The Witch's Toolkit

An Introduction to African Witchcraft

The Difficulty of the Topic

My introduction to African witchcraft came in my high school years. My sources were twofold: the Evangelical Christian megachurch I attended, and the news. It is interesting to research the subject now, and witness the impact those initial sources had on me. The stories from church were from missionaries, told secondhand in services or murmured about in youth group.

The consensus in those circles was that witches in Africa were real and powerful. Manipulators of dark spirits. Capable of strange magic that could cause people to become sick or even die. People prayed against them when they went on missions trips. They might even get ready for a trip by fasting or quoting scripture to gird themselves with spiritual armor and strength against demons and the people they worked through. If there was a reason, they might pray against witchcraft specifically.

That kind of introduction has made it hard for me to see the stories I am encountering as anything other than superstition, a form of social control over the dreaded Other, and something manipulated by the Christian church in Africa to scare people into religion. Needless to say, my own journey out of fundamentalist Christian beliefs is bubbling up as I research. I can feel my own prejudices working against an open mind in these cases.

Part of why I started with Africa was to avoid my immediate dismissal of European witch trials as part of the obvious evils of Christian superstition, something I feel intimately familiar with. I want to find out if there is a true paranormal element to any recorded cases out there. Instead I seem to be coming up against an eternal enemy of research: a well laid brick wall of intense emotion.

Contrast that to my reactions to other paranormal tales. When I discovered the legend of the Wendigo for example, my reaction was curiosity and a deep sympathy for the Algonquian people. To be honest, I didn’t think of the windigo killings covered in my series as the North American indigenous version of a witch hunt (until I read an anthropology major’s thesis). I thought of them as an ancient form of euthanasia performed on the sick, the elderly, and the mentally ill best. And part of me felt that it was possible there might be something to those windigo stories.

There’s reasons for that. They have the benefit of being a hundred years in the past. The witnesses of those supposed true tales are dead, and the windigo is now taught as legend, a symbol of the power of greed and overconsumption. The Algonquian people also no longer accuse and kill suspected windigos…at least not that I know of.

Africa is a different story. Right now in Ghana, a shining example of progressive democracy and a thriving economy in Africa, there are six witch camps filled with nearly one thousand women who have been accused of witchcraft. Many fled there to avoid being stoned to death, beaten or tortured. The accusers often stand to gain something, a widow’s inheritance or a plot of land.

But would it surprise you to know that nearly all the women in those camps, though vehement deniers that they themselves are witches, believe in and fear witchcraft? It is deeply engrained in African culture. Witchcraft has been hated and feared there for thousands of years. There are, of course, major overlapping commonalities with the European idea of a witch, which I am most familiar with. But there are very specific signs, symbology, and language around witchcraft that is endemic to Africa. To tell you these stories, I have to introduce you to witchcraft through their eyes. Of course I will fall short, but the background should inform the reasons and evidence that drive witch hunts throughout Africa.¹

Photo by Mario La Pergola on Unsplash

The African Witch

“What is a witch?”

Norman Miller² was speaking to a ten year old boy when he asked the question, the grandson of a good friend. They were in a teahouse in Usagari, a village in western Tanzania.

“They eat people, they can fly upside down, they can be fisi (hyenas). They have red eyes, they can hurt you and make you sick.”

People in Africa are taught from childhood about witches and the dangers of witchcraft. Before they are teenagers, they will have heard about an accused witch in the hushed dinner conversation between their parents, maybe even witnessed a witch hunt. They see dolls and carvings that depict witches. Grandmothers tell their grandchildren stories passed down to them.

When Miller first arrived in Africa, it was on a ship. The British still ruled there, but their time was ending. In the time that Miller lived and traveled throughout East Africa, the British would leave, turning African rule back over to Africans. In the aftermath, there were widespread witch killings. Under colonial rule, witchcraft was totally forbidden. Even speaking about witches, accusing someone of being a witch, or being caught with paraphernalia that was linked to witchcraft was illegal.

It was the European attempt to tamp down vigilante killings and banishing of accused witches. It was probably done with the goals of peace keeping and even protecting eccentrics and the mentally ill from being wrongfully persecuted by their families and villages. But it did not take hold.

Miller had just spent time in India, and was headed to colonial East Africa, with a plan to hitchhike across as a traveler. Just before he arrived in March of 1960, a young British geologist named William Hanning, was killed as a suspected witch. He had been prospecting for minerals and wandered mistakenly into an old burial ground. The locals who discovered him believed that he was a witch disguised as a European. They thought he was a grave robber looking for body parts.

That story ignited an interest in witchcraft that took him across Africa for years. He researched, interviewed Africans and British-colonists, judges and chiefs. Even some of those who had been accused of witchcraft, and later, self-proclaimed witch cleansers and witch hunters. He wrote about his journey and findings in a book, Encounters With Witchcraft: Field Notes From Africa. It details his search to classify and quantify African beliefs about witchcraft.

Time after time he was told by Africans that his definitions were too neat and uncomplicated. It almost seems you would have to be African, to hear witch stories from the time you were a toddler, see the witch trials that took place among farmers in Tanzania, to understand the real fear that drives beliefs about witchcraft there. To academics, African judges, and most Europeans, it was rubbish. An attempt to scapegoat eccentric old women, or a family member that was anti-social or even socially deviant. But to many in Africa, witchcraft is a real and present danger. Something that can make you ill, ruin your livelihood, or even kill you.

