The Trials of Mrs. K.: Seeking Justice in a World with Witches 9780226322537

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The Trials of Mrs. K.

The Trials of Mrs. K. Seeking Justice in a World with Witches

Adam Ashforth

e University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

e University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 e University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2018 by e University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without wrien permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2018 Printed in the United States of America 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 1 2 3 4 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-32222-3 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-32236-0 (paper) isbn-13: 978-0-226-32253-7 (e-book) doi: hps://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226322537.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ashforth, Adam, author. Title: e trials of Mrs. K.: seeking justice in a world with witches / Adam Ashforth. Description: Chicago; London: e University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2017051214 | isbn 9780226322223 (cloth: alk. paper) | isbn 9780226322360 (pbk: alk. paper) | isbn 9780226322537 (e-book) Subjects: lcsh: Trials (Witchcra )—Malawi. | Witchcra —Social aspects—Malawi. Classification: lcc bf1584.m3 a84 2018 | ddc 133.4/3096897—dc23 LC record available at hps://lccn.loc.gov/2017051214 is paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Dedicated, with love and gratitude, to my wife, Vivienne, and to our son, Terence Kibet

A er all, it is puing a very high price on one’s conjectures to have a man roasted alive because of them. —Michel de Montaigne

. . . an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice. —John Rawls

Contents

Prelude

xi

Introduction

1

1

The Most Abhorrent Crime

2

The Name of the Witch

3

A Fair Forum?

4

A Witch in the Family

5

The Case of the Kasitos

6

When a Witch Confesses

7

A Child’s Tale

8

Judgment Day for Mrs. K.

9

Human Rights, Norwegians, and 129 the “President of Witches”

ix

13 24

33 43 68 94

111 122

10

“Material Dreaming” and the Ways Witchcraft 139 Stories Work

11

Truth and Consequences: The Work of 158 Witchcraft Stories

12

In Defense of Witch Trials Acknowledgments

167

177

Appendix 1: e Malawi Journals Project Appendix 2: Alice_090312

181

Appendix 3: Bibliographic Essay Works Cited Index

237

221

187

179

Prelude

One Sunday a ernoon in late March 2009, a young Malawian woman named Alice visited the District Hospital in Balaka, where a neighbor from her home village was preparing to give birth.1 As the two women sat chaing in the shade of the veranda outside the maternity ward, a nurse passing by greeted Alice. “How are you, madam?” inquired the nurse, whom we shall come to know as Mrs. K. Short in stature, dark in complexion, Mrs. K. was in her early fi ies at the time and 1. e original text of Alice’s journal, on which this vignee is based, is reprinted in appendix 2. e complete journal (Alice_090312), along with others from the Malawi Journals Project used as source material in this book, can be found in the Deep Blue digital archive of the University of Michigan Library, available at hp://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/113269. All of these journals have been anonymized. e names of authors, and the people and places of whom they write, have been changed.

xi

xii

Prelude

living in a small two-bedroom brick house in the nurse’s compound behind the hospital. “I am fine,” replied Alice, rising to her feet, respecting the formalities. “And you?” “Fine,” said Mrs. K. A nurse for thirty years, Mrs. K. was a senior figure in the hospital. She coordinated the district’s HIV/ AIDS programs, including the hospital’s antiretroviral clinic. She knew Alice from a training course for HIV counselors she had led some months earlier. “Are you ill?” she inquired. “No. I have come to see my relative here who is ill.” “Good,” said Mrs. K. “Okay, I am going for lunch. See you.” eir greetings concluded, Mrs. K. passed on her way down the dusty path to a gap in the wall where a shortcut had been made from the hospital compound to the nurses’ quarters in the neighboring village, oblivious of the river of whispers, gossip, and rumor that was swirling in her wake. e brief exchange between Alice and Mrs. K. had not gone unnoticed. Before Alice had a chance to return to her friend, another nurse, who had been lingering in the shadows, approached her from the door to the maternity ward. Dispensing with the usual formalities of greeting, the nurse asked abruptly: “Is she your relative or friend?” “No,” replied Alice, taken aback by the brusque inquiry. “She was one of the facilitators at the training course I aended for HIV counselors.” “Okay,” said the nurse, her face relaxing, “I thought she was your friend.” And then, sensing approval to exchange gossip, the nurse explained the reason for her concern. “She is a cruel woman. You can see so in her face. We are lucky that she is not working at the maternity ward. She would have been shouting at the patients and she would have been leaving patients to bear children in her absence and even killing them.” e nurse, continuing her explanation, confided in Alice that when she had first met Mrs. K., she had felt uncomfortable in her presence, sensing that she had been “born a cruel woman.” But in

Prelude

xiii

time she had learned something even more alarming. Mrs. K., she said, was a “witch woman” who, moreover, was “teaching children witchcra and forcing them to kill their mothers and sisters.” A couple of days a er her conversation at the hospital, Alice encountered more stories about the witch-nurse of the District Hospital. According to a neighbor, who had heard the story from a friend, Mrs. K. had recently been flying in her magical witchcra airplane on her nefarious business at night, intent on attacking the residents of a certain house. Unfortunately for her, the house had been protected by powerful medicines from traditional healers causing the magical airplane to crash. Mrs. K., having lost her power and her invisibility, had been found injured on the ground outside the house, struggling to stand. Passersby rushed to her aid. People asking questions, at once solicitous and suspicious, quickly surrounded her. ey had heard the stories; now came a chance to corroborate. Someone offered to transport her by bicycle for medical help, but Mrs. K. rebuffed him and started to hobble away on her own, thereby confirming popular suspicions: the woman must be a witch. According to Alice’s neighbor, Mrs. K. was followed from the accident site by the people who found her, escorting her in a swelling mob to her home, taunting her with an improvised song to the effect of: “e nurse is a witch! She has fallen down. God would like to punish you.” ey ended with the words: “You shall see this world now. You have seen now.” Fearless, in a swirl of righteous malice, they defied the witch by turning back on her a version of the most deadly threat a witch can pronounce: “You will see!” Mrs. K. survived. What followed, however, was an ordeal that would leave her life in shambles. ough she was never formally charged, she faced many trials—legal, social, and psychological—in her struggle to clear her name of that dreadful stain: Witch. rough it all she maintained her innocence. But she was facing a community racked with dread, yearning for security, and angry about what seemed an epidemic of children being taught witchcra . . . .

