News

Ghana: Safety in Squalor – Ghana’s Camps for Alleged Witches

Belief in witchcraft is widespread in Ghana. A 2009 Gallup poll found that 77 percent of Ghanaians believe witches exist. For the women who are exiled, it means life in one of six camps for alleged witches, commonly called “witch camps.”

Thus, these camps seem to save the lives of alleged witches, but conditions are squalid. The inadequate food, clothing, shelter, and healthcare constitute numerous human rights violations. Many residents come from families that have no means of support for these women other than to send daughters and granddaughters to live with them. These “helpers,” therefore, are also exiled from their communities and damned to live in these inhumane conditions.

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South Afrcia: I took muti, says raped man

A North Coast man who was allegedly gang-raped at gunpoint by three women says he was able to cope because of muti he had taken days earlier.

Mocked by some listeners when he was interviewed on radio this week, he has been praised by a gender activist for his bravery in discussing his ordeal.

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France: Social suffering and anxiety: deciphering coughs and colds at Akan anti-witchcraft shrines in Paris

In treating illness and suffering, the Akan anti-witchcraft shrine is often presented as a model of unchanging, tightly bounded and antiquated ideals. This fails to acknowledge the extensive repertoire of Ghanaian witchcraft discourses and contemporary divinatory practices uncovered at Akan anti-witchcraft shrines. This paper analyses how one of the most popular Akan anti-witchcraft shrine in Europe, in an eastern banlieue of Paris, diagnoses the seemingly common and innocuous coughs and colds suffered by recently arrived, unskilled female Ghanaian migrants as something more socially and economically malignant, witchcraft. 

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Botswana: Muti murder chaos rock Tonota

Kenya: Woman, daughters raped and killed

Residents of Wekelekha village in Bungoma County are still reeling in shock after a woman and her three daughters were raped before being murdered in a bizarre incident. According to witnesses’ accounts, villagers woke up to an eerie silence and discovered a trail of blood leading to the woman’s house.

Upon checking, they found the four bodies. And in what pointed to a ritual killing, all the four bodies bore strange marks near their throats, a pointer that the victims’ lives might have been taken systematically and with a purpose.

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Namibia: People’s private parts removed for witchcraft rituals

Members of the community in Onayena settlement held a meeting with the Councillor for Onayena Constituency, Marx Nekongo this week and demanded that action be taken against the suspected culprits.

They alleged that weak people, such as drunkards and the mentally unstable, are often targeted by people who are practising witchcraft or known locally as ‘omindaba’.

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Thailand: They Burn Witches in Bangkok

Major general Rientong Nan-nah, self-appointed Witch-Finder-General and the director of Mongkutwattana General Hospital, has announced that he setting up the “Rubbish collection organisation” to root out all those who dare to criticise the monarchy. 

The Witch-Finder-General encourages the yellow shirts to bully the red shirts by offering rewards for any “witches” who are exposed. To get the rewards, the yellow shirts have to collect evidence such as messages posted on Facebook. Then they need to find out where the “witches” live and work and then they will circulate information among their network. They will report people to the police. Their behaviour is fascist witch-hunting, pure and simple.

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Nigeria: Saving Witch Children In Nigeria

In Nigeria beautiful, innocent children, as young as two years of age, are tortured, abandoned and killed by their own parents, family and community members. In a land stricken by poverty and illiteracy self-styled deliverance pastors and prophets have over the years branded thousands of children as witches.

Leonardo Rocha Dos Santos, cofounder and director of the Brazilian organization Way to the Nations, leads an orphanage in Nigeria that provides a safe place for the rescued children. In this interview he graphically illustrates the disturbing darkness that blankets the country of Nigeria.

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South Africa: Murder, Rape of Girl (14) Raise Muti Suspicions

The body of a teenage girl, believed to have been killed for muti purposes, were discovered in a bush near Happy Valley in Blackheath earlier this week.

Family members of the 14-year-old Nomsa Mosotho, a grade 10 learner at the Blackheath High School, told TygerBurger that the girl’s tongue were cut out, her limbs broken and her private parts also severely wounded.

One family member said that the crime was more than a “normal rape”. According to them the teenager also had a serious head injury.

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Tanzania: Witchcraft blamed for deteriorating Central Zone education standards

Witchcraft beliefs and some outdated traditional values and norms have been blamed for the deteriorating primary and secondary education standards in the Central  Zone.

The reasons were given out during a meeting to evaluate challenges facing the education sector that have contributed towards poor performance in the area.

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