The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  Once a person was identified as a probable witch, torture was sometimes used to extract a confession: in India the Dangs commonly swung an accused person upside down over a fire.144 Across much of the rest of India and in Burma suspects were flogged with wood from a sacred tree.145 The Navaho of the south-western United States preferred to tie them up and starve them of food and shelter.146 How severe a penalty was imposed on those convicted of witchcraft depended both on local attitudes to it and the perceived extent of the damage done by the presumed witch. To societies that prescribed the death penalty for murder or other serious crimes against the person, it was logical to apply it to people convicted of inflicting death or ruinous damage by means of magic. Most peoples who have traditionally believed in witchcraft have killed at least some of those formally convicted of it. In communities that greatly feared witchcraft, the body counts achieved could be considerable. It was said that in pre-colonial days every village of the Bakweri of Cameroon had its witch-hanging tree.147 Among the Pondo of South Africa, the rate of execution ran at one per day on the eve of the British conquest and this number did not include those who fled when accused, or were fined.148 A British official serving in India during the early nineteenth century estimated that about a thousand women had been put to death for alleged witchcraft on the northern plains during the previous thirty years: a rate of mortality far more serious than that caused by the more notorious local practice of sati, or widow-burning.149 The rupturing of British rule over India in the rebellion of 1857 permitted a great witch-hunt, with lethal effects, to occur among the tribes of northern India.150 Before British colonialism arrived, the Nyoro allegedly burned many of their people alive as witches, while before the Germans conquered them, the Kaguru clubbed to death those convicted of witchcraft and left them to rot in the bush, and the Pogoro burned them alive.151 The Greenland Inuit cut the bodies of those executed into small pieces to prevent their spirits from haunting the living.152 Likewise, the Northern Paiute of what became Nevada and Oregon stoned convicted suspects to death and then burned the corpses.153 A Jesuit missionary working among the Huron of Canada in 1635 noted that they often murdered each other or burned each other alive on the testimony of dying men who accused the victims of having caused their fatal illness by magic.154 On Flores, the penalty for witchcraft before the Dutch conquest was to be buried alive, and this apparently occurred regularly. On another Indonesian island, Sulawesi, the Toraja people submitted accused witches to ordeals that allowed virtually no proof of innocence, and then beat them to death. Young boys were encouraged to participate in this to prove their courage.155 Before being ruled by the British, the tribes of what is now Botswana avenged deaths by presumed witchcraft either by allowing the bereaved relatives to kill the family of the suspected witch or by having the local chief try the suspects and execute those convicted: there were twenty-six such trials among the BaNgwatetse alone between 1910 and 1916. The former execution places of witches were still pointed out to British visitors to the region in the 1940s.156 The Kaska, who lived on the border between Canada and Alaska, had no concept of magical cures that could be used against witchcraft, and so the only known remedy was to deal with the witch, who in that society was usually thought of as a child. This belief led to persistent killings in the first two decades of the twentieth century, often by the families of the youngsters accused.157

  Across the world, traditional peoples have often manifested the pattern of sudden upsurges in witch-hunting among populations hitherto or for a long time characterized by little of it. In general, people who have traditionally feared witchcraft tend to accuse neighbours of it much more frequently in times of economic pressure and/or of destabilizing economic, political and cultural change; but it is also true that such times do not automatically and necessarily produce an increase in accusations. When such an upsurge has occurred, it has tended to rebound on the social order in three different ways: to confirm the authority of the traditional leaders and society; to enhance the power of an individual member of the traditional elite; or to enable a new social group to seize authority. In Africa, Lobengula, king of the Matabele, Ranavalona, queen of the Malagasy, and Shaka, king of the Zulus are examples of nineteenth-century leaders who reinforced their hereditary authority by waging war on alleged witches. Shaka once summoned almost four hundred suspects to his court at once, and killed them all, while under Ranavalona about a tenth of her subjects were forced to endure the poison ordeal to test for witches, and a fifth of those died. Lobengula presided over an average of nine to ten executions per month, mainly of relatively powerful men. In nineteenth-century North America the Navaho chief Manuelito executed more than forty of his political opponents on charges of witchcraft, and a generation earlier the Seneca chief Handsome Lake established himself as a religious leader by directing a persecution of it.158 Such figures sometimes used witch-hunting to defend traditional ways against innovation: in the eighteenth-century Ohio Valley the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa instigated it against Christian converts in his tribal confederacy.159 Political use of the mechanism could be deployed collectively as well as by particular rulers and prophets: thus, in the seventeenth century the north-eastern Algonquian tribes of North America made witchcraft accusations their main means to establish new territorial boundaries to service the fur trade developing with European settlers.160 On the other hand, some strongly based and long-established regimes chose to discourage witch-hunts as part of the demonstration of their authority. When a panic swept twelve provinces of China in 1768, that itinerant magicians were cursing people (especially male children) to death in order to enslave their souls, the imperial judges quashed the convictions imposed by local courts, although mobs had murdered some suspects before they could be arrested.161

