Modern Witch Hunts

It may be difficult for Western cultures to fathom, but in Western Kenya, beliefs in ghosts and witches are very real. And sometimes they have deadly consequences. “I believe there is witchcraft and the witches kill,” Magoma says while building a chapel. His fellow workers concur: Witches exist and can put spells on people.

It is not surprising that the people who believe in witches were busy building a chapel. But it’s not as simple as that. This article is really only an introduction into the phenomenon and as I’ve argued before, even Pagan cultures can find witches to be a danger to society. Pagan Roman culture did not burn them but Roman law banished them. So even a Pagan society is not above taking umbrage at the ills worked by alleged witches.

In fact, what happened in Kenya sounds a lot like what began to take place in Transvaal in the 1970s. In 1986, in one incident, 32 people were burned to death; as in Kenya, most of the victims were older women. There was an intensification of attacks on witches in the 1990s. Peter Delius, writing in the Journal of Southern African Studies, notes that “Media reports often suggest that these events are the result of the re-assertion of pre-colonial beliefs and practices – a reflection of the fact that: ‘savagery lies shallow in Africa.’” But Delius does not think the explanation is so simple.[1]

Delius argues that prior to the arrival of missionaries, the native peoples had little problem with witches. When witches were dealt with, they usually turned out to be men, though women could also be accused. But the treatment was not harsh and there is little evidence in the pre-missionary era of large-scale witch burnings. But from the 19th century on, women came to be seen as witches to the near-exclusion of men. The author suggests that this “does pose the question of whether the present emphasis on women as witches is not the result of transformations in the society, and the context of witch beliefs that were set in motion in the late nineteenth century.”[2]

There was an upswing in NRMs (New Religious Movements) in Ghana (1927-1932) and the colonial government was generally tolerant of them. These NRMs were not Christian but supposedly traditionalist, though the authorities suspected the priests were mainly after money. Ironically, in this case, Christians (both Protestant and Catholic) were often suspected of witchcraft and could be the victims rather than the instigators of witch hunting activities. Muslims were also accused.[3] This association of Christians with witchcraft took place in the earlier episode as well, according to Delius. [4]

In this case, it was Christians who were instrumental in putting an end to the witch-hunting activities of the locals. The Christian Council, and umbrella organization of Protestant missionaries in the Gold Coast, issued a report in 1931 which said that Christians could disagree on whether or not witches existed but asserted that many of those who thought themselves witches were deluded. British authorities generally considered such people to be insane. The locals, on the other hand, believed them to be witches. Scholars have offered various reasons why people would confess: “suppressed power impulse,” depression, “an outlet for general aggressive feelings” and “a relatively mild form of protest and appeal for recognition and respect by people in subordinate social positions.” One scholar even suggested that the anti-witchcraft activities were “a response to, and proof of, the trauma of modernity.”[5]

Puja Roy argues that “In a world where unequal gender relations are the norm, as exemplified by male violence against women, the practice of persecuting women as witches epitomizes the tragedy of gender disparity.”[6] But if this can be true, it is also simplistic and does not offer an all-encompassing explanation. For example, one of our earliest examples of laws enacted against the use of magic for anti-social purposes is found in the Code of Hammurabi and it explicitly calls the offender a sorcerer, not a witch, reinforcing the idea that for Pagans, women were not the prime or only offenders. Indeed, it was foreigners and not women who the Romans mistrusted, and it is this outside influence that offended conservative and traditionally minded Romans when they turned their laws against astrologers. We must not let Christian notions of witchcraft and magic be colored by misogynistic Christian notions which took root after the destruction of Paganism. Beneficent magic was not seen to be a threat by ancient Pagans or by the Roman state as long as it was “officially and publicly employed”[7] but for Christianity, all “good” magic became part of the Church and bad magic became Pagan and the property of women. It is therefore not difficult to see, as Michael Gaddis has recently argued, that Christianity conflated “order” with “Christianity” and therefore considered anything not official (not Christian) as harmful, by definition, all things Pagan.[8]

What is clear is that blaming Pagan society for the ills of anti-witchcraft movements is simplistic and inaccurate. Given the strong anti-witchcraft movements of Christian Europe and its association with practices outside of Christianity and therefore Pagan, it is clear that the phenomenon is complex and far reaching. The reasons why a person might be accused can be other than the fact that they are a woman, as Delius demonstrates. But it is difficult not to see a connection between the Christian focus on women as witches and the change taking place in Africa from the missionary era on of women being the focus of anti-witchcraft activities to the near exclusion of men (only 3 of the victims in the recent outrage were men, the rest were women, mostly between 70 and 90 years of age). Then too, there is the increased violence of the response.

