In parts of Africa, witches are to blame
Some believe, some don't, but all have heard stories of fearful demons
July 26, 1999
BY NEELY TUCKER
FREE PRESS FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
DZIVARASEKWA, Zimbabwe -- When Anna Banda awoke to find a naked man in her house babbling about eating human flesh early one recent morning, she feared the intruder was a blood-guzzling witch who had come to kill.
So Banda, 28, a prophet in the Apostolic Faith Ministries, doused the man with holy water and sent up a scream so piercing that the police and neighbors came running in this densely populated township 12 miles from downtown Harare, the capital.
"The witch drank blood; he flew here in a ruserwa, a flying saucer, and said he had come to eat the flesh of Tichaona, my nephew," said Banda. "He lived nearly 100 miles away, and yet he knew my nephew's name. He knew what room he slept in. It was terrifying."
Police carted the suspect away -- they say he's no cannibal, just a mentally unstable old man -- but to the faithful, Banda's supernatural drama was another episode in Zimbabwe's season of the witch.
Reports of demons and their gremlin-like henchmen, ankle-high creatures known as tokoloshis, are making an end-of-the-century comeback in a nation wrought by two years of economic catastrophe and the world's highest AIDS rate. It doesn't matter that empirical evidence is lacking -- no one has ever seen a tokoloshi -- it is an article of faith in Zimbabwean society that the invisible monsters are at work.
The head of the National Traditional Healers Association says the black-market demand for human body parts, which are used in making evil potions, has been soaring since the country's economic decline started in 1997.
Thomas Mapfuomo, the nation's most famous musician, has accused a man of using witchcraft to kill one of his relatives.
Paddington Japa Japa, director of the Indigenous Economic Empowerment Association, says tales of evil magic are "growing by the day" in his 10,000-member organization.
Incidents spreading
"Witchcraft and tokoloshis are making a comeback," said Gordon Chavanduka, chairman of the 50,000-member Zimbabwe National Traditional Healers Association. "It's obvious the cause is economic. The worse the economy gets, the more political tension there is in society, the more frustrated and frightened people get. They turn to witchcraft to gain riches or to hurt their enemies."
The Zimbabwean phenomenon appears to be part of a grisly regional pattern.
Police in South Africa report that at least six Johannesburg-area children have been decapitated this year, apparently as witch doctors seek eyes, tongues and other parts for use in elixirs. In Uganda, newspaper editor Charles Onyango-Obbo says that such ritual killers are "running riot" in the country's lawless southwest. In Zambia, people are terrified of Wilson Mugwegweni, a self-described witch doctor who sports white linen jackets and black cowboy hats.
With sub-Saharan societies beset by problems such as inflation, high interest rates and the scourge of AIDS, analysts say the trend shows some people are turning to ancient, evil solutions for their modern problems.
"You get ahead in business by good marketing and financial planning," said Japa Japa. "But a lot of people think that's not enough. They want tokoloshis to give them a magical advantage over the competition."
Nobody knows how widespread the practice is, because witchcraft is an issue politicians and police avoid in public discussions. Zimbabwe's Witchcraft Suppression Act, a holdover from the colonial era, makes it illegal to call anyone a witch, meaning nearly all cases go unreported.
"Witchcraft is not an area that lends itself to police scrutiny," said Wayne Budzejina, spokesman for Zimbabwe's national police. "How do you verify an evil spell? This is a matter of spiritual faith, not a matter of empirical evidence."
Seeking explanations
South Africa is the only sub-Saharan country to stage a legislative inquiry into the subject. The 1995 "Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Witchcraft Violence and Ritual Murders in the Northern Province" reads like a combination of the movie "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and the Salem witch trials of 17th-Century Massachusetts.
The 285-page study mixes photos of dismembered bodies with reports of suspected witches being beaten to death by mobs. Legislators counted 204 witchcraft-related killings in the country's northern provinces during the preceding decade. Police counted 312 for the same period. They agreed both numbers were gross underestimates.
In one incident, a bolt of lightning hit the village of Tshitale. Neighbors used garden hoes to beat an elderly woman, Nyamavholisa Maduwa, to death for causing the storm. As she died, Maduwa asked, "My children, my children, why are you killing me?"
