Here is an item that ran on Al Jazeera last Saturday:
I wonder if the footage of the “witch” burning — which the reporter claims is “three months” old — is actually from the springtime incident we reported on here. (Note: If you click on that last link, do yourself a favor and don’t watch the video, unless you feel you need an extra jolt to achieve a level of righteous anger commensurate to something as wrong and pitiful as the burning of alleged sorcerers in an era in which one of the mob can record the spectacle in hi-def.)
There are two good things about this story, the first of which is that it actually exists. Although specific figures are unavailable, we may extrapolate from local tallies that the fear of witches has ruined the lives of tens of thousands of Africans in the last two decades, and has likely resulted in thousands of deaths.
Not many, perhaps, for a continent upon which child soldiers and psychopathic juntas have killed millions, and AIDS and starvation have killed millions more. But aren’t these ills of a piece? And won’t a critical examination of the mindset that can lead villagers to participate in an impromptu auto de fe say something about why the continent in question has suffered such wretched luck in the last century? I think so. But the uncounted deaths resulting from sub-Saharan Africa’s witchcraft hysteria have yet to enter the Western news cycles in a meaningful way. A blurb here, a segment there, none of which provide a sense that this is an ongoing story that may warrant more attention than a three-minute dispatch, or a quick column beneath the fold. (Keith Olbermann became interested in the witchcraft hysteria only when it provided an opportunity to pick on Sarah Palin, as though the milquetoast fundamentalism of Palin’s church in Wasilla was more interesting than the milieu that spawned Thomas Muthee. It’s not.) The Al Jazeera story, at the very least, speaks about the problem as “spreading,” and reporter Mohammed Adow sounds appropriately flabbergasted that he is living in a world where such things need reporting.
The other thing for which I am grateful to Adow is the way he diagnoses witchcraft hysteria — which, at the moment, is raging most intensely in the Kisii district of Kenya — as the product of a superstitious mindset. “Every little ailment, misfortune, or predicament is blamed on witchcraft,” he says, “and some say every success here is attributed to sorcery.” Though he doesn’t come right out and say it, it’s clear that he is presenting belief in witchcraft, rather than witchcraft itself, as the broader problem.
That should be an obvious point, but it isn’t. The Vatican, for example, offers the exact opposite diagnosis. And in a recent dispatch to Haiti, the Christian news organ Mission Network News not only affirmed the veracity and danger of witchcraft, but hinted that witchcraft leads to the prostitution of children. If “witch” burning takes root in the Caribbean, they will be partially to blame.