  In Africa witch-finding movements were common in the colonial period, affecting much of the western and central parts of the continent, and functioning partly as a response to the prohibition or extreme modification of traditional trials for witchcraft by the European administrations. It is also possible that colonial rule, by shattering tribal institutions and moral codes, increased the instability in which a fear of bewitchment often flourishes.162 The Lele were caught up in no less than five witch-hunts between 1910 and 1952.163 Typically, they were conducted by young men who toured regions, crossing tribal boundaries and claiming the power both to detect witches and to render them permanently harmless. The latter process usually took the form of forcing suspects produced by communities to deliver up the materials with which they were supposed to work their magic, for destruction, and administering a drink or ointment to them, or a particular rite, which was supposed to remove their ability to bewitch. Likewise, in western India, the ‘Devi’ religious revival of the 1920s included the detection and banishment of witches from villages as part of its remit.164 Such movements originated from outside traditional structures of authority and custom but generally worked within them. Even under colonial rule, however, witch-hunters sometimes emerged who provoked a rejection and punishment of the familiar native elites or religions. The Atinga witch-finding cult in West Africa was conveyed by devotees of a single shrine in northern Ghana, who destroyed other traditional cult centres as they travelled.165 The Nyambua, their equivalent in Nigeria, denounced established chiefdoms as well as witches.166 Sometimes, also, such movements blended with anti-colonial feeling, or even with outright rebellion: the Maji Maji uprising against German rule in Tanganyika in 1905–6 was led by a prophet who termed himself a ‘killer and hater’ of witches, and indeed ordered the death of anybody who refused the ‘medicine water’ that he administered to destroy evil magic.167

  This pattern has become much more common since the removal of European rule, as Africa has undergone programmes of self-conscious modernization that have produced major social change.168 Witch-hunting has often been prominent both in revolutionary movements which directly opposed and helped to end colonialism or white supremacy, and in the successor states, under native regimes, w
hich emerged out of the former colonies. The groups of young men who attacked suspected witches in parts of the Transvaal during the 1980s were also those who led resistance to the system of apartheid, portraying the white government which both upheld apartheid and forbade witch-hunting, as the protector of witchcraft. After the establishment of black majority rule, they still found themselves marginalized by the new regime, and so continued their role as local defenders of their people, in the face of a largely alien central government, with persecution of witches still part of that role.169 Closer to the main centres of population in the new South Africa, in the Soweto township, the daily fear of witchcraft was reported as ‘tremendous’ by the early 1990s, and it was said that ‘every older woman, especially if eccentric and unpopular, lives with the risk of being accused of witchcraft’.170 Among the Mijikenda of the Kenya coast, independence was followed by an upsurge of accusations and of violence against suspects, with tribal and national administrative leaders uniting to promote a particular healer as a witch-finder.171 From the 1970s direct and public accusations of witchcraft increased in Zambia, and with them the use of expert witch-finders, who were ubiquitous in rural areas by the 1980s.172