Introduction

is book stems from a chance encounter in the small town of Balaka, Malawi. In June 2009, I happened to be in Balaka, working on the Malawi Journals Project—a long-running project involving young Malawians writing journals describing everyday life in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic. I was enjoying a beer one evening at a local tavern with my friend McDaphton Bellos when we met a group of staff members from the nearby District Hospital. ey told us about the “witch trial” soon to take place concerning a nurse at the hospital. e nurse, whom I’m calling Mrs. K., had been accused by colleagues of teaching children witchcra and, I later learned, was suing her accusers for defamation. e gossip in town, as we heard repeated many times in the following weeks, had it that Mrs. K. was herself on trial as a witch. And the gossipers were adamant about what the verdict should be. e core 1

2

Introduction

of the book centers on Mrs. K.’s efforts to clear her name, unraveling the ways that claims to truth and demands for justice are intertwined in the stories people tell in their quests for security. In the process, we shall seek to beer understand how law actually works in places like rural Africa. On the day of the trial, idle and curious, I stopped by the magistrate court with my research assistant, Denview Magalasi, to observe the proceedings. From my perspective, the case was clear-cut: Mrs. K. had been defamed. Indeed, I, along with everyone else in that crowded courtroom, witnessed one of the defendants in the case denounce Mrs. K. as a witch right there in front of the magistrate. She accused the plaintiff of transforming herself into a black cat and coming to her house at night and causing a severe illness. at seemed prey defamatory to me. So I was curious to see how the judge, Magistrate First Grade Damson S. Banda, would decide the case. If he found in favor of Mrs. K., as I was convinced he should, he would anger virtually the whole town. But if he found in favor of the defendants and dismissed the claim of defamation, while satisfying the prejudice of the populace, he would surely be perpetrating an injustice against Mrs. K. I was not able to aend the judgment phase of this trial, which happened several weeks a er the hearing of evidence. But through the concerted efforts of my assistant, Denview, and contacts in the court (one of the magistrates was a friend’s uncle), and a er paying a fee (at least I was told it was a “fee”) to have it typed, I was able to obtain a copy of the judgment in the case of Mrs. K., along with the judgments in other witchcra cases tried in the same court. ese texts are the documents read in open court by the magistrate when passing judgment. In theory, they are public records. In practice, however, court records in Malawi are not easily obtained, for unless there is an appeal to the High Court, most cases from magistrate courts are never even typed up, let alone published. Indeed, appeals to the High Court are regularly confounded by the absence, loss, or destruction of trial

Introduction

3

records.1 Later, we shall see how the magistrate did in fact rule in these witchcra cases. But first, let me describe how this book came to be and what it is about. In her quest for justice, Mrs. K. became enmeshed in a tangle of laws and institutions imported to this part of Africa by British colonists at the turn of the twentieth century—a time when Englishmen, especially those who thought of themselves as the “beer” classes, were still confident that they were superior to all others and ruled much of the world accordingly. ese rulers did not worry about witches. ey brought with them a law dating from the eighteenth century outlawing accusations of witchcra and preventing courts from dealing with witches. But Mrs. K., living as she did in post-colonial twenty-first-century Malawi, lived in a world with witches. She did not doubt the reality and danger of witchcra , and neither did the vast majority of her compatriots. Nor did she doubt that someone must have taught the children who accused her of the “evil trade of witchcra ,” as they call it in Malawi. But she knew it wasn’t her. Her challenge was to prove this to the magistrate and to the broader court of public opinion. Magistrate Banda presides over a court steeped in centuriesold common law traditions originating far in space and time from twenty-first-century Balaka but linking that dusty lile town in central Africa to a web of precedent and procedure that today encircles the globe. His court upholds the statutes of the Laws of Malawi, a republic created from the Nyasaland Protectorate in 1964 a er seven decades of British colonial rule. But, as the magistrate told me when we met in 2013, he also lives in the community. And he knows that strange things happen, that witchcra is real. In short, he was using a formal court, heir to colonial-era English law, to conduct a witch trial. e power of “e Law”—the strangely active abstraction that 1. For case examples, see the High Court judgment in Republic vs. Lackson Dzimbiri ([2015] MWHC 1), in which a man awaiting the death penalty for murder appealed his sentence, but the records of his trial could not be found.

4

Introduction

“rules” and which no one is supposed to be “above”—is mysterious at the best of times. In Malawi, as elsewhere in Africa, “law” is a term that refers to the practices of institutions, deposited by the colonialists, whose influence is mostly somewhat less than magisterial. British law in African colonies was not always respected by African subjects to the degree that colonial authorities regarded as due and proper. Nowhere was this more apparent than in relation to laws about witchcra . Much has changed in Africa in the years since the sun set on the British empire, but most of the laws that were imported when British rule was instituted remain in force, including the Witchcra Act. Regarding African law in the colonial era, the British operated with a formula allowing them to recognize what they termed “native law and custom” except where “repugnant” to “civilized” norms, which basically meant when convenient, allowing chiefs to retain legal authority over most aspects of African life—except witchcra . e Laws of Malawi, today, include a Witchcra Act (CAP: 7: 02), originally introduced as an ordinance of the Legislative Council of Nyasaland in 1911, which was modeled on legislation passed by the English Parliament in 1736 and remained in force until 1945 (Davies 2008). Neither the Laws of Malawi nor those of England recognize a crime of “witchcra .” Nor do they prohibit a person from being a witch, though they do outlaw the “pretence” of claiming the powers of a “witch” or a “wizard.” e Witchcra Act of Malawi, like its English predecessor and its cousins in other former British colonies, proscribes the act of accusing persons of being witches, prevents courts from hearing cases of witchcra , precludes efforts to divine the identity of witches, and generally prohibits communities from taking any kind of action to protect themselves by detecting and punishing putative witches. Most Malawians, however, like others in Africa, see witchcra as the most serious of crimes. ey fear this crime more than any other and are generally astonished when informed that not only is it not a crime to practice witchcra , but it is a criminal offense to accuse a person of being a witch. Mrs. K., perhaps unaware that

Introduction

5

she could have lodged a criminal complaint regarding the accusation, brought a civil defamation suit against her accusers, claiming damage to her reputation. Nobody was charged with the (nonexistent) crime of witchcra . Nonetheless, in July 2009, while ostensibly conducting a trial in a civil suit for defamation, and while taking care to note that Mrs. K. was not accused of witchcra in his court, Magistrate Banda found himself in effect presiding over a witch trial. My initial inclination, on reading the judgment in the trial of Mrs. K., was to treat the whole thing as merely an amusing curiosity and to smile at the clever way the magistrate resolved his dilemma. e more I studied the judgment in the case—and I subjected it to as close a reading as any text in Germanic philosophy has endured—the more I began to wonder. To my surprise, I slowly became persuaded of the wisdom of Magistrate Banda’s resolution. It seemed to me that he was in effect conducting two trials at the same time: one a formal legal proceeding closely attending to the technicalities of the law; the other a parallel virtual trial, obvious to those in the know about the real issues, addressing the substantive issues of community concern. I became persuaded, moreover, that it was a fair trial—subject to rigorous principles of evidence. In 2013 I returned to Balaka to meet with Magistrate Banda. We discussed my reading of his jurisprudence. I was relieved to discover that I had not merely imagined what he was doing. I must say, however, that Magistrate Banda has not reviewed what I have wrien here, nor have we met since. Given that the magistrate is a public figure, I shall use his real name. Balaka, too, is the real name of his town. All other names of people and places, despite being in the “public domain,” have been changed. My method here departs from my earlier work drawn from life in Soweto. I have not been able to conduct as much fieldwork in Malawi as I did in South Africa. But I do have access to a unique ethnographic resource, the Malawi Journals Project, which is now

