Witchcraft in Africa

In Africa, witchcraft refers to various beliefs and practices. These beliefs often play a significant role in shaping social dynamics and can influence how communities address challenges and seek spiritual assistance. Much of what "witchcraft" represents in Africa has been susceptible to misunderstandings and confusion, due to a tendency among western scholars to approach the subject through a comparative lens vis-a-vis European witchcraft. The definition of "witchcraft" can differ between Africans and Europeans which causes misunderstandings of African conjure practices among Europeans. For example, the Maka people of Cameroon believe in an occult force known as djambe, that dwells inside a person. It is often translated as "witchcraft" or "sorcery", but it has a broader meaning that encompasses supernatural harm, healing and shapeshifting; this highlights the problem of using European terms for African concepts.
While some 19th–20th century European colonialists tried to stamp out witch-hunting in Africa by introducing laws banning accusations of witchcraft, some former African colonies introduced laws banning witchcraft after they gained independence. This has produced an environment that encourages persecution of suspected witches.
In the Central African Republic, hundreds of people are convicted of witchcraft yearly, with reports of violence against accused women. The Democratic Republic of the Congo witnessed a disturbing trend of child witchcraft accusations in Kinshasa, leading to abuse and exorcisms supervised by self-styled pastors. In Ghana, there are several "witch camps", where women accused of witchcraft can seek refuge, though the government plans to close them.
In west Kenya, there have been cases of accused witches being burned to death in their homes by mobs. Malawi faces a similar issue of child witchcraft accusations, with traditional healers and some Christian counterparts involved in exorcisms, causing abandonment and abuse of children. In Nigeria, Pentecostal pastors have intertwined Christianity with witchcraft beliefs for profit, leading to the torture and killing of accused children. Sierra Leone's Mende people see witchcraft convictions as beneficial, as the accused receive support and care from the community. In Zulu culture, healers known as sangomas protect people from witchcraft and evil spirits through divination, rituals and mediumship.
In parts of Africa, beliefs about illness being caused by witchcraft continue to fuel suspicion of modern medicine, with serious healthcare consequences.
Historian Jacob Olupona writes about religion in Africa: "...African religions are not static traditions, but have responded to changes within their local communities and to fluxes caused by outside influences, and spread with diaspora and migration". The people central to African religions, "including medicine men and women, rainmakers, witches, magicians, and divine kings ... serve as authority figures and intermediaries between the social world and the cosmic realm".
Pre-colonial Africa saw the existence of indigenous witchcraft practices, with some societies attributing supernatural powers to certain individuals. These beliefs ranged from beneficial powers like healing to malevolent forces capable of harm. The arrival of European colonial powers introduced significant changes. Colonial authorities often viewed African witchcraft as superstitious and attempted to suppress or eradicate indigenous practices, leading to the criminalization and persecution of suspected witches. This colonial influence sparked a complex interplay between traditional beliefs and foreign religions like Christianity and Islam.
In the post-independence era some African countries continued to grapple with witchcraft-related issues, including accusations and violence. Witchcraft remains a significant aspect of many people's lives, with varying perceptions of its powers and dangers. Legal responses have emerged in some nations to protect individuals from harm and discrimination due to witchcraft accusations, but the practice and beliefs continue to evolve in the context of modernization and globalization.
African witchcraft beliefs are incredibly diverse, encompassing practices from healing and divination to the worship of ancestral spirits and deities. Some of the most notable African "witchcraft" traditions include Vodun, Hoodoo, Santería, and Candomblé, each with its unique blend of African, indigenous, and sometimes Christian or Catholic influences. Many of these traditions have roots in specific African ethnic groups and have evolved over centuries in the diaspora, particularly in the Americas and the Caribbean. They often involve rituals, ceremonies, and the use of herbs, charms, and divination methods to connect with the spiritual world and address various aspects of life, including health, prosperity, and protection. Conjure in Africa and the Black diaspora can be used for negative and positive purposes. The positive purpose was protection against evil witches who cast spells on innocent people.
While some traditions have faced stigmatization and persecution, they continue to thrive and adapt to changing societal contexts. Black people in the diaspora share experiences of racism and prejudice regarding their religious practices. In the Black Diaspora, the word Juju is used to describe all forms of conjure and charms made and used in African Diaspora Religions and African Traditional Religions that incorporate conjure into their religious practices. In the Caribbean, enslaved Africans utilized Obeah to attack their enslavers. The practice of Obeah was prohibited by Europeans out of fear and the ability of Obeah men and Obeah women to organize enslaved communities for slave rebellions.