  In the war of independence, which established native rule in Zimbabwe, the guerrillas assumed the traditional role of chiefs as witch-detectors, usually with the full support of local communities, and put those detected to death if those communities desired it. Unsurprisingly, the victims were often allies of the white government.173 After independence had been achieved in the country, during the early 1990s, a local hunt was conducted by a spirit medium obtained from a government-sanctioned National Traditional Healers’ Association, who detected witches by making suspects step over his walking stick.174 Both sides in the Angolan civil war of the early 1990s, which followed the collapse of Portuguese rule, put alleged witches to death as an aspect of their attempts to enhance their popularity and claims to legitimacy; one tended to burn them alive and the other to kill them after making them dig their own graves. Refugees expressed outrage at the abuse of the activity, by targeting political opponents (and their children) as witches, but not at their execution.175 In those parts of the world in which native people were ruled for a time by European powers, a feature of the persecution of alleged witches was the manner in which selected features of Christianity were borrowed from the colonial rulers and integrated with traditional concepts of the witch. This was a natural enough process in Latin America, where for more than two centuries the ruling Europeans themselves feared witchcraft and outlawed all kinds of magic. Two parallel systems of witch-hunting thereby met and blended, with the early modern European stereotype of witchcraft as a form of Devil-worship infiltrating indigenous ideas and taking up permanent residence among them.176

  The process continued in Africa in the twentieth century under a very different colonial system, in which the official attitude to witchcraft was one of disbelief. Here the Bible, in early modern translations which affirmed a disapproval of witchcraft and ordered its suppression, often acted in its own right to confirm native beliefs: ironically, Christianity therefore had the effect of reducing the credibility of ancestor spirits and land spirits, against which the missionaries preached, and so of producing a tendency to blame witches alone for uncanny misfortunes. The easy relationship that could be made among traditional peoples between Christianity and witch-hunting is replete with examples. When the Malagasy queen Ranavalona created an intolerant religion to bond together her nation in the 1830s, which persecuted alleged witches and Christians alike, she did so using early modern European Christian models.177 A generation earlier, Handsome Lake’s hybrid religion, which he introduced to his branch of the Seneca of upstate New York, added Christian angels and devils to native spirituality, reinforcing an existing fear of witchcraft.178 In the 1920s native members of the Jehovah’s Witness movement in Central Africa got the idea that baptism by total immersion in water could detect witches. One of the proponents of it, who came to call himself the ‘Son of God’, was executed by the British after he had been found responsible for the killings of over a score of people in their territory in what was then Northern Rhodesia, and for the indictment of almost two hundred more in the Belgian Congo.179 He was followed in the next decade by a man who had been schooled by Seventh-Day Adventists and decided to found his own church in Northern Rhodesia, which included the exposure of witches in its remit.180 The Bamucapi witch-hunters, who spread across Central Africa from Lake Nyasa to the Congo basin in the 1930s, wore European clothes and preached ‘the word of God’ like white missionaries.181 Also between the world wars, a woman founded the Déima movement on the Ivory Coast after contact with Protestant Christianity had convinced her that she was an expression of the will and word of the Christian deity: she claimed to detect witches on sight. In the 1950s it was the missionary activities of the Salvation Army that triggered the Munkukusa or Mukunguna movement in the Congo basin, in which the Bible and cross were prominent symbols. Later in the decade a Protestant United mission in Northern Rhodesia baptized and instructed a woman who claimed a divine commission to preach against witchcraft. She set up her own church organization, which came to include 85 per cent of the population in her home district.182 The establishment of Zionist churches in the Northern Province of South Africa enhanced fear of witches in that area, while among the Zulu some leaders of the same denomination became notable witch-hunters. Such churches also produced a hunt in Zambia during 1988–9, led by a prophet called Moses.183 When some of the Tangu of New Guinea were converted to Christianity, they immediately identified witches with the Devil, and exactly the same thing happened among the Ewe of Ghana.184 A notable witch-hunter in Malawi in the years around 1960 had learned his ideas in a Presbyterian church, while in Zambia by the 1960s prophets from Pentecostal churches were very prominent among the magicians who detected the sources of evil magic.185 The leader of the Catholic Action movement in the Zambian capital of Lusaka in the 1970s was a woman who claimed to possess servitor spirits and to have the power to detect witches by reacting physically to their presence.186 When many of the Lele converted to Roman Catholicism in the late twentieth century, they promptly declared the native religion to be that of Satan and its priests witches. The young in particular proved amenable to conversion, as an opportunity to turn upon their elders, and some of the new Catholic priests among them became avid witch-hunters, employing torture to gain confessions.187 By the opening of the twentieth century hundreds of community churches in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa were committed to a struggle against witchcraft, as a satanic force.188 In 2005 it was estimated that Africa now had hundreds of thousands of ‘prophets’ attached to native denominations of Christianity who claimed the inspiration of the Holy Ghost and other spirits to detect the hidden causes of misfortune, especially witchcraft.189 The movements to eradicate witchcraft under colonial rule were generally bloodless, because the use of serious violence would have encouraged a hostile response from the European administrators who officially disbelieved in the threat from witches. This is what happened to the Atinga cult in Ghana and Nigeria in the 1940s and 1950s, which tortured and sometimes killed suspects who refused to confess.190 The ending of foreign rule, however, opened the way for the return of widespread physical attacks on suspects, often leading to death. When Belgian rule collapsed in the Congo during the 1960s, the Lele immediately reintroduced their traditional poison ordeal, and hundreds died.191 In northern Uganda, the end of British rule was followed by a resumption of witch-hunting by chiefs, with considerable popular support. Suspects were tortured by being made to sit or walk naked on barbed wire, exposed to termite bites, beaten, made to drink their own urine, or having pepper put into their eyes.192

