The old woman averts her eyes from the camera, her face a patchwork of sewn skin and flesh. Angry scars and deep indentations meander around her face in a way that makes it unsymmetrical. Her mouth is permanently twisted – slightly to one side – from where she had two months of operations to stitch her face back together.

“They started chopping me because they had machetes. My face was in agony. After they cut me here, my cheek was left hanging,” she says to Unreported World as she points to the engorged scar that sits like an embedded ball in her cheek.

Since surviving the brutal attempt on her life, she now lives in a remote area of Tanzania. After the death of her parents, her brothers accused her of using witchcraft to kill them. To exact revenge on her, they broke into her house one night when she was sleeping.

Thousands of Tanzanian women – in particular, older women – have been murdered over the last two decades after being denounced as witches. It is linked to hundreds of years of beliefs where magic and superstition explicated calamities such as death, sickness, and poor crops. To date, laws still exist in the East African country banning witchcraft.

According to a Pew Research Center report in 2012, around 93 per cent of people in Tanzania still believe in witchcraft, while 60 per cent of the population still rely on witch doctors to rectify maladies associated with witchcraft such as illnesses, drought, or death.

There is no specific accreditation that validates someone as a witch doctor. Generally speaking, the only supporting evidence required is that the local community believes in the person’s “powers”, along with supposed in-depth knowledge of herbs and potions.

Frequently, it is the witchdoctor that seals the fate and demise of the accused. It is widely believed that they possess the insight to pinpoint the witch and her crimes. When peculiarities occur, the villagers will flock to the trusted local witchdoctor, who will then be able to tell them who bewitched whom. The mayhem and killing will commence once the witch’s name is revealed.

A village leader told Unreported World that, often, accusing someone of witchcraft could be a means of frightening the person into signing over land or inheritance.

He spoke about a woman who was denounced as a witch because her family wanted to prevent her from obtaining an inheritance of land. In the end, she had to petition the court to get her family to hand over her share of the money from the 40-acre land sale.

“The brother wanted to sell the land so he could have his share of the money. When she asked for her share, they called her a witch. In the past, land wasn’t worth much but it’s become more valuable. Now there are lots of disputes about land,” he explained.

The Legal and Human Rights Centre reported that 501 people were killed due to mob violence and witchcraft suspicion from January to June 2018, and that at least 17 people were killed each month because of witchcraft beliefs.

Some of the reported incidents included that of Ndilu Mbogashi, a 65-year-old resident of Taba Village in Kilauwa District, who was reportedly killed by an angry mob over witchcraft-suspicion in March 2018. It was claimed that a woman, Amina Lufungulu, who was sick, went to a witchdoctor – who pointed a finger at the late Ndilu Mbogashi.

Another woman in Bukulu Village in Nyangw’ale District was reported to have strangled her six-year-old son to death, claiming that he disguised himself as an old woman during prayers.

Human rights organisations have called for changes to these unfounded accusations coupled with the lack of prosecutions – causing many in remote areas to live in angst and fear.

Witchcraft continues to be a controversial subject in Africa, flourishing on superstition. The legal system is often ill-equipped to fully address the issue with the level of urgency and importance that is required. A report by the University of Dar es Salaam concluded that witchcraft beliefs are too strong to be driven out by legal methods. It instead advocates for the removal of ignorance by introducing a scientific view of the world through [mass] education.

L'articolo Thousands Killed In Tanzania For Being Witches proviene da InsideOver.

Religion and superstition, modern and ancestral, faith and heresy: simply magic. This is an aspect of Africa whose tails attract and repel us at the same time. It is attractive because a remote reality opens wide in front of us, showing itself overwhelmingly in our futuristic present. We are pushed by a curiosity for the unknown and by that need for knowledge which enchants the listener like dulcet tones of a mermaid. However, while this world of rituals and beliefs is so intrinsic to modern Africa, it repulses us, though our repulsion is derived from an incapability for true understanding. We, prophets and followers of empiricism, are not able to analyse, understand or embrace this world of the occult. It leaves us paralyzed, upset and shocked when we realise that, amongst its many faces, magic in Africa wears also the mask of tragedy.

