WITCHCRAFT IN SOUTH AFRICA – AN INTRODUCTION (PART 1 OF 4)
The African Eye News Service, which focuses most of its attention on Mpumalanga, recently reported that 52 residents of Utah village, in Bushbuckridge, marked Freedom Day by appearing in the local magistrate’s court after they tried to kill a 38-year-old woman they had accused of being a witch.
According to the report, at around 9pm on 27 April, the mob gathered in the village main road, walked down towards the woman’s house, where they began to assault her.
The crowd had spent most of the day in ‘kangaroo courts’ after the woman had been accused of using witchcraft to kill a 14-year-old-boy, who had died earlier that week. The ‘verdict’ was guilty and the sentence: to be burnt alive.
Following a tip-off from the woman’s family, police managed to intervene before the woman was killed, although the mob resisted arrest, throwing stones at policemen and damaging five police vans.
Some police officers were also badly assaulted and had to be treated at Mapulaneng Hospital.
The 52 people the police managed to arrest – the crowd was far bigger - appeared in court on charges of public violence.
All things considered, the accused woman was lucky - not just because the police intervened but because the incensed villagers first held a series of ‘court’ meetings to determine her guilt. In a significant number of ‘witch’ killings, the accusers don’t bother to try the person. They move straight to the sentence, which is always death - usually by fire, sometimes by stoning and beating.
In fact, hardly a week goes by without a ‘witch’ being killed in South Africa.
As the police do not keep separate statistics for witch killings (they are captured simply as ‘murders’ and fall under that generic category), it is difficult to determine exactly how many; but if those reported in the press are anything to go by, at least 50 people a year are killed in this fashion, quite possibly more.
Accusing a person of witchcraft or of being a witch is a criminal matter. Section 1 of the Witchcraft Suppression Act No 3 of 1957 provides that any person who accuses another of being a witch commits an offence and is open to prosecution.
Labelling someone a witch is not simply a matter of pointing a finger, there are certain rituals or customs that are followed. Often a witch doctor is called in and paid to “sniff” out a witch. A “witch sniffing ceremony” will result in a person being identified and then either put on trial or killed, or both.
Witches, witchcraft, magic and superstition are a fundamental part of day-to-day life in the new South Africa and, although rarely reported, if one does a little research and scratches below the surface, the facts of the prevalence and the impact of witchcraft make for horrific and astounding reading.
It is not a phenomenon particular to South Africa, but can be found throughout the African continent. Last year, for example, Zimbabwe outlawed the practice of witchcraft following a raft of amendments to legislation drawn up by the former colonial regime, which made witchcraft a criminal offence punishable by a fine or a five-year jail term.
The fact that there is also legislation on witchcraft in South Africa means that not only will the state have records on this issue, but those statistics are public information.
Towards the end of last year, the DA asked the minister of safety and security - for each year since 1994 - how many people, accused of being witches, had been murdered, and how many people had been arrested for instigating a witch sniffing ceremony.
The reply makes for deeply disturbing reading.
Today, InsidePolitics launches a four-part series on witches and witch killing in the new South Africa.
After today’s introduction, part two will look at the brutal reality on the ground, by outlining some of the stories covered in the press in this regard, and the extremely violent way in which people are identified as witches, tortured and k
| Posted on 11/5/2007
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