These two phases of witch-finding focussed on witches and wizards (ajwok/lajok) rather than witch-doctors, although the cojnlonial witchcraft Ordinance was focussed against witch accusations, especially by witch-doctors. The led to a local frustration with colonial law for preventing the pre-colonial extreme, but rare, punishment of witches. The 1966-7 episode does appear to have more in common with the reported phenomenon of 2010, which make the title ‘Modern’ pertinent, in that there were fears of rich men being able to purchase the most effective ‘medicines’ from beyond Lango (pp36,42). this gives further evidence that were witch-finding to be given some enorsement would result in brutality being meted out on a non-forensic basis.

Returning to Paulino, it is no surprise that his testimony appears more suspect on scrutiny. The history of witch-finding suggests some explanations. In his aiming at witch-doctors (if Whewell’s report is accurate), he avoids the old proscription against witch-accusations, but he does pick up on local people’s fear of witchcraft, while addressing those suspected of being the cause of children going missing. Also he could have bounced the second witch-doctor into confession on the grounds, given the 1966-7 precedent, that it would avoid physical cruelty. On the other hand, we still need to hear from the BBC, whether they promised or paid any money (and how much) to the Lango appearing in their shots or to the NGO which was their entree. Did it pay the actors involved?

http://www.newvision.co.ug/D/8/12/711009/bbc

You can find more on the discussion I had in one of the villages, part of which Tim kindly copied above, at http://www.hollyandben.blogspot.com, a post entitled ‘No smoke without fire?’

Priest to be charged over BBC report
New Vision
Publication date: Monday, 15th February, 2010
By Jeff Lule

THE Police is to charge a Catholic evangelist in northern Uganda, Angelo Pollino, with giving false information to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) last month.

The head the of Police Anti Human Sacrifice and Trafficking Task Force, Moses Binoga, told The New Vision yesterday that Pollino had confessed that he gave false information to cater for his financial interests. “We have interrogated Pollino and he said the information he gave was baseless,” Binoga said.

In a documentary by a journalist, Tim Whewell, on the BBC on January 7, Pollino, 60, said he had sacrificed 70 people, including his son, during the 1980s and 90s while he was working as a traditional healer.

The documentary also showed a group of traditional healers killing their victims.
Binoga said since Pollino had confessed, he would be charged for giving false information.

“We have him under a 24- hour surveillance. More investigations are being carried out and a detailed report will come out,” he added.

Binoga said they were also investigating Whewel overthe origin of the story.

“Pollino alleged that he was paid by Whewell to dramatise the story,” he noted.

Pollino said Whewell paid him sh200,000 and others sh50,000 and promised him a donation for his organisation.

He stressed that investigations established that, Pollino heads the Fr. Russi Foundation, a local organisation whose members come from the families of traditional healers.

Binoga said they suspect the incident to have been spearheaded by some non- government organisations to create the impression that human sacrifice was deeply rooted and required more attention and funds.

This article can be found on-line at: http://www.newvision.co.ug/D/8/17/710148

Perhaps it could be argued that the Ugandan police would have good reason for wanting to dismiss Whewell’s claims, but it would be interesting to hear his reponse to the police investigation, or to know whether he has any evidence with which he could counter them.

Readers may also be interested in the following discussion. It has been sent to me by Holly Porter, one of my PhD students, who is currently researching in northern Uganda, and who used to live close to where Whewell’s film of witch-cleansing was shot. I asked her to try to show the BBC reports to local people.

Holly Porter’s report on her discussions follows below:

I’m in a village a few kilometres from Gulu town sitting in a grass-thatch hut with a group of about a dozen people, my laptop and a portable modem. We load the BBC website and navigate to Newsnight’s special on child ritual murder in Uganda that was aired several weeks ago. Five or ten seconds play at a time, broken by a rotating circle assuring us it’s ‘loading’. The Internet is slow here. In correspondence between the BBC and several anthropologists, the BBC pointed out that criticism has only been from British-based academics. People in Uganda must like the report since they haven’t complained. Looking around the room, this defence is perceptibly feeble. I hoped to remedy the paucity of Ugandan voice in the discussion by showing the piece today and sharing reactions. But after repeated broken promises from the twirling icon we finally give up and discuss a few issues raised by people far away on a report that none of us have seen.