6

Introduction

publicly available and which makes this experiment possible.2 For an experiment in writing it surely is. e Malawi Journals Project consists of texts wrien by locals about a wide range of issues broadly relating to HIV/AIDS, over nearly two decades. Produced by rural Malawians reporting everyday conversations in their home communities, the journals contain a wealth of insight into African life. I aim to retell the stories I have harvested from the journals in as authentic a manner as I can in order to show how they work in their social seings, both in everyday situations and in the somewhat out-of-the-ordinary contexts of witch trials—in the formal context of the magistrate court as well as the less formal assemblies of chiefs’ courts in rural villages. What you will be reading in the pages to come, for the most part, is a reading—my reading—of other people’s texts. To give a sense of this, I have reprinted in appendix 2 a copy of the text of the journal on which the “Prelude” is based. e originals of all the texts adapted in this book are available in the University of Michigan’s Deep Blue digital archive for the diligent reader to read, or reread, against my reading.3 e journals, while recounting the stories told in everyday situations, provide unique data about the contexts within which stories are told and the work these stories do. In representing these stories, I also draw on court records, newspaper accounts, interviews, and ethnographic observation. With a brief to document conversations pertaining to HIV and AIDS, the journal writers were not enjoined to write specifically about witchcra . Nonetheless, the theme arises in dozens of journals. Most accounts of talk about witchcra in the journals occur in connection with illnesses and deaths, the majority of which were most likely AIDS-related. e important point to note is that the conversations documented in the journals emerged organically in ordinary social seings. ey are not the product of a researcher’s inquiries, or even of a research study seeking infor-

2. For a description of the Malawi Journals Project, see appendix 1. 3. Available at hps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/113269.

Introduction

7

mation specifically about witchcra . For this reason, the archive of the Malawi Journals Project affords a unique opportunity to examine the work that is done by stories of witchcra in shaping social relations and, particularly for our purposes, the ways in which the verisimilitude of such stories is established. is is important. For judging the truth of such stories can at times, as we shall see in the case of Mrs. K., be maers of life-and-death. When talk of witchcra emerges in everyday contexts, as reflected in the hundreds of examples to be found in the Malawi Journals Project, it does so in the form of stories. Diagnoses, suspicions, and accusations involving witchcra are always narrated. People do not, in the ordinary course of events (or even in the extraordinary context of a trial), articulate general propositions regarding witches and their cra . ey do not generally elaborate beliefs about the existence or nonexistence, reality or unreality, of phenomena we might deem “the occult.” Indeed, in my experience, most people who live in the world with witches usually don’t know quite what to believe in relation to maers of witchcra . Rather, they tell stories. And these stories exhibit distinct narrative paerns. Our task will be to understand why these stories are deemed plausible, how they are adjudged true, and what work they are doing in shaping social relations in the contexts wherein they are told and retold.4 On occasion, we might find a group of friends speculating about some aspect of the issue—such as, for example, whether the ability of witches to perpetrate a form of magical rape (during which an invisible intruder sexes a sleeping woman) involves a risk of HIV infection. But even in these instances, the discussion hinges on the narration and interpretation of a story. Focusing on the trials of Mrs. K., we shall see how the general plausibility of witchcra narratives and the veracity of particular witchcra stories have real effects on people’s lives. I shall elaborate at

4. For a review of the literature broadly underpinning the approach adopted here, see Frank (2010).

8

Introduction

length on the importance of the distinction between propositions and stories in relation to the study of witchcra later. e beauty of the Malawi Journals Project archive is that it allows us to examine multiple examples of the ways in which stories are told and the multiple ends such narrations serve. Some three dozen writers have produced journals for the project since it started in 1999. Because the project began as part of a social scientific research study, anonymity for the journal writers and their subjects was required. When that study was completed, the journal writers were eager to continue their work, which was an important source of income for them over the years. Since 2008, under my stewardship, the journal writers have been working as independent authors, writing about their lives and communities in rural and small-town Malawi. e project purchases their work for US$30 per journal (rising to US$40 in 2017). In return, the writers assign copyright to the project of their work to the project, which then makes the texts publicly available for analysis. Given the sensitive nature of some of the issues about which they write, the journal writers have decided to remain anonymous and we have de-identified all people and most places (except for major towns and cities) in the texts before making them publicly available. is book, then, should be seen as part of a collaborative enterprise. Sadly, the public acknowledgment of authorship can only be lopsided. Rest assured, however, that full acknowledgment is given. A group of four writers has participated from the start, contributing at least one journal each month since 1999. ese are the writers upon whom I rely here. ese writers—whom we have given the aliases of Alice, Diston, Patuma, and Simon—are both keen observers of life in their communities and gi ed storytellers. Except for Diston, who died in 2012, they are now in their early forties and respected members of their communities. Like the vast majority of Malawians, they also grow food in their gardens for subsistence. Since these are the primary authors of the stories presented here, let me briefly introduce them. I shall in-

Introduction

9

troduce the work of other journal writers from time to time in the chapters to follow. Alice, whom we met in the “Prelude,” is a devout Muslim, though at various times in the past, inspired by the promise of miraculous healing, she has joined “born again” Christian Pentecostal churches. Her home in the village, about a twenty-fiveminute walk from a small market town, is at a crossroads, serving as a conversational way station for people on their way into town. She is the mother of five children and active in community life, at one point founding a women’s group devoted to agricultural development in the village. Petite in stature and always modestly dressed, even in the days before she started wearing a hijab, Alice, deceptively, seems quiet and shy. But she is steely in her resolve and relentless in pursuit of her goals. Early in her career as a writer, she honed a distinctive style, selecting her stories and shaping her narratives around pressing moral questions. Her journals are replete with details of intimate conversations among women. Diston, who died in 2012, oscillated between being a rather overenthusiastic drinker, regaling us with accounts of conversations in bars and village drinking spots where the locals consume a potent homemade liquor distilled from maize (along with whatever other fermentable stuff might be at hand) known as kachasu, and a commied churchgoer, writing of the somewhat less colorful events in the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian (CCAP). Mostly, however, he wrote of daily life in the village where he lived and where his uncle was chief. Diston was also a fanatical player of the traditional game of bawo, spending many hours gathered with other men playing the game, shuling stones along the rows of holes, all the while swapping stories. His journals over the years contain a remarkable chronicle of African village life, tracing the lives, loves, and, all too frequently, deaths of a sprawling cast of characters. Simon—who like Alice and Diston lives in a village in the central region of Balaka and is a Yao by ethnicity—is an easygoing,

