Why Belief in Witchcraft Remains Strong Among Africans - Henry Makori

During his recent visit to Africa, Pope Benedict XVI spoke in Angola about many Africans “living in fear of spirits, of malign and threatening powers. In their bewilderment they end up even condemning street children and the elderly as alleged sorcerers. Who can go to them to proclaim that Christ has triumphed over death and all those occult powers?”

The pope was expressing his concern about the persistence of the belief in witchcraft among Africans. This belief is certainly widespread throughout the continent. In Kenya, hardly a day passes without news reports of this phenomenon, especially the harassment of suspected witches.

Since mid-2007, children have been kidnapped and murdered in Uganda in what are believed to be bizarre rituals to attain wealth. In Tanzania, the killing of albinos whose body parts are reportedly used to make charms has caused global consternation.

And last month, Amnesty International found out that up to 1,000 suspected witches in The Gambia had been kidnapped from their villages by witchdoctors employed by the government in a nationwide witch-hunting campaign.

Perhaps more astonishing for Christians was the revelation in 2006 by the bishops of southern Africa that "some Catholic priests act as Sangomas and call on the ancestors for healing." A Sangoma is a traditional diviner-healer whose many functions include counteracting witches.

But even when witchcraft is not making the headlines, it is still a daily issue in Africa. The southern African bishops noted that “many African Christians, during difficult moments in their lives, resort to practices of the traditional religion: the intervention of ancestral spirits, the engagement of spirit-mediums, spirit-possession, consulting diviners about lost items and about the future, magical practices and identifying (‘smelling out’) one’s enemies, etc.”

Last year, Cardinal Polycarp Pengo of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and president of the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM) decried “the phenomenon common in many African societies of Christianity on Sunday morning and the practice of witchcraft and sorcery during the rest of the week.”

Why does belief in witchcraft persist? The attitude of mainstream Christianity is that witchcraft is a vestige of African ‘backwardness’, the evidence of incomplete conversion or relapse to ‘paganism’. More pastoral attention would stamp out the menace.

Witchcraft is also dismissed as ignorant superstition or fear of the unknown. The practitioners and their victims believe in powers that simply do not exist. Sometimes belief in the dark arts is attributed to mass poverty and state failure to ‘modernize’ the outlook especially of people living in the rural areas. It is argued that if people were better educated and had access to adequate healthcare they would understand that illness is caused by germs and not witchcraft.

But these explanations miss the biggest point. They fail to place witchcraft within the persistent African worldview. Belief in witchcraft is part and parcel of the moral universe as understood in African Traditional Religion. Contrary to popular belief, African Religion is still alive and well.

In African religious thought, the universe created by God ought to be harmonious, balanced and good. But mysterious evil powers exist that disrupt this order. Evil originates not merely from the breaking of taboos and other laws, but from spiritual, mystical powers at work in the universe.

The eminent Tanzanian theologian Fr. Laurent Magesa explains that witchcraft is supernatural. The witch is a person possessing or possessed of, or by, supernatural forces which he or she uses knowingly or unknowingly, selectively or indiscriminately, to harm others often for no apparent reason. Magesa writes that “evil, in the African perception, is always incarnated; it does not exist except as it exists in the evil person, that is, in the witch.”

So, how can belief in witchcraft be eradicated? This is hardly possible. According to Fr. Magesa, “in African Religion, witchcraft must be understood as part of the mystery of the human person”. Witchcraft is therefore central to the understanding of morality and ethics among Africans.

“In the African mentality, everything wrong or bad in society and in the world, and most particularly various afflictions, originates in witchcraft. There is no kind of illness or hardship at all that may not ultimately be attributed to witchcraft”.

Belief in witchcraft shall therefore persist as long as African Traditional Religion exerts influence on Africans. As it is, most African Christians subscribe to two faith traditions. Perhaps the church should not dismiss witchcraft as superstitious nonsense but instead develop appropriate pastoral responses that take into account the African worldview.