Generalized use of the term ‘witchdoctor’ is unhelpful

There are diverse practices of people involved in the supernatural: people born with uncontrolled power to harm or help, herbalists, those involved in divination, séances, exorcisms, curses and charms. The group lists titles in English and Acholi: wizard, witch, night dancer, Ajwaka, Lajok among others. Categories I draw from their descriptions and that anthropologists have outlined (p’Bitek, Girling) are much more neat than the complex fluid social understandings. I asked how they would feel if the BBC referred to them all as ‘witchdoctor’? One woman responded, “If they misrepresent the situation, it doesn’t bother me since all of them are doing bad things.” Another person disagreed citing positive work of herbalists. Unfortunately, the Ajwaka who lives next door wasn’t around. Her main activity is to bang her shoes together, throw them on the ground and read your future by the way they fall. She would certainly be appalled at the idea that she belonged in a category accused of brutally murdering children.

Perpetuating fear poses danger to the accused

If there were any indication that Ugandans were watching this would be a significant worry. Northern Uganda is in transition, when such issues should be handled with extra care. Disordered times create space for the enactment of widespread fear in extraordinarily violent ways. In the late time of transition a predecessor to the Lord’s Resistance Army, Cilil, was infamous for torturing ‘witches’ forcing them to carry hot coals or burning them with melted plastic. One person in the room admitted she set a trap seriously injuring a night dancer. They all assured me, however, that the six known Ajwaka in their village were in no danger as long as they continued activities within the law. I would add, as long as there are no rumours to the contrary.

Such stories revive myopic prejudices

I asked how they felt about such stories in western media. A young man said he worried that people would think Ugandans are “backward.” Another woman wondered how BBC decides which stories to report. She paused thoughtfully, “Well, we’re tired of people always giving attention to the war. At least now they are reporting on something else.” Yes, it’s nice to see media breaking from perpetuating the image of Africa as a place of endemic political violence to focus on witchcraft for a change.

Medicine murders are rare, not new and not the result of modernization (as the BBC suggests)

The only thing new modernisation contributes to ritual murder is media’s effect on public perception. According to the group, ritual murder has “always been there” but tends to have clusters of popularity followed by lulls. Competition among powerful people resorting to similar dark methods is followed by negative attention that forces practitioners to withdraw until the popular imagination moves on. One person had witnessed evidence personally. She saw the body of a two-year-old boy that was used in ritual. I asked them, what they believe prompted this particular perceived cluster of child sacrifices. They suggested politics. Some politicians are rumoured to use witchcraft to secure power, or in campaigns to manipulate fear in their favour.

“We have a saying in our language,” a woman offers by way of conclusion. As she says it, you are reminded how universal some things are: “There is no smoke without fire.” I pushed the issue, recalling an instance a few months ago when a severed hand in the middle of a road sent people into superstitious panic until a one-handed woman was found in a hospital. She was driving with her arm out the window when a lorry carrying sharp cargo passed. Well, sometimes, they concede, there is smoke without fire. However, on the issue of child sacrifice, “there is fire. But it seems the BBC also reported on smoke.”

Summary of the meeting of the Africa Research Interest Group held at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies
2-4pm, 3 February 2010

Present: 22 graduates from Oxford, all but one with personal research interests in Africa, including ten Africans (two from West Africa, eight from East Africa including a Tesot from close to Lango, one Chinese, and one Japanese)

1. Terminology / Specificity

 The BBC advertising and highlighting of all its programmes was unquestionably sensationalist, foregrounding terms like ‘Child sacrifice’, ‘Battling the Witch-Doctors’ ‘horrified’, ‘human sacrifice’, ‘astonishingly frank confessions’, ‘murdering children, supposedly to satisfy evil spirits’. ‘In Africa withcraft has played a role in …’, and worst of all ‘mutilated bodies are often found in Africa, with their organs removed presumably for use in magic charms.’ It is this billing, up to which the programmes must play, and inevitably they fail to deliver the substance they claim to have investigated, when a child’s death is ‘blamed on the witchdoctor’.

 There is a terminological confusion between the witch and the witchdoctor, which the programme failed to address. The words witch and witchcraft share an epistemology, so should witchcraft be confined to the witch?