10

Introduction

ever friendly man, a now-divorced father of five who has a gi for conversing with people of all stations. He is an ethnographer extraordinaire. He and Diston both liked to spend time in bars, hanging out with the local gents talking about the things that guys in bars like to talk about. He and I have spent many hours over the past decade hanging out in such places, too. His journals offer an unparalleled insight into the affairs of young men. Like Diston, he is a member of the CCAP, though not subject to fits of religious enthusiasm such as occasionally possessed his late friend. Early in his journal-writing career, a er despairing at the way long conversations that filled an a ernoon would disappear into a couple of pages when transported to his notebook, Simon realized that aention to detail is the key to filling the blank pages. His journals, as well as reporting countless conversations, are replete with detailed descriptions of the places he calls his “catchment area” for stories around the small trading center, or marketplace, near where he lives, along with the multiple characters to be found there. Patuma, living in the south of the country, runs a small stall at the local market from which vantage point she is witness to the many small eruptions of village life as well as the placid rounds of the day-to-day. Her journals are marked by her enthusiasm for all things religious. A devout Christian, of the Pentecostal variety, whenever a preacher or prayer meeting is to be found, which is o en, Patuma is there, noting the proceedings and fleshing out the teachings—no doubt for the benefit of her American employers’ souls as well as their interests in research. Patuma’s journals suffer somewhat from her tendency to repeat Bible stories at great length, as indicated by the particular preacher’s text of the day, but probably also a er being refreshed in the comfort of her home from her own copy of the Good Book. Nonetheless, her journals offer many insights into the enthusiasm of grassroots religion in the rural backwaters of Africa. Since the original texts of the journals presume a degree of familiarity with the contexts within which they were wrien

Introduction

11

and of which they write, they can at times be difficult to follow for those not familiar with rural Malawi. I have taken the liberty of substantially editing and at times rewriting accounts of events presented here, though I have tried to not materially alter the content. My intent in this has been to preserve within quotation marks words and passages that can be found verbatim in the original texts, while relying on the reader’s wits to figure out how much of the rest is summarizing, interpolating, or adding material to aid readability. Again, read appendix 2 and reread the “Prelude” to get a sense of how this has been done. Since my personal involvement in the stories represented here is minimal, I have tried to keep the imagination in check and provide only such maer as, based on long experience, I think necessary for understanding what is going on. Interspersed throughout are passages of interpretation, which I hope will not prove too burdensome or distracting. I have kept scholarly citations in the main body of the text to a minimum. Readers seeking a discussion of the relevant scholarship might care to read the bibliographic essay in appendix 3 or my chapter on witchcra in Critical Terms for the Study of Africa, edited by Guarav Desai and Adeline Masquelier (Ashforth, forthcoming). On the surface, the stories I shall recount here are about witches and witchcra in a small dusty town and surrounding villages in a very poor country in the middle of Africa. At a deeper level, however, these stories also tell of one of the most fundamental impulses driving humans, not to mention other forms of life: how to protect children from harm. In the cases reported here, the issue is about protecting children from being taught witchcra , which, since it would transform them into serialkilling cannibals, is one of the worst forms of harm imaginable. As we shall see, the teaching of witchcra to children is seen in these parts not merely as harm inflicted on an innocent creature, but the transformation of the child into a source of danger for kin and community, a security issue of the first order. In a context where AIDS has robbed families and communities of legions of

12

Introduction

parents, since it afflicts primarily persons of child-bearing ages, the possibility that surviving children might in some way be responsible for the deaths of their parents, acting in concert with evil grandparents who teach them witchcra , must surely be terrifying to all. In telling the story of the trials of Mrs. K. and others accused of involving children in witchcra , my central concern is to reflect on the ways these stories of witchcra are told and how the truth of such stories is adjudged. In almost thirty years of worrying at such issues, I remain fascinated by the question of why my friends in Africa find such stories believable, while I do not. So, a er recounting stories of witch trials in a magistrate court, in chiefs’ courts, in backyards and streets, and on the porch of a store in a small market town, we shall inquire into the general question of why stories of witches remain plausible in twenty-first-century Africa. Borrowing a notion of “material dreaming” from Michel de Montaigne, of sixteenth-century France, I shall argue that the key factor rendering witchcra stories believable, in general, is a willingness to accept a sort of porousness between the worlds known in waking hours and those experienced in dreams. And, to rephrase a question Montaigne raised long ago, we shall have to wonder, should people be held accountable for actions perpetrated in dreams? Since there is a strong consensus throughout Africa that witches should be held accountable for their deeds, I shall argue that trials of the sort described here, with crucial limitations, are the best available means for avoiding violence and human rights abuses perpetrated on accused witches while at the same time protecting communities from the violence they perceive as perpetrated by witches and securing justice for people deemed victims of witchcra .

1 The Most Abhorrent Crime

In the weeks a er Easter 2009, the story of Mrs. K., the witch-nurse at the District Hospital teaching witchcra , spread quickly through the town, all over the district, and soon the country. One morning, shortly a er she was confronted by a mob a er collapsing outside a neighbor’s house, some community members arrived at her hospital lodging with a vehicle in an aempt to forcibly return her to her original home in a rural village. But they didn’t find her. Some said she had le the house under cover of darkness. Others insisted she had used magic to make herself invisible. Everyone in town was talking about the nurse at District Hospital. Before long, the story was national news. On the fi h of June 2009, Malawi’s premier newspaper, e Nation, published a front-page article under the banner headline “Witchcra Terrorises Balaka Hospital”: 13

14

Chapter One

Witchcra has terrorised Balaka District Hospital, forcing medical staff to petition the Ministry of Health to transfer a nurse suspected of teaching the art to children at the campus and trying to kill some members of staff. One nurse, who was a victim in the latest ordeal last Sunday, was rushed to her home in Chikwawa by hospital management fearing for her life and her sister’s children who were staying with her at the hospital. e two children revealed that the nurse had taught them witchcra and ordered them to kill their aunt. Balaka Hospital administrator Symon Nkhoma confirmed on Wednesday the district health management team wrote the Ministry of Health on June 2, 2009, giving it a 48-hour ultimatum to solve the situation or risk a strike or exodus of the staff. Nkhoma said one nurse is alleged to be teaching children witchcra and trying to kill a nurse, medical assistant and lab technician. He said the children revealed the nurse for the first time in April and management advised staff to love one another and pray. “We fear we may lose staff, hence writing the ministry,” said Nkhoma, who added that the ministry told them that the South East Zone of the ministry would look into the maer. e nurse (name withheld), who was rushed to her home in Chikwawa, also confirmed on Wednesday that another nurse at the hospital taught her sister’s children witchcra and that she wanted to kill her. Secretary for Health Chris Kang’ombe was not available for comment.

