The Independent (UK)
29 November 2005 01:31
Tanzania suffers rise of witchcraft hysteria
Thousands of elderly people, mostly women, are being accused
of witchcraft and then murdered or maimed by vigilante
groups in Tanzania. But the police and government do little
to prevent the deaths, re****ts Oliver Duff from Mwanza
Published: 28 November 2005
They came for Lemi Ndaki in the night. "I was sleeping when
I heard a noise," explains the 70-year-old Tanzanian
grandmother. "There was no security in my hut and the door
was easy to open. I got up to see about the noise and
someone grabbed me and chopped off my arm with a machete. I
think he came to chop my neck but I raised my hand and he
only took my arm."
A neighbour heard her cries and took her to the hospital in
Mwanza, the nearest city, a three-hour drive away on the
shore of Lake Victoria. "They couldn't put my arm back on
and the scar still hurts, especially when I'm cold." That is
not surprising: the open bone still pokes out from the skin
below her elbow, 19 years later.
Other elderly women in her village, Mwamagigisi, haven't
been so lucky. Ng'wana Budodi was shot in the head with an
arrow. Kabula Lubambe and Helena Mabula were knifed to
death. Ng'wana Ng'ombe was also murdered with a machete, and
when her mud hut was set alight, her husband, Sami, was
burnt alive.
This is the fate awaiting thousands of old people, mostly
women, who are accused of witchcraft in this rural and
isolated corner of east Africa. The killings are escalating
in many areas, perhaps numbering more than 1,000 a year, but
the Tanzanian government and police do nothing to stop them.
Although belief in witchcraft is common across much of
sub-Saharan Africa, relatively few people persecute
suspected sorcerers. What exists in the regions of Mwanza,
****nyanga and Tabora -- predominantly Sukuma by tribe -- is
a localised hysteria reminiscent of the witch burnings and
trials-by-ordeal of Salem or medieval Europe.
A combination of poverty, ignorance and personal jealousies
leaves fearful and frustrated peasants quick to blame any
adverse act of fate -- a dead child, a failed crop, an
inheritance settlement where a sibling receives all the land
-- on witchcraft. Throw into the pot malicious gossip and an
often fatal bout of finger-pointing at old women, and the
result is vigilante groups of professional killers moving
from village to village, accepting payments to remove the
"problem" by hacking, beating or burning. Four cows or $100
is said to be the going rate.
Sometimes local outrage is such that mob rule breaks out and
the "witch" is openly lynched. One of the most surprising
aspects is the attacks often originate from the victim's family.
"We are talking big numbers as not all cases are re****ted,"
said Simeon Mesaki, a sociologist at the University of Dar
es Salaam who specialises in witch killings. "They appear to
be increasing in some areas. In ****nyanga region you are
talking a minimum 300 a year that we know about. Mwanza is
probably the same. About 80 per cent of re****ted attacks are
against elderly women."
In 2003 the Tanzanian government said more than 3,072 witch
killings had occurred since 1970 -- but a government
commission said in 1989 that 3,693 had been re****ted to
police between 1970 and 1984 alone. A regional police chief
admitted they were a daily occurrence, and a leaked survey
by the ministry of home affairs said 5,000 people had been
lynched between 1994 and 1998. The problem is so prevalent
that villages have been set up populated exclusively by
accused witches forced to flee their communities. "The
government figures are very low, not accurate," said one
official who asked not to be named. "I know a much higher
number, and even that is not the full situation."
The root cause of the killings is that village life is so
hard, prompting neighbours and relatives into competition
over resources that can spill into violence behind the
smokescreen of witch hunts.
These are the most deprived parts of a country whose people
have an annual income of $330 and a life expectancy of 46
years. There is no electricity or running water; home is a
mud hut with a straw roof. Few roads are passable during the
wet seasons and 60 per cent of villagers lack adequate
sanitation facilities. Rainfall is low and unreliable so
crops struggle. Lions and leopards from the nearby Serengeti
attack cattle or people.
These conditions result in poor employment, literacy and
general health, and susceptibility to superstition. The
incidence of HIV/Aids -- a mystery to some locals -- is
thought to be much higher than the countrywide average of
one in 10 adults and is decimating the working 18-49
generation. Malaria, typhoid, polio and dysentery kill many
more under-fives than the national mortality rate of 165
deaths per 1,000 children.
But life has always been hard here and witch killings were
s****adic until the late 1960s. What prompted the explosion
in murders was the breakdown of the traditional tribal
system of governance. The collectivisation policies of
Tanzania's popular first President, Julius Nyerere, tried to
bring together 120 tribes through a common language,
Swahili. The dialect policy proved successful: despite
Tanzania's diversity, it is one of Africa's most harmonious
societies.
