During the time of goodwill towards all, bad news came during the Christmas holidays in 2021, saying that youths who returned for the holidays from distant cities, accused one of my cousins of being the witch who caused misfortune in their village. She was said to be the evil one who consumed the wealth of her husband who lived in Europe and who was said to have complained that it was his wife who used witchcraft to stop him from visiting home so that she would not be asked to account for the remittances he had been sending home to build a nonexistent house.
It was also alleged that she used witchcraft to kill their only son and that the same evil powers prevented her daughters from attracting suitors for marriage. One of the daughters allegedly claimed that she found an exercise book in the house where her mother wrote a list of all the people she had killed and the dates that they died. That may be the kind of lists that every family keeps to remind them of those who brought them gifts during ceremonies and who deserve gifts in return when they have ceremonies of their own. The young people were probably too biased against her and the list of names confirmed their bias.
They were said to have paraded her around town to shame her but she showed no shame, perhaps because she was in shock. They were said to have tried to shame her extended family by asking them to take her back but they allegedly said that she was no longer in the shape she was as a young woman when they came to marry her. They should have taken her to hospital to make sure that she was examined by experts. The person narrating this to me emphasised that she was from my extended family as if that made me guilty by association. After parading her around the town all day, ‘the next day she was dead’, said the narrator.
They may have killed the poor woman, fearing her as a witch. Lethal witch hunting happened before in the same town a few years ago when some youth returned from the cities, burnt a native priest to death and destroyed his shrine on allegations that he used his claimed powers to control thunder to kill someone from the village who lived in a distant city. But our people carry on under thunderstorms with the belief that lightning only kills those whose hands are unclean. The frequent occurrence of misfortunes leads to suspicions that someone is behind it. Fanon was right that Africans fear spirits more than they fear the police and the army of colonisers, at least you can bribe the police.
Contrary to popular beliefs, Nnamdi Azikiwe (Zik) advised the new Africa of his Renascent Africa to move away from belief in witchcraft and develop the scientific methodology in everything they were doing. For instance, the epidemics that kill lots of people are not caused by witches but by often preventable diseases. If witches kill people by poisoning the air, Zik reasoned, they too would breathe the same air and die for as the Igbo say, dibia la agwo otule, o dowelu ike ye la elu (the sorcerer who is concocting diarrhea, is he keeping his own buttocks in the sky)? Two years after Azikiwe published Renascent Africa in 1937, one of his future rivals, Obafemi Awolowo (Awo) published an academic journal article in 1939 arguing that Juju is an African scientific method that could kill enemies remotely by calling their names three times at crossroads.
Awo believed that juju can be used by a detainee to vanish from prison even while chained to the walls. Zik was sceptical and asked for the proof of juju to be demonstrated through the scientific methodology by asking those who claim that they could change from one animal to another or fly on a broomstick to do so under systematic observation. Zik went on to test his own social scientific method of intellectual-activism by training journalists from scratch and appointing them to run his chain of newspapers to successfully campaign for the restoration of independence.
Although his political party, National Council of Nigeria and Cameroons, allowed membership of Traditional Medicine Practitioners Association to join as a group member, the party did not use witchcraft beliefs to organise (unlike Awolowo’s Action Group that relied on the Ogboni Cult) at a time that people believed that Zik was what Phillip Emeagwali later reported as ‘the Spirit-Man’ to make him bold enough to lead the fight against colonialism. Zik’s son, Chukwuma, said that his father had no magical powers.
Reports of witch hunting are on the rise across Africa at a time of social, security, economic and political crises facing Africans. If we do not end witch hunting in Africa, the disaster that faced medieval Europe may be looming in Africa. During the witch craze, Europeans murdered an estimated nine million people, mostly women, according to Stephen Pfohl. According to Mary Daly, alleged witches were killed by people who claimed to be Christians and they were killed supposedly ‘in the name of the Father and of the Son’.