Accounts of witchcra at Balaka Hospital were not only published in the newspaper but also broadcast on the national radio program Nkhani Zam’maboma (News from the Districts), a popular show consisting of stories sent to the station from people

The Most Abhorrent Crime

15

around the country. ese reports confirmed the general fear that the nurse at District Hospital was in fact teaching children witchcra . So began the trials of Mrs. K. Rumors of adults teaching witchcra to children were common in Malawi around the time when Mrs. K. was accused, and they remain a potent source of fear and insecurity. Newspapers regularly carry allegations from different parts of the country, and radio programs such as Nkhani Zam’maboma spread stories even more widely (Englund 2007b). Countless people have been suspected. Many have been accused. Some have been aacked. Several have been killed. ere are no good estimates of how many accusations have been made or how many people punished for this “crime.” e fear of this pedagogy, however, is widespread. In a 2012 research study commissioned by the Norwegian Embassy in Malawi and the Association for Secular Humanism, 38% of household heads surveyed reported that it was “common” for children to be taught witchcra in their area (Chilimampunga and indwa 2012, table 8). Moreover, the same study reported that “when asked if any children in their own household had been taught witchcra , 18% of the household heads responded affirmatively” (Chilimampunga and indwa 2012, 51). ese percentages, the authors suggest, may in fact underestimate the numbers of people who worry about their children being taught witchcra , “since family members tend to keep the maer to themselves.” Considering the horrors associated with the notion of children being taught witchcra (which we shall examine below), these numbers represent a staggering level of insecurity. Roughly one in five households, it would seem, is dealing with their own children being taught witchcra , while two in five worry about their neighbors’ children being schooled in this “trade.” Imagine, if you will, what you might say were a child you cared for to awaken in terror in the night, convinced he had been flying in the company of witches, as the children we shall hear from later report. Would you say: “It’s just a dream”? I know I

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would. But how do I actually know that the realities of the story I’m being told are not really real? A er all, the experiences recounted were exceptionally vivid. Anyone who has ever dreamed knows of such experiences, and cognitive neuroscience now tells us that the same regions of the brain are triggered in dreams as in waking experiences (Hobson, Hong, and Friston 2014; Revonsuo 2015). So where does my confidence in making a distinction between the experiences of the sleeping and waking states come from? How is that my own child, comfortably awash in stories of Harry Poer and the Hogwarts School of Witchcra and Wizardry, takes talk of witches and wizards to be amusing diversions. Yet when my friend’s child in Malawi, awaking from what I would call a bad dream, swore he had spent the night at a school for witches, his parents flew into a panic? Answers to these questions, I am going to suggest, lie in the way we construct stories interpreting the meaning of action experienced in dreams. Or, to put it another way, the general condition for the plausibility of witchcra narratives derives from what we might describe as a porousness in the boundaries separating human action as experienced in the waking world and in dreams. Montaigne, centuries ago, described these sorts of dreams as “material dreams” and insisted people should not be held to account and prosecuted for their evil actions therein. He was in a minority then and would be in Malawi today. But the story of how “Westerners” stopped fearing witches and stopped using courts to prosecute them is neither a simple tale of reason overcoming superstition nor of knowledge defeating ignorance. I shall discuss this at greater length in chapter 10. It can be hard for people unaccustomed to living in a world with witches to appreciate the gravity of the charge of teaching children witchcra . People schooled in traditions of modernism tend to consider talk of “witchcra ” a curious anachronism, a form of foolishness the enlightened world le behind long ago. We tend to react with amusement to tales of rumors such as those that ensnared Mrs. K. But these are issues of the utmost serious-

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ness in contemporary Malawi, as elsewhere in Africa: maers of life-and-death. To untutored ears, the charge may seem objectionable in the same way that indoctrinating children into values at odds with those of the parents would be unacceptable. Imagine, for example, the sort of chagrin that would erupt in an evangelical Christian household in the United States if a child came home from school excited with newfound knowledge about evolution and ready to demolish the biblical myth of Creation. Or consider the anxiety and dismay that lesbian parents might feel when confronted by a beloved child who had just learned that homosexuality was a “disorder” that could be cured. “Witchcra ,” whatever else the word may signify, certainly names values at odds with those embraced by most families. Another analogous response might be the rage a parent would experience upon learning that his or her child had been sexually abused. is analogy is apt in many ways, for the parent who discovers a child being taught witchcra must worry not only about the child’s loss of innocence, but also about the long-term ramifications of the physical and psychological harm inflicted by the witch. Indeed, stories of witchcra o en have an explicitly sexual component. A few years back, for instance, our journal writer Patuma reported that a six-year-old boy revealed at a village headman’s meeting in the southern region that he was being taught witchcra . His tutors were flying with him at night, he said, and forcing him to have sexual intercourse with women in their sleep. Neighbors worried not only about the witches corrupting the innocence of a child, but also about his life being put in danger from the risk of HIV infection.1 Teaching children witchcra is treated as child abuse of the most serious kind. Indeed, witchcra as “child abuse” is a common theme in contemporary discourse on witchcra in Africa. In recent debates over the reform of witchcra legislation in Malawi, for example, 1. For an account of this incident, see Patuma_071212 in the Malawi Journals Project.

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some have insisted on the imperative of reforming witchcra laws in order to meet international treaty obligations upholding the rights of the child. e current law prohibits the identification and punishment of witches. Lamenting this fact, the Centre for Youth and Children Affairs in Lilongwe emphasized in its newsleer in 2009: Recent media reports show that there is an increase in the involvement of children in witchcra , mostly where they are forced and threatened to learn the diabolical and inhumane act. Children as young as three are used as vehicles for sinister witchcra acts, in various cases forced to murder their own parents and guardians, a situation that also raises concerns of increasing OVC [“Orphans and Vulnerable Children”] cases, more especially in rural areas. e urban areas are not spared, either. (Lungu 2009)

Even if we contemplate the most grotesque forms of physical, sexual, or emotional child abuse, even when perpetrated by a trusted adult, “teaching witchcra ” is far, far worse. For the ultimate purpose of the pedagogy of witchcra is to form the child into a secret killer. In a sense, the teaching of witchcra to children is akin to the forcible recruitment of child soldiers. But the child witch is not just a random killer or a foot soldier in a world of war. He or she becomes a specialized killer of kin. Witches are said to demand of their apprentices that they kill a close relative, preferably their mother, to provide meat for communal feasting during their nocturnal meetings. At a time when AIDS has le many children orphaned and in the care of grandparents and other kin, as the children who accused Mrs. K. were, it is not hard to imagine how frightful this possibility that children could be killers might seem. Dreadful as it might be for an innocent child to be turned into a killer of kin, the effects of her being taught witchcra are