The roads through the Central African Republic savannah give way to the jungle that, thick and dense like a wall, interrupts the route and our thoughts. It is imposing, green, and a reminder of just how small we humans are who try to hid our fears of magic, rebel groups and armed demons. Near a roadblock made of stones, six men appear from behind the trees and bushes.They have cow leather amulets tied to their bodies know as gris-gris which, according to folklore, can even protect you from AK-47 gunfire. These men are the Anti-balaka warriors (anti, balles de AK), Christian and animist rebels who, with guns and machetes, wage war against the Islamic irregulars Seleka. They stop our car. Their eyes seem glassy and possessed, with their hands of stone holding wooden weapons. They warn us not to take off our sunglasses, since our light eyes are a curse. They kiss their amulets, they are drunk on waragi (African gin) and creeds. The Antibalaka warriors are statuary, occult like a macabre dance, they are one of the many cruel faces of African magic.

Then there is the village of Kavamu in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a few kilometers from Bukavu. Her, between 2013 to 2016, a nightmare took place, one that is hard even to imagine, came to be in absolute silence. During this period 44 girls, aged from 2 to 11 years old, were kidnapped in the night, brought into the wood and were repeatedly raped by armed men. They abused them because they were persuaded by a magician that laying with a virgin and spilling her blood is a way to achieve invincibility and prosperity. The culprits, 74 militiamen lead by deputy Frederic Batumike, are now in jail, waiting to be tried with the charges of rape and crimes against humanity. However, these horiffic actions have left a black mark, and nothing can ever make this go away. Beatrice is 11 years old, with deep black eyes, which show a past filled with terrible pain; they seem to scream with anger, breaking the silence of the house where she lives with her grandmother, here in this cursed village. When, under the incessant rain, she crosses through the village, she is greeted by staring eyes and pointing fingers. All alone, and with the scars of the violence atrocitiees committed by dispicable men, she walks through the village of Kavamu, feeling a pain that they all consider her own fault  and her personal shame to bear. She walks without ever looking back, leaving behind her a lost innocence, without a future in front of her. All she has is the present, which is filled with nothing but pure tragedy, which she cannot escape. Yet another face of the African magic.

And then there is an island in Lake Victoria, Ukerewe, a promised land for 80 people who are experiencing discrimination and persecution in Tanzania because of the color of their skin. They are albinos and in this Great Lakes Country they are rejected by their families and wanted by many people who, armed with thousand-year old legends, hunt them to use as sacrifices and to sell their organs on the black market. Albinism is a genetic anomaly that makes skin, hairs and eyes very light, and is more frequent in Africa than in the rest of the world. South of Sahara 1 in every 5000 people is afflicted by this deformity. At the same time, an epidemic of popular beliefs and irrational frenzies have hit a large amount of the population, who have been persuaded that the bones and the organs of albinos have magical properties, leading them to kill and mutilate dozens of these people. Albino’s body parts can be worth up to $75,000 on the African black market. On Ukerewe island,  men, women and children seek refuge in order to escape the brutal nature of these popular beliefs and their own genetic disposition, which seems to be punishing these human beings. They seem condemned, with cynical witchcraft, to be excluded and without an identity. Albinoo Africans live in a world of intolerance, on a continent that needs you to belong to a faith, an ethnic group or a skin color.

Today the organization Ukerewe Albino Society is situated on an island in the waters of Lake Victoria. Ramadhani Khalfan, one of the spokespeople of the association, has been fighting to guarantee fair treatment and social protection to the albino population, says: “Safety is in numbers. People who live together because they have the same difficulties can face them as a team. We opened a clinic and a legal office, but the attacks go on and armed men have even come here trying to commit a massacre”.

These massacres do not only happen here in the Great Lakes region, but also in Uganda, Burundy and above all in Tanzania, where a few days ago 34 people were judged guilty of the murders of albino people between 2006 and 2016. Beatrice Mpembo, lawyer for the public ministers office commented on the news and the problem of the albino persecution: ” In order to fight this plague we need to educate society on the truth about albinos. Often mothers and children afflicted by albinism do not know their own right’s and live in shame. It is necessary to inform and to use culture as an instrument to stop this problem”. The words of the lawyer and the conviction of the murderers are small signs that there is hope for change. Small because in the meantime, we hear news from Kampala about women murdered through means resembling magic rituals.

In Tanzania, albino murderers can be convicted, and rapists can be successfully tried in South Kivu, but on the other hand, hidden by the darkness of the african night, killings, rituals and violence continue. Age-old devils are turning Equatorial Africa into a place of horrors where human beings are the most tangible representation of the inhumane.

Pictures of the black magic in Tanzania by Gabriele Orlini

L'articolo A Journey Through Black Magic proviene da InsideOver.