  In the Northern Province (now the Limpopo Province) of South Africa, witchcraft seems to have been relatively little feared in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, and accusations ran at a proportionately low rate: the highest level was recorded among the Lobedu, of
fifty in the course of the 1930s, punished by exile. The social, political and economic instability that accompanied the breakdown of the system of apartheid, however, led to an escalation of tensions among neighbours, which resulted in 389 known witch-related killings in the province between 1985 and 1989 alone.193 In the 1990s recorded cases of such murders there totalled 587, but this was judged to be a serious underestimate due to a fear of reporting such incidents to the authorities: it was known that forty-three people had been burned alive in one action in just the Lebowa district.194 At Soweto, witchcraft-related murders were rarer, but still took place at times in the 1990s, the victims being burned to death by a mob of young people who termed the process ‘democratic’.195

  Both Malawi and Cameroon have reintroduced laws that allow the trial and conviction of people for alleged witchcraft. In Cameroon service magicians are accepted as expert witnesses by judges, and their testimony valued above the protestations of innocence by the accused. The latter are commonly treated as having no human rights and are sometimes beaten to death by police attempting to extract confessions. Concrete proof or a confession is not required for conviction and the prison sentences imposed are heavy – up to ten years – but at least those found guilty are not put to death. Tanzania has refused to permit a revival of the legal prosecution of witches, and the result has been an epidemic of lethal vigilantism. At least 3,333 murders of suspected witches were recorded on the mainland of the country between 1970 and 1984, two-thirds among one people, the Sukuma.196 By 1991 a ghetto had been created in the old capital of the Mamprusi of Ghana, in which 140 women had been permanently confined on suspicion of witchcraft, to live in poverty: the space operated both as a prison and as a sanctuary in which they were safe from their accusers.197 In 2007 the president of Gambia, Yahya Jammeh, sent a division of his personal bodyguard to join local police in rounding up over 1,300 suspected witches from one district of his country. They were taken to detention centres and dosed with a potion expected to remove their powers, which made many ill. Three years later a major hunt swept southern Nigeria, directed at children and driven by ministers from native Christian churches who offered to exorcize the accused and render them harmless. The young victims were often detained and tortured to induce them to confess, and then abandoned by their families after exorcism; and all this occurred despite the existence of a new national law forbidding accusations against children. By 2012 the panic regarding child witches had spread to Congo, and twenty thousand children were said to be living on the streets of the capital, Kinshasa, because they had been expelled from their homes.198 By 2005 at least half a million people had emerged as self-proclaimed experts in dealing with the problems of bewitchment in South Africa alone. If Christianity had easily been assimilated into traditional beliefs regarding witches, and served to reinforce them, then so has modern technology. Indeed, as the anthropologist Adam Ashforth has emphasized, science has become the ‘primary frame of reference’ for interpreting witchcraft in some South African townships, as quantum physics, cell phones, digital imaging, cloning and artificial life are all more compatible with a magical view of the universe than that of the preceding machine age.199