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yet worse. Once taught witchcra , children are said to be able to perform amazing acts, like flying across continents by night in a witchcra airplane while leaving their mortal body asleep at home in bed. Witchcra enables persons to transcend ordinary reality, to operate in realms beyond the mundane orbits we humans ordinarily occupy. Yet while witches are said to be possessed of enormous superhuman powers, they are also in essence subhuman, having renounced membership of the human community by rejecting the fellowship of family and community in favor of communion with their own evil kind. And once a person is a witch, he or she will continue killing. Inducting a child into witchcra , then, is tantamount to creating a serial killer. And there is still worse news: Once your child becomes a full-fledged witch, he will have an insatiable appetite for human flesh. He will be a cannibal feasting with fellow witches on his own relatives and on the families of fellow witches. Most stories of witchcra in Africa engage a distinction between the witch as a distinct kind of being, the epitome of evil, and witchcra as a particular form of action—a form of violence perpetrated in secrecy using invisible means. e distinction is analogous to one commonly found in murder stories everywhere (of which witchcra stories are a subgenre): that is, it is the difference between homicide—as an action of which virtually anyone is capable given the right combination of circumstances, means, and motives—and the murderer, the psychopath addicted to killing for its own sake. In Chichewa, the lingua franca of Malawi, people commonly distinguish between the mfiti (afiti pl.), the person who has given over their entire being to the practice of witchcra (such as those imagined to be teaching children), and the use of secret “medicines” or “charms” by otherwise ordinary persons to cause harm to others or secure illicit wealth. Anthropologists, since the pioneering work of Edward Evans-Pritchard in the early twentieth century, know this as the distinction between witchcra and sorcery, with “witchcra ” referring to an innate capacity and “sorcery” involving the manipulation of ma-

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terial substances (Evans-Pritchard 1937). e distinction doesn’t quite apply here, as the witch possesses not an innate capacity but a learned “trade.” Stories of afiti typically speak of them enjoying a perverse sociability, gathering with others of their kind for feasting (on human flesh) and other abominations. e particular nature of the abominations in witchcra stories varies—in some times and places emphasizing illicit food, that of human flesh; in others, illicit sexual practices such as homosexuality or incest. Mrs. K., then, was accused of being an mfiti and endeavoring to indoctrinate young children into the trade. She was also, we shall see, accused of using witchcra in an aempt to murder her accusers. She was, thus, accused both of being a witch and doing witchcra . Witches, as they feature in stories such as those recounted here, can be either male or female. e term mfiti has no gender. Most of the people accused of such practices turn out to be older women. is is not surprising. For even if we were to assume that motives for causing harm are evenly distributed across populations, men and younger women are generally presumed to have access to a wider range of ordinary means of violence than older women, so would be presumed less likely to need to embrace the secret methods of witchcra . Nor should the fact that accusations predominantly target elderly women be taken as either a sign, or a function, of their “vulnerability”—as is o en presumed by outsiders. On the contrary, witches are figures of immense power in the imaginations of those who fear them, their physical vulnerability making people who fear them assume they are more inclined to resort to extraordinary means to perpetrate violence because of their apparent weakness. Open accusations against witches are comparatively rare in Africa, considering the extent of the damage they are imagined to cause. It takes courage to take on a witch in the open. Most people prefer to use private means to protect themselves, such as medicines from a traditional healer or the power of prayer. Witches, obviously, prey on children because children, being

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young and impressionable, are easier to entice into the world of evil than most adults would be. Most stories of children being taught witchcra hinge on the moment when the child realizes he or she will have to kill a parent or other caregiver, leaving them with no one to depend on, which precipitates a revelation by the child of occult activity. Parents and guardians must thus pay close aention to the stories their children tell. And they must also scrutinize their children to detect signs of occult activity. Tiredness in the morning, for example, might be a sign that the child has been active at night, despite having slept in the house. Lack of appetite at breakfast, similarly, might indicate a surfeit of nocturnal feasting. e fact that weary lile bodies were sleeping peacefully on their mats all night in no way contradicts the possibility that the children were engaged in nighime exertions in otherworldly realms—realms that are represented in the medium of dreams. Sleep disturbances, such as the night terrors that afflict many young children, are frequently taken as evidence of nocturnal interactions with invisible beings. Sometimes, on waking, children tell stories of outlandish events, revealing details of their exploits and their companions of the night. But children are suggestible. ey inhale the anxieties of those around them as if with the air. ey hear the stories; magnify the monsters. Malawian parents know this as well as anyone. Stories told by children, however, are the only access parents and others have to the dangerous otherworldly places their children may inhabit in the dark hours of the night—and the darkness of an African village, free of the sky-dimming powers of electric light, is dark indeed. So when a child reports that he or she is being taught witchcra in the night, parents do not ordinarily scoff or try merely to allay unfounded fears. ey take what is said seriously. In the past, or so I have been told and as the ethnographic record confirms, stories about children being taught witchcra usually featured a witch who was part of the pupil’s family. In contemporary Malawi, however, although much indoctrination

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is still said to take place within families, stories abound of witches imparting their secrets to other people’s children. is new development heightens the sense of danger. Some say this opening up of the trade is a result of a widespread neglect by families of the rituals and medicines needed to protect their children. Others say it’s just another sign of the general increase in witchcra that is afflicting the country. As horrifying as it must be to imagine the possibility that the witches within a family are recruiting children, it must be even more terrible to live with the fear that strangers are recruiting your children to their evil trade—especially when these strangers are teachers, or nurses such as Mrs. K., or others entrusted with the duty of caring for children. Teaching children witchcra in such circumstances, then, is not merely a private maer of ordinary familial acrimony, but a maer of public safety and security—a question of concern to the whole community. Which brings us to the question that lies at the heart of all the cases described in this book: Are people actually teaching children witchcra? We shall see what the verdict was in particular cases, but what about the general possibility? Faced with such a question, my instinct—as I imagine yours—is to answer: Of course not! A er all, as a thoroughly modern secular humanist with a passing knowledge of basic science, I know that witches, as featured in stories we shall hear here, cannot exist. Even a cursory acquaintance with the laws of physics tells us such entities must be imaginary. So how could someone teach children, or anyone, a “cra ”—or as Malawians prefer to describe it: an “evil trade”— deploying nonexistent powers? But, a er several decades of dealing with these issues, I now know that it would be unwise to dismiss the possibility of such pedagogy out of hand. As we shall see, people do sometimes confess freely to being witches. eir confessions are not always coerced or insincere. And we should not discount the possibility that, wracked by intense hatred and a desire to cause harm to an enemy, coupled with feelings of envy, impotence, and resentment—what Max Scheler long ago described

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as “ressentiment” (Scheler 1998 [1913])—a would-be “witch” might engage in ritual actions, perhaps including teaching children, which are experienced as an efficacious form of “witchcra .” Given the prevalence of misfortune, a person wishing harm on another in this part of the world will rarely be disappointed for long before being rewarded with signs of suffering that they could take as tantamount to evidence of their power. I do not discount the possibility, then, that some people, sometimes, imagining themselves to be witches and finding evidence of their powers in the suffering of their putative victims, do in fact seek to teach children witchcra . As we shall see, such persons would also be in breach of the law. Given persuasive evidence—which, in principle, could be had beyond a reasonable doubt—such people could, and should, be prosecuted under the Laws of Malawi. If for no other reason than this, it might be wise to be skeptical of approaches to these issues of “witchcra ,” such as advocated by contemporary human rights activists, that treat all accusations, by definition, as false. Another reason for taking the process of resolving accusations seriously is that more than a century’s worth of insistence that witches do not exist has made lile headway in eliminating the plausibility of witchcra narratives, or the fear they arouse, in this part of the world.

