13. Bizarre News from the Third World
At a September 2009 meeting in Geneva, United Nations officials, individual country representatives, activists, and NGO workers expressed their concern at the increasing prevalence of witch-hunting in poor, mostly rural areas of India, Africa, and Asia. Most of the victims are women and children.
Although experts maintain that reliable statistics are hard to come by, according to Indian sources in Asam and Western Bengal, an estimated 750 women have been killed since 2003. Suspected witches are terrorized by members of their own communities: they have their heads shaved, are stripped naked and forced to walk through the village, are beaten with sticks, branded with hot irons, buried alive, tied to trees, set on fire, and forced to endure deadly tests. One of the tests, a pareksha, involves a woman being forced to pick up a coin from the bottom of a pot of burning oiclass="underline" if her hand comes out unscathed, it means she’s not a witch, if it burns, she is. As a practice, witch-hunting usually has hidden pragmatic motives. In India the burning of witches is a local form of geronticide, a way for the community to eliminate a mouth that is no longer capable of earning its bread. Studies show that in India witch-hunting increases in years of drought. Accusing the witches of having cursed the crop, the community — the collective executor — rids itself of its “useless” elderly members. In places such as Tanzania and Congo, victims are also most often elderly women from poor rural households.
The practice of witch-hunting has recently experienced exponential growth in Papua New Guinea. The country is home to ninety percent of all AIDS sufferers in the Pacific islands, and recently surpassed Uganda in total numbers of those infected with the virus. The island nation’s inhabitants blame witches (who they refer to as sangume) for the spread of the disease, subjecting them to terror that most often ends in murder.
A particularly worrying trend is the increase in child molestation, where children, irrespective of their gender, are proclaimed witches by their communities. Estimates suggest that tens of thousands of children live on the streets of Kinshasa, the majority of whom have been disowned by their parents on the suspicion that they are witches. The real reason is poverty, and the accusers are parents who are unable to care for their large broods. A leading role in the brutal practice is played by local priests, who conduct hearings (determining who’s a witch, and who’s not) and perform torture in the form of exorcism, which involves forcing children to drink nitric acid. Needless to say, the priests are paid for their services.
African albinos are also an endangered group, as it is believed that certain parts of their bodies serve as antidotes to witches’ spells. Children are particularly vulnerable, and the terrifying practice of live organ harvesting is not uncommon, the organs being ingredients in a purported anti-serum.
In witch practice there is also a phenomenon known as koro or penis snatching. The phenomenon was first documented in China and other Asian countries, but the more recent examples can be found in Africa (Congo, Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Gambia). Men occasionally become engulfed in the collective hysteria, believing that their penises have disappeared. Anyone can be accused of penis theft: “witches,” “black men”(!), people wearing a “gold ring,” “the devil’s right-hand,” a mysterious “stranger.” The penises of the affected supposedly disappear after they have shaken hands with any such person. Enraged, the “dismembered” men physically turn on the “thief.” An unfortunate Sudanese accused a “Zionist agent who was sent to Sudan to prevent the procreation and propagation of our people” for the theft of his penis.
Witch-hunts involve two kinds of participant: accusers, or witch-smellers, and executors. Although banned, in some African cultures (the Bantu culture, for example) the practice of witch-hunting is yet to be eradicated. Dressed in ceremonial clothing, the witch-smellers, usually women, perform a ritual designed to flush out the witch or witches. Members of the tribe sit down in a circle and, accompanied by rhythmical handclaps, begin a hypnotic, ritualistic chanting, until at a given moment the witch-smeller goes into a state of trance. Whomever the witch-smeller touches in her trance is deemed to be a witch; it could be one or many people. Their fellow tribesmen drag the accused from the circle, summarily executing them. Sometimes the rituals go on for days, and sometimes they end in a tribal self-slaughter. Animals can also be witches. The accuser, the witch-smeller, eats raw animal flesh in order to enter the animal’s spirit and refine her hunting instincts.
14. Accusers and Executioners
Today, almost twenty years later, I see many similarities between the living tribal practice of witch-hunting and my own “witch” case. In the early nineties, the Croatian tribe fell into a state of collective trance. Shamans, tribal leaders, and the media, beating their drums day and night to the rhythm of “the-nation-endangered,” led them into the trance. The shamans (ritually draped in the Croatian flag) called their fellow tribesmen to the hunt. The people ate raw meat to refine their instincts, their appetites only increasing when they saw they would go unpunished, and that the other side was doing the same. Their snouts now sophisticated, they became either accusers or executioners. The yellow witch fever dimmed the lights in many people’s heads. A handful of disobedient women were the first to be publicly denounced; others had their turn later. The women were accused of colluding with the devil, of casting spells and betraying tribal custom, spoiling the harvest and spreading illness, and were deemed responsible for the tribe’s misfortune. As punishment, the Croatian witches were subject to public humiliation, media terror, intimidation, contempt, verbal attacks, ostracism, slander, and vicious gossip. They were stripped of intellectual employment, the right to dialogue, and as public figures — actresses, professors, journalists, and writers — removed from public life. Their families were subject to harassment and intimidation, and collective and personal letters were sent to foreign universities, journalists, writers, and translators, all with the express purpose of denying the women access to a public platform or any kind of professional opportunity. It’s true, not one of the accused women was beaten or killed. But far from the media storm, other, anonymous people were. The “witches” served as media surrogates, as fairground attractions, as free dartboards erected on town squares, as the cheapest way to homogenize the people against “internal” and “external” enemies.