 The polarity between witchdoctor and witch is self-evident in local parlance and it is Christian discourse that confuses good and bad. The witchdoctor is normally known to have a healing practice and clientele. If he becomes known for intentionally killing people, he must be a witch. For the observer it has long been extremely difficult to identify a witch forensically in Africa. The witchdoctor is usually better known across Africa, and charlatans may be exposed by government or society.

 The sociological distinction between cult and occult, and religion and magic or witchcraft should not be forgotten. One is in public for the public good and the other in private at social cost, so was often regarded as anathema in traditional society without missionary assistance.

 St Paul’s approach to the Athenians was ignored, when Christian missionaries arrived in Africa, and lumped together the herbalist and the Satanist. The language of witchcraft was diabolized, meaning that much, if not all, of any traditional African religion was dismissed as such. The programme follows this antithetical discourse. Still the widespread perception of bad spirits should not be dismissed.

 One Kenyan respondent to the 2005 BBC debate ‘Is Witchcraft Alive in Africa?’ conflated rainmakers in Western Kenya with other types of witches

 Tim Whewell, the reporter, totally overlooked the distinction between the witch and the witchdoctor, to the extent that it was unclear as to what he was talking about. For example, when he visited the shrine, to what kind of spirits were the sacrifices being made? Ancestral spirits or which kind of spirits? The meanings of shrine and sacrifices were also loose in his usage.

 The language of witchcraft and evil is nuanced and diffuse. If academics and journalists are to discuss witchcraft they must be specific and understand the specific beliefs held by different tribes, (Pentecostal) churches, and regions. A century of revivalism has diabolized traditional African religions.

2. The BBC’s response

 Terence Ranger felt that the BBC’s responses (both the reporter and the editor) were similar to those academics such as ter Haar and Ellis had made to his article ‘Scotland Yard in the Bush’. They claim that the serious hurts felt by Africans deserve more than a frivolous academic response. In order to take these phenomena seriously it is precisely necessary to make critical distinctions, and not to lump them altogether as the BBC reports do in exemplary fashion!

 The BBC is mistaken in thinking that academics do not take matters of child sacrifice seriously. Terence Ranger, for example, has written supporting case notes for trials in Zimbabwe.

3. Modernity

 The definitions of modernity in the BBC programme were inadequate and misleading. Pictures of skyscrapers in Kampala and discussions of wealth were presented as if that made a difference to what people are experiencing in northern Uganda

 The notion of Uganda being more modern than it has been in the recent past is questionable.

 In Zambia police caught a woman on a bus with a child’s head in her handbag. Suspicions of witchcraft in new phenomena are occurring widely, as when someone obviously has hidden resources to build a distinguished house. For the same reason a flourishing shop may be burnt by the local populace, because the proprietor claims or presumes ‘to have something under my seat’, and such a phenomenon may have an older provenance in Africa. The witch is one who spurns the social responsibility to neighbour and accumulates selfishly, so in Zambia you have to pretend to your neighbour, that you are not socio-economically independent.

 That an increase in affluence is at the heart of this matter is a reflection of the Comaroffs’ argument. The modernization discourse was not reflected upon, when there is a counter-theory (especially in JDY Peel).

 The inequality divide is widening in Uganda (rich vs. poor), and people are under a lot of pressure from poverty, debt, and material needs. These pressures may be shedding new light for Ugandans on the words of the Bible – Satan may still be walking this world.

 There were accounts of child sacrifice in Ugandan newspapers last year. These were portrayed as isolated incidents, where the children were either orphans or unwanted

 There have also been reports in northern China in the recent past of children being snatched for building projects, and were ultimately sacrificed.

 Terence Ranger raised the issue of the shift in the perceived balance between adults and children in Africa. The Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda, for example, had recruited children and contributed to social destabilization. Certainly children can hardly be looked upon as innocent and harmless in Lango and Acholi, when they have been recruited for the LRA as child soldiers, or have been sexually or physically abused or psychologically damaged in other ways, especially by life in a government camp. Children can then be associated with danger, and their mysterious absences with witchcraft.