2 The Name of the Witch

e story of the witch at Balaka District Hospital was born in the nightmares of children, nourished on the fears of adults. It was started by an eight-year-old girl named Chifundo. Chifundo was the ward of a medical assistant at the hospital named Promise. Medical assistants, with two years of post-secondary school training, along with clinical officers, who are trained for four years, provide the bulk of primary health care in a country where there are fewer than six hundred doctors for a population of around 18 million (Greenberg 2016). Like Mrs. K., Promise and Chifundo lived in staff housing on the hospital grounds. Promise retold the child’s story under oath in the Balaka Magistrate Court. e account presented here draws from the magistrate’s transcript of the proceedings in the case of Mrs. K. During the Easter holidays in March 2009, according 24

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to Promise’s testimony, Chifundo went to stay with her grandmother in Blantyre, the commercial capital of Malawi. Early one morning, perhaps awakening from a troubling dream, Chifundo confessed to her grandmother that she had been practicing witchcra in Balaka, along with some other children from the hospital compound. e grandmother immediately phoned Promise and told her what she had heard. e next day Promise traveled to Blantyre, a ride of several hours, to hear the story for herself. Chifundo’s story was terrifying to all who heard it. She said that she had been going out at night and flying with a witch and two other children to the Livilidzi River, where they were “eating meat and drinking blood”—human meat and blood, needless to say. e other children were six-year-old Mishel and her five-year-old brother Bradrey, both orphans living on the hospital grounds with their aunt, Rennie, a colleague at the hospital and friend of Promise’s. Chifundo did not mention the name of the person responsible for teaching the children witchcra ; she identified her only as “a certain lady from the hospital.” She told them that the woman had told her: If you reveal my name, you will be killed. Burdened with this dreadful story, Promise returned to Balaka, where she recounted the details to Rennie. At that point, Rennie’s niece and nephew were also away visiting their grandmother for the Easter holidays in her village in Chikwawa District in the far south of the country, so they could not be confronted and asked to tell their stories directly. Horrified, Rennie phoned her mother and asked her to question them about the issue. As Rennie later testified in court, “ey admied that they do practice witchcra here in Balaka.” e children also told their grandmother that they learned witchcra in Balaka, not in Karonga, where they had lived with their mother before she died—an important point, since, if true, it surely meant they could not be held responsible for their mother’s death. It also meant that their grandmother was not responsible for inculcating them into the trade. Rennie and her mother, agreeing that something had to be

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done, took the children to church and prayed intensely to protect them. But no maer how fervent their prayers, they would have still had to worry that the witch would not relent. God, of course, can defeat witches; but he might choose not to. Later, when the story of witchcra at Balaka Hospital became national news, someone from Rennie’s home village in Chikwawa contacted the hospital and told the matron, the chief nurse, that Rennie’s mother was herself on trial in her home village: charged with teaching children witchcra . If true, this would have meant the children knew the trade of witchcra before leaving for Balaka to stay with their aunt, perhaps being complicit in their mother’s death. Mrs. K. would be in the clear. But, though she mentioned this in court, Mrs. K. didn’t take this story as her primary defense. e children’s story of being taught witchcra steadily gained strength as it raveled up threads of suspicion running through the community in Balaka. Even before the witch was named, everyone had a suspect. No one, at least publicly, doubted the lile ones had actually been taught the evil trade of witchcra . Nor did anyone say the children were talking nonsense or reprimand them for spreading rumors. To have done so would have been tantamount to trying to silence them, to keep them from speaking the truth—and only a witch, surely, would want to do that. Rather, people wondered how many more victims were yet to be revealed. A er the Easter holiday, Mishel and Bradrey returned to Balaka, to school and their aunt’s house in the nurses’ quarters. eir aunt and grandmother hoped that they were now safe, since the grandmother had taken them to be “prayed for to cast the spell out.” But shortly a er their return, Mishel woke one night in a panic, crying for her dead mother. She rushed from the bedroom, begging never to have to sleep in that room again. She told her aunt that the witch “was beating and assaulting her.” She was angry, the child reported, because the children had been taken for prayers, and she was trying to force them to return to the “trade.”

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It was then, according to their guardian’s testimony in court, she revealed the name of her teacher: Mrs. K. We should note that while the child Mishel was reported as waking at night in terror, nowhere in the story was the word “dream” used, nor, apparently, did the child’s aunt, who did not delay in reporting the issue to the hospital authorities, suspect the girl was suffering a nightmare or the parasomnia known as “sleep terror,” common in children of Mishel’s age; in an episode of sleep terror, Mayo Clinic neurologist Suresh Kotagal explains, “the child awakens abruptly from sleep with a blood curdling scream, appears agitated, flushed over the face, with sweating, and tachycardia,” usually in the first part of the night’s sleep, o en jumping out of bed “as if running away from an unseen threat” and remaining inconsolable when aended by the parent (Kotagal 2009, 161). ough it was a er ten o’clock when Mishel awakened the household with her screams, Rennie immediately roused Promise, her friend and neighbor, for help with the emergency. As Rennie later told the court, they “decided to go to the office to complain over the issue to the hospital management,” bringing both Mishel and Bradrey with them. ere they found the transport officer, the district medical officer, and another man from the management team. ey questioned the children. As Rennie later testified, “e two children then . . . indeed admied and explained that they do practice witchcra at the instruction of Mrs. K.” e morning a er the children told their tale, on May 5, 2009, Mrs. K. went to work at the hospital, just as she did every day, oblivious of events of the night before. Later that a ernoon, relaxing at home a er work, as she told Denview, my assistant, a messenger from the hospital came to her house with word that she was wanted for a meeting with the hospital administrator. He wanted to meet her at 6 p.m. that evening. Puzzled, she returned to the hospital at the appointed hour. ere she found the three top administrators of the hospital, including the district health