Scholars at Duke University have identified Bantu-Kongo cultural influences in Black populations across the Americas, particularly in the continuation of Nkisi and Nkisi Nkondi traditions and Kongo burial traditions among African Americans in the Southern United States. These practices, rooted in Kongo spiritual beliefs, were employed to ward off evil spirits, conjure spirits of the dead and ancestral spirits, and provide protection against withcraft. The Nkisi Nkondi is made by an nganga and the spirit of the Nkondi is used to hunt and punish evil witches.
African witchcraft beliefs have exerted a profound influence on practices called brujeria in Latin America, especially in regions with incoming African diaspora religions, such as Brazil, Cuba, and the Caribbean. This influence is marked by syncretism, where African witchcraft beliefs have merged with Indigenous, European, and Christian elements. For instance, in Brazil's Candomblé and Cuba's Santería, African Orisha worship is blended with Catholicism, allowing practitioners to maintain their African spiritual heritage while adapting to the dominant religious culture.
Witchcraft plays a significant role in the beliefs and culture of the Azande people, located in North Central Africa, particularly in regions like South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Northern Democratic Republic of Congo. In Azande society, witchcraft is perceived as a potent force used to harm individuals, and it permeates every aspect of their lives. They believe that witchcraft is hereditary and can only be passed from parent to child of the same gender. This psychic power is believed to work at close range and can manipulate nature to cause harm, such as using animals or collapsing structures.
The Azande do not attribute human errors like mistakes in farming or moral crimes like lying to witchcraft. Instead, they primarily associate it with negative occurrences, such as disease and death. A witch will only use their powers against someone they dislike, with the process involving the transfer of the victim's soul to a group of witches. While the victim's relatives can prepare a defense, they must seek advice from an oracle before retaliating.
Oracles are crucial in Azande society for identifying those responsible for using witchcraft and predicting future tragedies. They employ various methods, such as the poison oracle (using a poisoned chicken), to determine if witchcraft is being used. The outcome of the oracle's decision influences the course of action taken by the community. Besides the poison oracle, there are also the termite oracle and the rubbing-board oracle, each with its level of reliability.
In addition to oracles, witch doctors are also consulted to predict disasters and identify witches. They undergo extensive training and perform rituals, often in front of a crowd of villagers, to locate the source of evil magic. Medicinal herbs play a crucial role in the power of witch doctors.
Early colonial observers often viewed Azande witchcraft as belonging to a primitive people, but anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard's seminal work Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande challenged this perception. He argued that Azande witchcraft is a coherent and logical system of ideas, similar to other world religions, contributing significantly to the field of anthropology by conducting extensive fieldwork and studying Azande beliefs and practices in-depth. Evans-Pritchard's work has had a lasting influence on the study of "primitive thought" and has guided subsequent generations of anthropologists in understanding the complexity of witchcraft in Azande culture.
The Maka people of Cameroon believe in an occult force known as djambe, that dwells inside a person. It is often translated as "witchcraft" or "sorcery", but it has a broader meaning that encompasses supernatural harm, healing and shapeshifting; this highlights the problem of using European terms for African concepts.
Every year hundreds of people in the Central African Republic are convicted of witchcraft. Christian militias in the Central African Republic have also kidnapped, burnt and buried alive women accused of being 'witches' in public ceremonies. Ngangas are spiritual healers in Central Africa and use divination to detect evil witches and perform rituals to remove witchcraft by making nkisi nkondi to hunt and punish sorcerers.
As of 2006 between 25,000 and 50,000 children in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, had been accused of witchcraft and thrown out of their homes. These children have been subjected to often-violent abuse during exorcisms, sometimes supervised by self-styled religious pastors. Other pastors and Christian activists strongly oppose such accusations and try to rescue children from their unscrupulous colleagues. The usual term for these children is enfants sorciers ('child witches') or enfants dits sorciers ('children accused of witchcraft'). In 2002, USAID funded the production of two short films on the subject, made in Kinshasa by journalists Angela Nicoara and Mike Ormsby.
In April 2008 in Kinshasa, the police arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic or witchcraft to steal or shrink men's penises. Those accused of penis-snatching are often alleged to have done so to extort cash from their victim in exchange for a cure, sometimes amidst or resulting in a wave of panic.
According to one study the belief in magical warfare technologies (such as "bulletproofing") in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo serves a group-level function, as it increases group efficiency in warfare, even if it is suboptimal at the individual level. The authors of the study argue that this is one reason why the belief in witchcraft persists.