How to Spot a Witch

“We saw her outside of our hut at night. She was crying, murmuring in a strange tongue. A month later, our baby died.”

Those are the types of accusations that get hurled at suspected witches. The common thread: tragedy.

A drought, children dying from sickness, grasshoppers eating crops - witchcraft. When bad things happen, a witch may be to blame. But that doesn’t prove it. An investigation must take place. Elders are called. Chiefs convene. Witnesses provide testimony. Trials may even be conducted. A search may be done, or someone who is capable of identifying a witch through spiritual means is called to perform a ceremony.

If they go into your hut and find evidence of witchcraft, it is usually enough to convict. The consequences of that conviction vary wildly. Some people believe in a confession and cleansing ceremony. The witch is restored to the village over time. Others will demand they be banished. In the worst cases, there are beatings or lynchings.

The Witch’s Toolkit

I took the term from Miller’s book. It was his way of classifying all the paraphernalia he had encountered in his research into African witchcraft. They represent a collection of beliefs taken from central and eastern Africa. There is no, one area, that believes in all of these things. Instead, they come from localized myths and legends, and have been compiled to show the variety of tools used by witches.

The use of body parts in witchcraft was a widely held belief among people in different parts of Eastern Africa. This was usually achieved by grave robbing, but there have been some sects that have murdered people to take their skin, bones, or blood. Anything that could be used for digging, tools such as axes, spoons, digging hoes, needles, and knives were common among self-proclaimed witches, and can be used against a suspected witch if they are found in suspicious circumstances.

Animal skins, particularly those of animals that were believed to be controlled by witches to attack people, were another common theme. Most were predators, animals that would already be dangerous to encounter in the wild. Some were not dangerous to humans specifically, but held deeply engrained symbolic power, such as the owl. Animal skulls and specific plants were believed to be used in witchcraft, as well as inverted clay figures.

Inversion is a commonly held symbol of witchcraft. Ancient drawings depict human figures riding hyenas upside down. Witches smear their bodies with ashes to make them look lighter, walk on their hands instead of their feet, and do their work at night instead of during the day. They are inside out, upside down, opposite to what is natural.

There were other items that on their own would not be considered powerful, but in the hands of a witch, could be dangerous. Human hair, fingernail clippings, pieces of bone or ashes from someone’s fire were all used to bewitch people. The colors red and black were strongly associated with witchcraft, and a woman accused who happen to be wearing a red shawl of dress could be certain that the accusation would hold up in the public square.

Poison is a large feature of African magic. Red powders may be delivered in an envelope to someone. Discolored needles placed in a walkway believed to be dipped in poison or thorns near the place where someone urinates could be used as evidence. You may think to yourself, "Well, poison isn't witchcraft," like I did, but here's the thing. It's not the substance that poisons someone. It's magic. Interestingly enough, there were a few poisoning deaths that were blamed on witches in Miller’s book. When sent to labs for testing during trials, none came back as toxic. The anthropological explanation? Death by suggestion, or "voodoo death."³ The African explanation? Witchcraft.

If you came home and found a piece of wood on your bed smeared with blood, witchcraft. Animal excrement on a leaf left inside your house, witchcraft. A tiny carved figure half buried near your doorway, you guessed it, witchcraft. Honestly, I’m spooky enough that any one of those things would scare me (but probably not to death).

There were natural indications of witchcraft as well. Hyenas, crocodiles, jackals and leopards were believed to be signs that witches were at work. Sticks scattered in a strange way, or tufts of tall grass that had been tied in knots were symbols of witchcraft. Even distant fires or lightning could be signs that witches were near.

Most of the time, these symbols seem to be weaponized, used to intimidate people into electing a certain official or giving money to a threatening secret society. But they feature prominently in witch hunts and witch trials. To Miller, the fact that an accused witch was wearing red meant little. But to Africans who have been taught from birth about the signs of witches, it was a signal, a language that was clear to them. That fact coupled with hyenas coming into the village, a woman’s night wandering, speaking in another tongue, and ultimately a tragedy or bad luck would seal a woman’s fate.

In the coming week, I will explore African witchcraft. I will dig into modern witch hunts that have ravaged African countries, the language of witchcraft and symbology that haunt people who fear witches most, and present stories that are unexplainable through any other lens but a paranormal one.

1. When I write “Africa,” I do so understanding that it is a gross summarization of many countries in an enormous continent. Each have distinct religions, economies, tribes, cities, universities, and, specific to this writing, beliefs about witchcraft. I will do my best to distinguish between them. If I fall short, please chime in with a comment, and I will update any accidental misinformation.

2. Norman Miller taught Political Science and African Studies at Michigan State University as an Assistant and tenured Associate Professor from 1966-1971. He was in the first group of American field researchers who worked for long periods of time in remote parts of East Africa.

3. These are the types of explanations that always hold me back from fully believing in the secular, Western interpretation of the paranormal in general. The idea here is that people so deeply believe they will die, that they just drop dead. I don’t know about you, but that makes zero sense to me. I’m inclined to think that we need to look into the possibility that there may be some type of magic at work that we don’t understand (or some really good African assassins).