Today, the Europeans have come out of their dark ages, thanks to millions of Africans that they kidnapped and enslaved without pay for four hundred years. Nothing to do with religion or Obeah, wrote Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery (just republished); despite the fact that his high school teacher, CLR James, wrote in the Black Jacobins that the enslaved used Voodoo as the medium to organise their revolution against slavery in Haiti.
Similarly, the National Church of Nigeria and Cameroons was used by the banned Zikist Movement to support the independence struggle by making Zik and others, living saints of Africa as opposed to European churches and their saints and the war heroes invoked ancestral spirits of Chimurenga in Zimbabwe while also chanting the Rastafarian songs of resistance. Olusegun Obasanjo wanted to use juju to fight against apartheid, and the Boers must have been shaking and quaking in their boots.
Marx Weber theorised that it was the Protestant Ethic of hard work that produced the Spirit of Capitalism in England and in the US compared to China, India or Africa; supposedly proving Marx wrong that religion is the opium of the people. WEB Du Bois (the only American sociologist that Weber invited to contribute to his academic journal) in Black Reconstruction in America proved Marx right and Martin Luther King Jr. agreed that it was the forced labour of millions for hundreds of years that produced capitalism, not protestantism which people of African descent embrace in their millions but still remain underdeveloped.
Now Europeans celebrate Halloween Day every year by giving sweets to children who knock on their doors at night while dressed as witches. They even allow people who identify as witches to practise their own faith that they call Wicca. At the same time, Africans are killing ‘witches.’ What if a poor child tries to do Trick or Treats during Halloween in Africa?
When lightning strikes and kills someone from the village in a distant city, it is likely because people go about openly even during a thunder storm and not because of the priest in the village who claimed that he had the power to make rain and invoke thunder and deserved to be burned alive. It is not witchcraft that causes unemployment, poverty, and other misfortunes. When one branch of the extended family is doing relatively better while others are struggling, it is not because the head of that family used juju to tie the hands of the other branches of the extended family. Those who sacrificed to provide education or business startup for their children have seen more success among those children than those who failed to educate their children or train them in a trade and it has nothing to do with witchcraft.
African countries are at the bottom of the league tables of the Human Development Index reports of UNDP annually because Africans are denied educational opportunities by African rulers but not because of witches and wizards. Those who believe in spiritual warfare should say prayers but desist from attacking and killing fellow human beings with the bias that they are witches. Those who kill people for money ritual should desist from that and work smarter.
Difficult times promote witchcraft beliefs and desperate measures in all societies, according to a controversial academic conference on witchcraft at the University of Nigeria that was opposed by Christians. What distinguished the Igbo among their neighbours in the past was that while the Ibibio, for example, believed in appeasing or eliminating the suspected witch, according to my professor, Daniel Offiong who however failed to compare them with their Igbo neighbours who did not have significant beliefs in witchcraft; nor did he compare the Ibibio with their Tiv neighbours who believed that all their chiefs were witches, according to a brief review of Offiong’s book by G. I. Jones.
The current state of insecurity may be contributing to the rise of witchcraft allegations among the Igbo as some news reports indicate, though many more may go unreported, as I analysed in an article for the African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies. Let the youth be trained in scientific methods so that they can invent new technologies to improve life in Africa without blaming misfortunes on innocent people suspected of witchcraft to be lynched by misguided youths. Educate your children or sponsor them to learn a trade. No more witch hunting.
Africans must show more love for fellow Africans as the Igbo symbolised with Mbari sculptures where the living and even spirits cohabitate under one roof, according to Chinua Achebe. Stop trying to demonise fellow Africans to justify attacks against them. The fact that intoxicated drivers of vehicles that are not road-worthy but manage to ply on roads that are nor vehicle-worthy and cause many fatalities is not the fault of a poor woman in the village who should not be killed by people who claim to be Christians. If you see mobs attacking anyone as an alleged witch, oppose the attack and advocate for the person being targeted. You can also report it to the organisation that is trying to end such violent crimes in Africa: Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW). Google it.
•Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA.