Complimentary remarks about witchcraft by a native Congolese initiate:
In Ghana women are often accused of witchcraft and attacked by neighbours. Because of this, there exist six witch camps in the country where women suspected of being witches can flee for safety. The witch camps, which exist solely in Ghana, are thought to house a total of around 1000 women. Some of the camps are thought to have been set up over 100 years ago. The Ghanaian government has announced that it intends to close the camps.
Arrests were made in an effort to avoid bloodshed seen in Ghana in 1997, when twelve alleged penis snatchers were beaten to death by mobs. While it is easy for modern people to dismiss such reports, Uchenna Okeja argues that a belief system in which such magical practices are deemed possible offer many benefits to Africans who hold them. For example, the belief that a sorcerer has "stolen" a man's penis functions as an anxiety-reduction mechanism for men suffering from impotence, while simultaneously providing an explanation that is consistent with African cultural beliefs rather than appealing to Western scientific notions that are, in the eyes of many Africans, tainted by the history of colonialism.
In Kamba culture some people are believed to be born with spiritual powers to heal or harm. Historian Deika Mohamed says this about witchcraft in Africa: "The practice of witchcraft is often divided between uwe and uoi, the former softly translated as witchcraft for healing and the latter as witchcraft for harm. Uwe, uoi and kithitu (oath-taking) possess nuanced meanings. Beyond violence, uoi may refer to a way-of-being, a substance or force and uwe is often used to remedy the ill-effects of uoi. Similarly, kithitu may also denote the employed objects during the oathing ceremony or empowerment of the oath itself; those who disobey forfeit their life by means of curse. By exploring the lexicography of witchcraft the reader is made aware of the important complexity of an otherwise essentialized subject".
In 2008, Reuters reported that a mob in Kenya had burnt to death at least eleven people accused of witchcraft.
In Malawi it is common practice to accuse children of witchcraft and many children have been abandoned, abused, and even killed as a result. As in other African countries, both a number of African traditional healers and some of their Christian counterparts are trying to make a living out of exorcising children and are actively involved in pointing out children as witches. Various secular and Christian organizations are combining their efforts to address this problem.
According to William Kamkwamba, witches and wizards are afraid of money, which they consider a rival evil. Any contact with cash will snap their spell and leave the wizard naked and confused, so placing cash, such as kwacha, around a room or bed mat will protect the resident from their malevolent spells.
In Nigeria several Pentecostal pastors have mixed their evangelical brand of Christianity with African beliefs in witchcraft to benefit from the lucrative witch-finding and exorcism business—which in the past was the exclusive domain of the so-called witch doctor or traditional healers. These pastors have been involved in the torturing and even killing of children accused of witchcraft. In the states of Akwa Ibom and Cross River alone, around 15,000 children have been accused, with around 1,000 murdered between 2000 and 2010. Churches are very numerous in Nigeria, and competition for congregations is hard. Some pastors attempt to establish a reputation for spiritual power by "detecting" child witches, usually following a death or loss of a job within a family, or an accusation of financial fraud against the pastor. In the course of "exorcisms", accused children may be starved, beaten, mutilated, set on fire, forced to consume acid or cement, or buried alive. While some church leaders and Christian activists have spoken out strongly against these abuses, many Nigerian churches are involved in the abuse, although church administrations deny knowledge of it.
In May 2020 fifteen adults, mostly women, were set ablaze after being accused of witchcraft, including the mother of the instigator of the attack, Thomas Obi Tawo, a local politician.
Among the Mende of Sierra Leone, trial and conviction for witchcraft has a beneficial effect for those convicted. "The witchfinder had warned the whole village to ensure the relative prosperity of the accused and sentenced ... old people. ... Six months later all of the people ... accused, were secure, well-fed and arguably happier than at any [previous] time; they had hardly to beckon and people would come with food or whatever was needful. ... Instead of such old and widowed people being left helpless or (as in Western society) institutionalized in old people's homes, these were reintegrated into society and left secure in their old age ... Old people are 'suitable' candidates for this kind of accusation in the sense that they are isolated and vulnerable, and they are 'suitable' candidates for 'social security' for precisely the same reasons." In Kuranko language, the term for witchcraft is suwa'ye referring to 'extraordinary powers'.
In Zulu culture, herbal and spiritual healers called sangomas protect people from evil spirits and witchcraft. They perform divination and healing with ancestral spirits and usually train with elders for about five to seven years. In the cities, however, some offer trainings that take only several months, but there is concern about inadequately-trained and fraudulent "sangomas" exploiting and harming people who may come to them for help. Another type of healer is the inyanga, who heals people with plant and animal parts. This is a profession that is hereditary, and passed down through family lines. While there used to be more of a distinction between the two types of healers, in contemporary practice, the terms are often used interchangeably.