Rethinking

Witchcraft in Africa


The Witch Victimization Problem

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge

 Image on Preceeding Page

Charles Kehinde Alasholuyi on Facebook

31 March at 22:40

A 2-year-old Nigerian 'witch' boy who was found emaciated and riddled with
worms after his family left him for dead in Akwa Ibom state has made an
incredible recovery.
Many thanks to Anja Ringgren Lovn [shown in the picture feeding Hope ] who
adopted him.
"Incredible Recovery of the Nigerian Boy Saved by Anja Ringgren Loven"- Goals
Daddy.

Two months ago Hope was living on the streets of Nigeria, riddled with worms,
on the brink of starvation and cast out from his community accused of being a
witch.

Now, new pictures shared by Anja Ringgren Loven who adopted him reveal the
extraordinary transformation he has undergone in a matter of weeks.
She said she first saw the problems created by superstition in rural Nigeria when
she travelled there alone three years ago and met children who had been
tortured and beaten almost to death because they were accused of being witches
and therefore left alone on the street
Thousands of children are being accused of being witches and weve both seen
torture of children, dead children and frightened children, she wrote on
Facebook, accompanying images of her feeding the young boy and appealing for
donations to help pay for his medical bills in January. With all the money, we
can, besides giving Hope the very best treatment, now also build a doctor clinic
on the new land and save many more children out of torture! she said.Ms Loven
runs an childrens centre where the youngsters she saves live and receives
medical care, food and schooling. She and her husband, David Emmanuel Umem,
began building their own orphanage in late January.

Anja Ringgren Loven's personal Facebook account

DINNdhjlp - deres overlevelse Anja Ringgren Loven's non profit
organisation
Anja Ringgren Loven's official Facebok page

What should be done about the problem of children and old women, the primary
victims-I wonder why men are not singled out- being turned out of their homes
and communities on being accused of witchcraft?
Its a very serious problem for children in Nigeria and for women in another
African country, can't remember which now, where such women have been
compelled to found a community to live together without being molested.
Inadequacy and claims of being bewitched go together.
An environment that is significantly disempowering, in which such basics of
modern life as electricity and potable water are not assured, where state
workers can be owed salaries for months, where economic and social insecurity
may not be far off, as in Nigeria, is an environment likely to breed
supernaturalistic mentalities, styles of thinking that insist on the supernatural
as a primary means of explaining reality, particularly in relation to negative
experiences and misfortune.
Such environments are central to breeding the cult/culture of forms of
Christianity as evident in Nigeria where the belief in the supernatural fuels
strange developments, such as mega wealthy pastors in a world of great
inadequacy as well as the world of belief in spiritual evil as a primary source of
people's problems, witchcraft being at the centre of such evil, in these beliefs.
Should Africans have serious public discussion about witchcraft in an effort to
disentangle fact from fiction?
I am convinced that much of what passes as witchcraft in Africa is pure fiction
and superstition.
It is true though, that England dealt with its similar witchcraft problem which
was even more virulent in the West than it is now in Africa, a social
horror represented by the burning of many women as witches in the West, by
making it a crime to refer to anyone as a witch.
When this law was repealed many years later, under the inspiration of Gerald
Gardner witchcraft emerged as a serious spiritual, cognitive and artistic
discipline in England and spread to other parts of the West, particularly the US.
Today, its a thriving core of the new Pagan culture with its ecosystem of books,
groups, history, prominent figures, historical controversies, rich body of
concepts, workshops, conferences and a related rich academic literature.
Belief in ideas similar to the various ways the witchcraft concept has been
understood over the centuries in the West has long been part of African systems
of thought, but there is an urgent need for better public perception of views on
witchcraft, a need for more prominent public analysis of these ideas, ideas
from the general public, scholars and from people who claim to be witches, such
the Witches and Wizards Association of Nigeria, or the bold Osemwegie Ebohon

of Benin-City who has publicly declared himself a witch.

Ebohon has mounted spirited public efforts over the years, built a cultural
centre, engaged in media appearances defending witchcraft, , some of which I
have witnessed, has made himself accessible for interviews, one of which I
conducted and can recall clearly although I was not mature enough then to know
how maximize the opportunity of access to this clearly very informed man
and has written books, such as Ebohon and his Centre : A Life, Paganism :
Not My Religion, Cultural Heritage of Benin, Life and Works of a High Priest of
African Religion: A Guide to the Ebohon Centre Museum and Hospital Complex,
With Interviews by Osamwnyi Osagid and Efe Jereton Mariere, and others as
indicated by the School of Oriental and African Studies library listing under his
name, books which are visible online and which I am only just learning about.

Such efforts as those by Ebohon contribute to the urgent need to publicize
readily accessible coherent statements by self described witches on what may be
understand as witchcraft, its significance,pros and cons, how people may become
witches or stop being witches, in a manner that members of the public can freely
access and examine.The Facebook page of the Witches and Wizards Association
of Nigeria, which I discovered on reading this essay, has some valuable
information on child victimization and on ethics in seeking initiation into
witchcraft, but its sadly little more than another platform for political
expressions, a central preoccupations of Nigerians in cyberspace. A comparison
between the page and those of the Egbe Aje Iyami Aje Temple of America,
described below, makes clear what is required to demonstrate a serious public
presentation of a spiritual discipline.

