of the "Comrades", a youth organisation once fighting against Apartheid. In Tanzania more than 20,000 old women were killed in a wave of witch-hunts. In Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, more than 25,000 children are roaming the streets, chased away from their parents who accused them of being child-"witches". According to Amnesty International, in Gambia the infamous president himself organized witch-hunts some month ago.
Anyone who fans the fears of people takes part in those crimes. Churches, the movie-industry and the notorious picture-faking rainbow-press are most to blame for producing propaganda others are willing to believe and even to pay for.
It is true that most Africans take stories about witchcraft for real and they are by no means alone with this in the world. There is fear, hate, anger, jealousy and malice inside people. People can be manipulative with knowledge about common reactions of people which appeals to our lust and fears. People can be very, very sick in mind and torture children, beat them with a cane or abuse them sexually. Even if a person confesses the most unimaginable spiritual crimes this does not mean that these crimes are real. Fantasizing power can be as stimulating as having power, especially for those who are deprived of any power.
Sometimes and always too often people are indeed butchered for rituals - recently a lot of albinos were murdered in Tanzania by organized criminals who sold the body-parts. But the body-parts of these persons will never cause any "spiritual" influence on economic processes. And if a 419-fraudster really does some strange ritual he will, maybe, feel more self-confident, but the ritual will have no effect on any of his fraud-victims.
Science can not yet explain everything and it is very likely that it will never be able to explain luck or accident. But nowadays we have certain knowledge about some psychological mechanisms of hallucination and fantasy, of dreams and nightmares, of sexual desire and projection, of psychosis and traumata, of hysteria and schizophrenics. This knowledge reaches far beyond anything any religion tells us about humans.
In ancient Greece, many scientists were aware that the earth is a globe. Later the church told them, that the earth is flat and everybody in Europe believed it is flat. Then, hundreds of years later, several scientists were burned to death as heretics until it was accepted, that the church of Europe had been in a fundamental error - the earth was a globe again. It was painful for those who had to admit that their whole conception of the world was wrong. But the yield for mankind was the connection of Europe to the Americas, Australia and a whole new world of trade, movement and possibilities - for good and bad.
Nonetheless, even a person who defends all stories about witchcraft as real has to obey basic laws like the one against murder and torture. And there are also people who believe in the existence of witchcraft but just feel very sad when they see victims of witch-hunts treated the way they were and are. Not even the belief in the existence of witchcraft is therefore an excuse for killing or maltreating anybody labelled as a witch. There is simply no excuse for this crime against humanity. For this reason we should all show solidarity with the victims of witch-hunts, take care of them and while we can, prevent the persecution or labelling of people as "witches".
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