You also have to wonder if the Christians in Ghana would have been as anxious to put an end to anti-witchcraft activities if they themselves had not been the accused. If it were only Pagans who were being accused, would anything ever have been done? And to what extent did Christianity create the problem in the first place? It may be poetic justice that they came to be accused of something they themselves fostered. There is no doubt that there are many places in the world where women are second class citizens and that this condition exists outside of Christianity. It is also true that Christianity does nothing to alleviate these conditions and in fact reinforces them by insisting that women, through Eve, are the source of evil in the world. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the lot of women will not be improved if they are seen not only as less than men, but as evil.

John Njenga Karugia writes,

We have decided not to pray in the name of Jesus Christ anymore. We will now pray in the name of the gods of our forefathers. We shall pray in the name of our grandmothers and grandfathers. We will pray in the name of the gods of the wilderness and the gods of rain and thunder and lighting. We will pray under trees and make sacrifices like we did before the white missionaries came. Those were nice days. Our forefathers did not have to carry books around to be reminded of what the gods were for or against. They felt the presence of the gods and the gods were kind to them

Karugia asks,

Where are the gods of our forefathers? The gods of our motherland? The gods that lived on our mountains and trees? The gods that swam in our rivers? The gods we feared to go against? The gods we made offerings to under our trees? The gods of our African shrines? The gods of our forests? The gods of night and the gods of day? Our African gods.

Where did the white missionaries take our gods? Where did converted black missionaries hide them? Are we allowed to pray in the name of our African gods or will they say its witchcraft and magic? Do we need permission to look for these gods?

These are good questions, and they demonstrate how difficult it is to separate witchcraft from Christianity. Christianity did not invent witchcraft, but it redefined it. It dogmatically separated magic into “good” and “bad”, and accepted into the Church those aspects they considered good and put the rest “outside” and declared it the devil’s work. It is accurate to argue, as some scholars have, that Paganism was subsumed by Christianity, and that magic was an “under-current” of Paganism, that part that was not acceptable. If it was not part of mainstream Paganism – the Heathen Norse saw seidh (ON seiðr) workers as existing on the fringe of society for the same reason Pagan Rome mistrusted witches – such people were seen even in Pagan times to be using magic for selfish reasons and thus posed a threat to the social order. Established temples and priesthoods on the other hand sustained and supported the social order.[9]Imagine how much worse it was in the eyes of the Church!

It is interesting and also illuminating to consider that today, rather than astrologers and sorcerers and so forth, railed against by Roman law and generally male, have been replaced in the popular imagination by female practitioners and that malign magic has become the property of women. No surprise, as we have said, since women are considered to be agents of evil in Christian doctrine, and the evidence from Transvaal that men more often than women were accused before the missionaries came tends to support the idea that women are primarily victimized now as a result of the Christianizing of ethnic cultures. It is also no surprise that Christians want to blame “backwards” and “savage” Pagan cultures for these activities, pretending to their conceit of an “enlightened” Christianity which peels back a dark veil and brings peace and order to the world. But shrugging off its defects on others is a time-honored Christian practice and it should not surprise us now. Sociologists are not immune and are as capable of limiting their interpretation to a Christian filter as any other scholar, as demonstrated by Rodney Stark, who sees Christianity as “True Religion” and polytheism as “false” religion. Obviously, such attitudes need to be taken into account when reading even scholarly treatments of the subject. We forget at our peril that we in the west live in a predominantly Christian culture still.

As an aside, there is an interesting post by Wandia Njoya at the Zeleza Post about the witchcraft problem and Kenya and its relationship to Christianity.

Notes:

[1] Peter Delius, “Witches and Missionaries in Nineteenth Century Transvaal” Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3, Special Issue for Shula Marks (Sep., 2001), pp. 429-443

[2] Ibid., 441-442.

[3] Natasha Gray, “Witches, Oracles, and Colonial Law: Evolving Anti-Witchcraft Practices in Ghana, 1927-1932″ The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2001), pp. 339-363

[4] Delius, 440.

[5] Gray, 359-362.

[6]Puja Roy, “Sanctioned Violence: Development and the Persecution of Women as Witches in South Bihar” Development in Practice, Vol. 8, No. 2 (May, 1998), pp. 136-147

[7] Clyde Pharr, “The Interdiction of Magic in Roman Law” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Vol. 63, (1932), pp. 269-295

[8] Michael Gaddis, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ (University of California Press, 2005), 20-21.

[9] Pharr, 278-279. See also Thomas A. DuBois, Nordic Religions in the Viking Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), particularly chapter 6. DuBois cautions that Ït is probable that saga writers saw little difference between seiðr of the past and the thirteenth-century notions of witches.”