The only other effort known to me, apart from that of Ebohon, but much more
specific in relation to witchcraft as a textually presented idea, to develop African
witchcraft concepts in a manner that the public can access, in terms of ideas and
practices clearly spelt out and publicly propagated by a person or group of
people sharing a lifestyle they describe as embodying those beliefs, is the Egbe
Aje Iyami Aje Temple of America, an organization deriving inspiration from
Yoruba concepts of female centred spiritual power, Awon Iyami which may be
translated as "Our Mothers Arcane " and their description as aje, which bears a
similarity to aspects of the witchcraft concept in the West and which I learnt
about through the active promoting of this group in the work of Mercedes
Morgana Bonilla, also identified in terms of her initiatic name, Iyanifa
Fakinsuyil'Aje Afirimaako Iku Ladde, on Facebook, where one may also see the
Egbe Aje Iyami Temple Worldwide and Egbe Aje Iyami Temple de America
Facebook pages of the group.


Mercedes proudly posts on the social media site pictures of her husband, son
and other family members living a fulfilling ling life as normal human beings,
along with her vast collection of witchcraft materials and images and icons on
female spirituality from various parts of the world, thereby indicating witchcraft

in the African or African inspired context does not have to be seen in terms of the
life destroying demons of African lore.
Recent literature on ideas similar to witchcraft in Africa include the books of
Teresa Washington, Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations of j in
Africana Literature and The Architects of Existence: Aje in Yoruba Cosmology,
Ontology, and Orature, building on the Yoruba Iyami conceptions, while older
works from the same body of ideas include Hallen and Sodipo's Knowledge, Belief
and Witchcraft: Analytic Experiments in African Philosophy and Oyerunke
Olajubu's Women in the Yoruba Religious Sphere also addresses the subject, while
works outside the scholarly domain but focused more on the perspective of a
practitioner of Yoruba spirituality include rb Ifym le bubn 's The
Invisible Powers of the Metaphysical World: A Peep Into the World of Witches.
To the best of my knowledge, the impact of Washington's books is primarily in
the West, as in its being used as a storehouse of ideas by the Iyami Aje Temple of
America, as shown by its Facebook page and that of Mercedes, even as the
influence of the other scholarly productions seems centred on scholars in the
field, while I understand Elebuibon as elaborating on the generally held
orientation on the idea in Yorubaland.
Scholarship on witchcraft in the West, however, was central to inspiring its 20th
century public discussion and its flowering as a new religious community shaped
by and identified with a flood of literature and artistic forms produced by its
practitioners and about them, in the context of formations of various groups
practicing different kinds of witchcraft based on the founders of their central
ideas, Gardnerian or Alexandrian witchcraft, for example, as well as the
development of solitary, individualistic witchcraft, hedge witchery or
hedgecraft, which relates chiefly to herbalism and movement between human
and spirit worlds, and kitchen witchcraft, "a form of witchcraft practiced
concurrently with tasks centered on the kitchen, such as cooking and baking, and
making use of readily available items".
All these varieties can be traced, even if not in a direct line, to centuries of
growth of beliefs and practices in Europe, which have fed some of its more
vigorous literary traditions, beliefs and practices now formalized,
institutionalized in some cases, and publicly presented in a manner that opens it
to public examination even as the practitioners are at liberty to maintain a
degree of exclusivity as they may see as relevant to a system that requires a
degree of privacy.

We need a similar expansion of the space of discourse, of belief and of
engagement with the idea of witchcraft in Africa.


Conceptions of witchcraft, whether in the West or their equivalents in Africa and
other parts of the world, may be seen as fundamental to humanity-they are not
going anywhere regardless of the levels of scientific, technological and social
development of a civilization.

The best that can be done is to sanitize and streamline these concepts and
beliefs.
An aspect of witchcraft lore, since that is largely what t it is in Nigeria, to which I
have some exposure, at least in Yorubaland which I have read about, relates to
ideas of feminine creative and destructive power emerging from procreative
capacity, a body of ideas of profound significance and one which has also central
to

Western
Paganism
and
witchcraft.
Could such concepts not be examined for their value, contributing to removing
witchcraft in Africa from the domain of superstition to that of definite
knowledge, eventually doing away with the culture of victimizing people,
particularly the weaker members of society such as children and old women, in
the name of something which the communities in question cannot defend in a
rational manner?
I make my own contribution to this effort through the imaginative creations and
expositions posted on the Facebook group I founded under the inspiration of the
work
of
Mercedes
Morgana
Bonilla,
Rethinking Iyami : An Autonomous Yoruba/Orisa Female Centred Spirituality,
describing it as autonomous spirituality because it is not circumscribed by
although it has links to other aspects of Yoruba Orisa spirituality and may be
understood as a distillation of perceptions of relationships between female
biology and its spiritual significance, ideas resonate across and unify various
aspects of Yoruba culture and Orisa spirituality but receive their most potent
integration in Iyami spirituality.