Witchcraft in Africa
These beliefs often play a significant role in shaping social dynamics and can influence how communities address challenges and seek spiritual assistance.
It is often translated as "witchcraft" or "sorcery", but it has a broader meaning that encompasses supernatural harm, healing and shapeshifting; this highlights the problem of using European terms for African concepts.
[5] The Democratic Republic of the Congo witnessed a disturbing trend of child witchcraft accusations in Kinshasa, leading to abuse and exorcisms supervised by self-styled pastors.
[8] Malawi faces a similar issue of child witchcraft accusations, with traditional healers and some Christian counterparts involved in exorcisms, causing abandonment and abuse of children.
[9] In Nigeria, Pentecostal pastors have intertwined Christianity with witchcraft beliefs for profit, leading to the torture and killing of accused children.
[12] In parts of Africa, beliefs about illness being caused by witchcraft continue to fuel suspicion of modern medicine, with serious healthcare consequences.
The people central to African religions, "including medicine men and women, rainmakers, witches, magicians, and divine kings ... serve as authority figures and intermediaries between the social world and the cosmic realm".
Colonial authorities often viewed African witchcraft as superstitious and attempted to suppress or eradicate indigenous practices, leading to the criminalization and persecution of suspected witches.
[16][17][need quotation to verify] In the post-independence era some African countries continued to grapple with witchcraft-related issues, including accusations and violence.
Legal responses have emerged in some nations to protect individuals from harm and discrimination due to witchcraft accusations, but the practice and beliefs continue to evolve in the context of modernization and globalization.
[18][19] African witchcraft beliefs are incredibly diverse, encompassing practices from healing and divination to the worship of ancestral spirits and deities.
They often involve rituals, ceremonies, and the use of herbs, charms, and divination methods to connect with the spiritual world and address various aspects of life, including health, prosperity, and protection.
This psychic power is believed to work at close range and can manipulate nature to cause harm, such as using animals or collapsing structures.
Evans-Pritchard's work has had a lasting influence on the study of "primitive thought" and has guided subsequent generations of anthropologists in understanding the complexity of witchcraft in Azande culture.
It is often translated as "witchcraft" or "sorcery", but it has a broader meaning that encompasses supernatural harm, healing and shapeshifting; this highlights the problem of using European terms for African concepts.
[34] Christian militias in the Central African Republic have also kidnapped, burnt and buried alive women accused of being 'witches' in public ceremonies.
[35] Ngangas are spiritual healers in Central Africa and use divination to detect evil witches and perform rituals to remove witchcraft by making nkisi nkondi to hunt and punish sorcerers.
In 2002, USAID funded the production of two short films on the subject, made in Kinshasa by journalists Angela Nicoara and Mike Ormsby.
In April 2008 in Kinshasa, the police arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic or witchcraft to steal or shrink men's penises.
[7] Arrests were made in an effort to avoid bloodshed seen in Ghana in 1997, when twelve alleged penis snatchers were beaten to death by mobs.
[47] While it is easy for modern people to dismiss such reports, Uchenna Okeja argues that a belief system in which such magical practices are deemed possible offer many benefits to Africans who hold them.
[53] In Nigeria several Pentecostal pastors have mixed their evangelical brand of Christianity with African beliefs in witchcraft to benefit from the lucrative witch-finding and exorcism business—which in the past was the exclusive domain of the so-called witch doctor or traditional healers.
In the course of "exorcisms", accused children may be starved, beaten, mutilated, set on fire, forced to consume acid or cement, or buried alive.
[57] In May 2020 fifteen adults, mostly women, were set ablaze after being accused of witchcraft, including the mother of the instigator of the attack, Thomas Obi Tawo, a local politician.