Religion scholars and anthropologists say as many as 75 percent of sub-Saharan people believe in the power of witchcraft to some degree, although they acknowledge precise numbers are unavailable.
"In every African community, there are endless stories and conversations about the use of magic, sorcery and witchcraft," wrote the Rev. John Mbiti, an Anglican priest in Kenya, in "Introduction to African Religion."
"The belief in witchcraft is endemic to all African societies, although this is greatly misunderstood by Americans and Europeans," said David Simmons, a PhD candidate in anthropology at Michigan State University. He has just completed six years of research in African spirituality, traveling from Nigeria to Zimbabwe. "It's seen as a weird bunch of superstitions, rather than as the sordid part of a complex spiritual system that has sustained a continent of people for centuries."
Societies worldwide have faith in invisible, holy beings that affect human life on Earth. Monotheistic religions such as Christianity, Islam and Judaism have their own ways in which religious powers are made manifest. A Catholic priest prays over water to make it holy; a Pentecostal preacher lays his hands on an ailing person to heal an affliction. There is no scientific evidence of either power; it is an article of faith.
Spirituality in sub-Saharan Africa is dominated by belief in an overall power, although "God" is known by hundreds of names in the region's 48 nations. Below God and above man is a pantheon of lesser gods and a teeming world of ancestral spirits. The latter are family members who have died but who see the physical world, take part in it and can be consulted by spirit mediums or traditional healers. For centuries, these healers have held powers other societies associate with priests, medical doctors, herbalists, faith healers and psychics.
The spirit world they consult has its dark side, much as Christianity has the dualism of God and Satan. African societies, however, remain much more likely to see the hand of the devil at work in daily life, as almost all Christians once did.
Episodes recounted
K.K. Manyika, director of security for the Zimbabwean parliament, recounts a harrowing series of car crashes, lightning strikes and personal assaults he says were caused by demonic tokoloshis.
"I was assaulted by invisible tokoloshis as I walked along a road," he said. "They were beating me about the head, shouting things like, 'You! You! You are an unfair boss! You want too much money!' They were trying to knock me into the road so I would be run over by a car. They had been sent by an employee who knew I was about to fire him."
Winnie Mudanda, a beautician in a fashionable Harare salon, tells how her sister was recently possessed by a tokoloshi during a church service.
Six female schoolteachers in Guruve resigned this month after accusing a male colleague of using a tokoloshi to cast spells on them in their sleep. They say the spell allowed the man to have sex with them while they slept next to their snoring husbands.
To tap into this evil world, people pay a traditional healer to create a tokoloshi to carry out their plans.
"People come to me for riches or revenge," said Lucas Gogoyi, a 62-year-old traditional healer with a menacing reputation. "They say they want to take business away from a successful shop. Maybe somebody borrowed money from them and didn't pay it back. Or they think someone has been sleeping with their spouse. They come to me, and I send my boys to sort them out."
Gogoyi works in a narrow room in his house in a Harare slum. The rectangular corridor, lighted by a bare bulb dangling from the ceiling, is filled with bags spun from python skin, walking canes carved in the shape of writhing snakes and five rows of shelves jammed with baby-food jars, coffee cans and animal-hide pouches, all filled with herbs and red potions.
Gogoyi says he can make tokoloshis take the shape of a gremlin, a monkey or an invisible spirit. They can turn themselves into the most mundane of objects, such as a jar of peanut butter. They can cause thriving businesses to fail for no discernible reason, or cause death by AIDS, heart attack or any other reason. People who are caught using tokoloshis often go insane, which appears to be why so many people who claim to be witches are mentally disturbed.
It is said tokoloshis can be deadly to those who spawn them.
"Tokoloshis drink blood," said Boniface Mankone, former executive director of the Zimbabwe National Traditional Healers Association. "If you have one created, one of your relatives will die within a year. With AIDS claiming so many lives now, people often say this is the tokoloshi claiming their payment."
Although many highly educated Zimbabweans tend not to believe in such phenomena, they acknowledge the belief is part of their cultural background.
"I've never seen a tokoloshi, I've never had a tokoloshi attack me, but I've heard all the stories like everyone else," said Welshman Ncube, a constitutional law scholar. "I don't believe or disbelieve. It's difficult for outsiders to understand, but African daily life relies heavily on the spirit world, for good or evil."
hemp out of the market
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