The fear of witchcraft is more dangerous than witchcraft itself. The former leads to wide-scale imprisonment, torture, and execution, while the latter is a mostly-harmless delusion.
Unfortunately, this is not always the case.
Three days ago, a terrifying Malawian news item appeared on the web: “Mozambican Boy Castrated For Witchcraft.” The story revealed that two men lured a nine-year-old boy into the woods near the Malawi border with the promise of “rat hunting.” There, they gagged him, amputated his testicles and penis, cut out his eyes, and left him for dead. The men allegedly planned to sell the body-parts to a witchdoctor. It appears they had already arranged the sale.
Last weekend, as the Mozambican child-mutilators were being tried for attempted murder (the mutilated boy lived through the night, and was taken to a hospital the next morning), scholars gathered in Kumasi, Ghana, at the Conference On Culture, Witchcraft, and Human Rights. There they explored methods of combating the belief in witchcraft, and the misogynistic violence by which such fears are always accompanied. According to GhanaWeb.com, Kwasi Gyan-Apentang said it was “disheartening to know that people do not take pragmatic efforts to attempt to deal with witchcraft and its human rights consequences, but rather level accusations against innocent women and children, especially those in very poor circumstances.”
Mr. Gyan-Apentant is undoubtedly correct. But in a region where witches, if not witchcraft, can enact such terrible violence against children, I fear moderation will be a difficult sell.