4. Myth / Reality

 Whether witchcraft happens or not, the effect can be destructive, whether through violence or fear

 In Kenya, there is a belief that child sacrifice is a recent phenomenon in East Africa. Beatrice Mbogoh contacted four Uganda friends who though that the suspicious deaths were not always ‘human sacrifice’, but a practice that has been learnt from sangomas in South Africa, and, to blame it on Europe, is founded on freemasonry

 As portrayed in the film, there are plenty of Ugandan Christians, especially revivalists, who believe that there are many involved in witchcraft, who are Satanists trying to create a blood bank for their Messiah (for Christian terms, the anti-Christ). It is difficult to establish the facts about the occult, when there is so much fear involved, but there is a spiritual aspect, not just a physical one, when it appears the anthropologists are saying it is all nonsense.

 Makonen Getu noted that the Church is closely linked to the portrayal of witchcraft. In one way, the Church is demolishing the powers of beliefs in witchcraft. At the same time, the Church is becoming that same force, by overplaying the role of exorcism and in that way placing people under perpetual fear as well as loss of responsibility: ‘It was not me, but Satan in me, who is more powerful’. The Roman Catholic church in Zimbabwe only uses exorcism in extraordinary cases, while the deliverance churches can make all church members wonder whether they might not be suffering from a spirit of something with their exorcisms performed at least once a week.

 Fanen Ade observed that Nigerian churches had grown so bi, because they were built partly on a discourse of devil-worship to attract people and to receive the proceeds of their fear. Exorcism is supposed to be a liberation, but it can become a bondage. Witch-spirits, unlike other spirits could not be placated, so the sufferer could not be healed. the Christians wanted to exorcize their hosts, while the guerrillas wanted to kill them, since they could not be liberated.

 For academics, there is a methodological difficulty in discussing something that is secretive and that people refuse to exhibit publicly. There are cases where witches have been arraigned in Nigeria. However, their confessions may have been obtained under torture. The occult and responses to it are therefore difficult and sensitive subjects of research.

 Two vivid examples were given from Nigeria of how those purporting to have practised or observed ritually killing were doing so for cynical, pecuniary purposes: ‘We have to make a living! I did not kill the soldier’s mother.’ Another was paid to say that a child, reputedly removed by witches, was missing. This was a warning that a confession cannot necessarily be taken at face value. Media reports of hild-witch accusations have increased greatly in Nigeria and Ethiopia, with their growing locus in Pentecostal churches. This might be linked to a situation of poverty and hardship, but could equally be the result of watching too many Nollywood videos, suspending disbelief in the child as witch, which could reflect children being seen as more vulnerable (and less valuable) now than women. Often only orphans and street-children would be considered as missing as a result of witchcraft.

 In Kibera slum in Nairobi the fear of witchcraft threatened by ritual specialists was shown to be more powerful than swearing on the Bible for the return of looted property in 2008.

 The lack of verification for the numbers and trends asserted in the clip was striking.

5. Ritual

 People kill in all societies. When does killing become witchcraft? The trade in body parts is known in the more globalized parts of Africa, so perceptions of a market demand may evoke a supply, which fits nicely with the old perception of Europeans or Asians being witches, enhanced by awareness of the medical demand for organs. Body parts then can become merely a scarce commodity, whose supply may involve killing without any ritual, although rituals may be performed later with the body parts.

 The BBC documentary was misleading in terms of ritual. According to the second witchdoctor shown, it was the consumers who had to bring body parts. If so, then these would not have been sacrificial killings per se.

 There were none of the obvious signs of conversion in the second witchdoctor, apart from a most reluctant confession that appeared to be pressed on him. If his words could be taken at face value, then it was his clients who were killing people to bring three human hearts a week. In other words there was no evidence that this witchdoctor was killing anybody, although it would make sense that if his clients were intent on having the strongest ‘medicine’, then the witchdoctor is likely to have instructed them what to bring.

 The hint that there was a direct link with the ‘traditional healers’ of Kampala needs exploring, for no-one could produce cases of witchdoctors using human body parts (as opposed to blood, or parts of a hyena’s corpse) in occult rituals in traditional societies in northern Uganda. This appeared to be a recent addition linked to inventions of urban ‘traditional healers’.

Action

Terence Ranger, Joost de Fonteyn, and Rijk van Dijk are to publish a belated response to ter Haar and Ellis’ rejoinder to ‘Scotland Yard in the Bush’.

Many thanks to Yolana Pringle for writing good foundations for this report.
Dr Ben Knighton
8.2.10