The second policy, Ujamaa, proved disastrous. It demanded
socialist farming collectives, bringing together distant
peasants for work and access to basic facilities (many are
still waiting for these). Ujamaa's idealism was suffocated
by the lack of individual incentive and sowed a more
murderous seed by disbanding the system of village chiefs,
outlawed in 1963 and replaced by faraway officials.
The chiefs had been responsible for resolving local
conflicts -- not always amicably, but firmly. Into the
authority vacuum stepped the unsung culprits of the witch
killings that would tear apart rural harmony: traditional
healers, or, as we would crudely recognise them, witch doctors.
This motley crew of diviners (fortune tellers), rain makers,
herbalists, bone sitters and traditional birth attendants
ac***ulated great power over their clients. Many enjoyed
good reputations for patient care even if their scientific
knowledge was poor. But a new generation of hoaxers has set
up shop in villages and by highways to prey on passing
motorists and pedestrians worried about their fate. These
"briefcase specialists", as some locals laughingly call
them, attribute undiagnosed illnesses to witchcraft, and --
for a price -- direct their vengeful clients to the accused
sorcerer. Hence the rise in witch killings.
It is the elderly, particularly those whose families have
died and so have no protection, who bare the brunt of
people's frustrations and anger. Diviners spread
money-spinning stories that an individual keeps hyenas and
tames s****s, digs up corpses and eats the flesh, and stays
up all night bewitching people -- hence her bad temper, grey
hair and the bags under her bloodshot eyes (actually the
result of years toiling over cow dung cooking fires).
A law was passed two years ago obliging the ministry of
health to set up a traditional healers' union with a code of
conduct for members, but the effect has yet to be noticed.
In Mwamagigisi, the nfumu (diviner), Gamawi**** ****ja, said
people needed to know if they had been bewitched by a
neighbour so they could "stop the problem". The 44-year-old
Maasai said: "When you have a disease which is unknown you
can see it is witchcraft. Ancestors tell me who the witch is
when I sleep. Then I tell the patient. When the person dies,
[relatives] want to kill the witch. It is for security."
She breaks away from her explanation to tend to a client.
The ceremonial im****tance of handing over money is
immediately apparent. Once a coin is tossed in her basket,
the diviner sets off on a 10-minute, eyes-closed medley of
bell-ringing, whistling and shaking a maraca -- to contact
the ancestors. Her chants grow louder to drown out the sound
of a patient's cough in a hut behind her. Once finished, she
returns to her client: "Maybe you are suffering with your
backbone, your legs?" With no easy access to dispensaries
and medical advice, this is a common experience for rural
Tanzanians.
The witch killings are not a problem eroded by the dribble
of modernity -- radios, mobile phones and cars -- into
villages. If anything, peasants' growing awareness of their
poverty compared to the rest of the country only exacerbates
tensions.
The day we passed through Magu town, Mwanza, on the way to
the countryside, a old woman was murdered in nearby Busami
village after relatives accused her of bewitching her
terminally ill husband to an early grave.
Many murders go unre****ted because villagers cover up the
killings to avoid police attention. If the police do receive
a re****t, they arrive a day or two after the attack, once a
4x4 vehicle can be found to negotiate the country trails. By
then the killers have fled and there is no evidence.
The best officers can do is round up the victim's neighbours
and question them until they buy their way out of jail.
Regardless of corruption, law enforcement officials lack the
resources to solve the crime and prosecute the perpetrators.
"The government is condoning the killing," said Scolastica
Jullu, the executive director of the Women's Legal Aid
Centre in Dar es Salaam. "Except for cases of rape of older
women, I don't find anyone taken to court. If it was a man
or young woman who was killed, the police would investigate,
but because it is old women they don't worry."
The government says with so few resources it can do little
more than encourage NGOs interested in the problem. "This is
an evil, repugnant practice", the district commissioner for
Magu, Elias Maaragu, said. "But if old people have no
children to protect them, it is not like it is in the UK
where you house them together and give them an allowance."
Stepping into this void is a handful of NGOs targeting
trouble spots with educational programmes. One charity,
Maperece, is recognised as having had particular success in
Magu. It gets £20,000 a year from British donors through
Help the Aged's Adopt a Grandparent scheme, allowing its 12
volunteers to sup****t elderly people in 58 villages. But
such charities are the only agents likely to intervene.
Until the Tanzanian government can be embarrassed into
action, and until it controls less pitifully empty coffers,
that will remain the case.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1587154838/thedanclorenecro/
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"
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