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officer (DHO), waiting for her in the manager’s office. e DHO told her that the previous evening Rennie and Promise had woken him to accuse her of practicing witchcra at their house and teaching their children to do the same. Mrs. K. asked the DHO why he had waited so long to call her, since she lives in the hospital campus. Why had he let her work the whole day without saying anything? And she told the three administrators that these accusations were very strange to her: “I came to Balaka in 1992, and I have been here long enough, so why I only teach the children who are staying with Rennie and not others?” (She was unaware at this point that Promise’s ward had also named her.) She then insisted that the children and their guardians be called. e accusers—Rennie and Promise, along with Rennie’s niece and nephew—were summoned to the manager’s office, where they joined the three administrators and the DHO along with another senior administrator. Mrs. K. faced what was in effect a tribunal, the first of her trials. When everyone was seled, she later testified in the magistrate court, she asked the people gathered in the office to “first offer a word of prayer.” A er prayers, Nurse Rennie was called upon to speak. Although both Rennie and Promise were accusing Mrs. K., Rennie, it seemed to me at the trial in the magistrate court, was more insistent in her desire to bring Mrs. K. to account. She told the assembly that the children had revealed that Mrs. K. teaches them witchcra , and she added that Mrs. K. had also bewitched her, Rennie. She told how Mrs. K. had stopped by her house one day on her way to work, claiming she had heard that her young colleague was ill. But according to Nurse Rennie, her illness had in fact been caused by Mrs. K. herself, who had been “squeezing her head down, hence she has severe headaches.” Promise added that she, too, suffers from severe headaches because of Mrs. K. She said she suspected that Mrs. K. turns herself into a cat at night such as the one she had seen about her house recently, in order to perform witchcra aacks on her. More reserved than her friend Rennie, in the later

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court case, Promise seemed less enthusiastic in her prosecution of the charge. Facing her accusers in the manager’s office, Mrs. K. asked the children to tell their story. In her later account to the court, she said the boy “was failing to express himself.” He had nothing to say. Six-year-old Mishel, however, did point to Mrs. K. as the person teaching them witchcra . But, according to Mrs. K.’s testimony in court, the child only did so because she was asked a series of leading questions, such as “Is the mother of Stella [Mrs. K.’s daughter] the one teaching you?” “Yes.” “Who is the mother of Stella?” She points at Mrs. K. And: “Where do you go?” To this last question, the child answered, “Livilidzi”—meaning that she was traveling at night to a far distant place on a magical witchcra airplane. Sensing that the children’s testimony was working against her, Mrs. K. demanded that the hospital management call a sing’anga, a traditional healer, “to probe into the maer as regards whether I am a witch or not.” But the manager said: “As regards rules and regulations governing the civil service, we are not mandated to call a sing’anga.” Mrs. K. later told us, in an interview with Denview, that she offered to pay the healer’s fee herself, but the administrator still refused. Nurse Rennie, a born-again Christian, also objected to the idea, saying, according to Mrs. K., “She does not believe in herbalists because to her they, too, are witches and wizards,” performing the work of Satan. Mrs. K. then insisted that they take the case to the police. But Nurse Rennie rejected that proposal as well because she claimed that the police were corrupt. At that point the DHO, no doubt feeling deprived of options, called on both parties to “pray hard to take away the problem between us” and brought the meeting to a close. But Mrs. K.

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was not satisfied. According to Nurse Rennie’s testimony at the subsequent trial, the DHO’s “ruling” to pray had clearly angered Mrs. K., who said that “she considered that her reputation had been damaged and that she would take up the maer elsewhere.” If Mrs. K. were in fact a witch, as Rennie doubtless believed, her suggestion that she would take up the maer “elsewhere” would have seemed a threat of the most ominous kind. reats of witchcra are always oblique: “You will see,” is the most common way that the promise of occult violence is issued. By Rennie’s account, she soon found out what the threat implied. Some weeks a er the confrontation in the manager’s office, she told the court, she was sleeping at home when something fell on her bed. She described it only as an “object,” but it was not an ordinary material thing. ough it was real, it was invisible. Terrified, she asked everyone in the house what had fallen onto her bed. As she later told the court, “e two children said that Mrs. K. had thrown something onto it so that I should die because I have damaged her reputation.” Nurse Rennie immediately asked for an ambulance to take her to the district health officer’s house. e DHO gave her money for transport to flee with her children to her mother’s place in Chikwawa, 150 miles away. Even with that distance between themselves and the witch, however, they did not feel safe. ey sensed that Mrs. K. had followed them south, magically, redoubling her aacks. At home in Balaka, meanwhile, the earthly body of Mrs. K. fell ill. Her own medical judgment was that she was suffering from malaria. But as neighbors and colleagues later told the court, the visible signs and symptoms—her “swollen and protruding” legs and lips—provided even more confirmation of her guilt, most likely having resulted from injuries sustained in a crash while Mrs. K. was flying as a witch to Chikwawa to aack her victims. By this time, the story of Mrs. K. was news all over Balaka, and the hospital was in crisis. Nursing staff, clinical staff, and the hospital administrators all signed a leer to the Ministry of

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Health demanding that the witch be removed from the hospital within forty-eight hours. At the Ministry of Health, the director of Nursing Services returned the leer to the hospital, saying it should have been sent to the South-East Zone Office instead. e leer went out again. On receiving it, the zonal officials resolved to visit the hospital to question Mrs. K. once more. By this time, Mrs. K. had learned about the accusations against Nurse Rennie’s mother in Chikwawa and duly informed the zonal officials that she knew who had really taught the children witchcra . “Is that your story?” the zonal officials replied. “Yes,” Mrs. K. said. “is is my story. I am a senior staff member, I deserve respect. is has pained me a lot, because these people have not given me respect. People are mocking me.” Mrs. K. was going to fight back. e officials promised to look into the maer, but Mrs. K.’s problems remained. A few days later, the hospital management called an emergency meeting. All members of the hospital staff assembled—nurses and gardeners, management and maintenance, clinical officers and cleaners—with one exception: Mrs. K. e children and Rennie (who had returned by this time to Balaka) as well as Promise were called into the meeting hall one by one to tell their stories. e “verdict” of what essentially was a witch trial, Mrs. K.’s second, was unanimous: the assembled staff would resign en masse if the witch were not removed from the hospital. Mrs. K. learned of the proceedings later in the day when a friend on the hospital staff came to her home. “Why did they not call me?” Mrs. K. asked, angry at not having been given a chance to defend herself. Months later, the bierness still eating at her as she recalled these events in an interview, she asked again: “Why did they not call me?” But the reason was clear. ey already knew the name of the witch. e only question they faced was: What is to be done? While the meeting was in progress, Mrs. K.’s youngest daughter, Stella, passed by the hospital. She rushed home to tell her mother, “People are making noise.” A mob was forming. ough

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Mrs. K. had been roughed up once or twice in the weeks following the initial emergency meeting, in the days following the meeting, she began to fear for her life. Nevertheless, she was determined to fight to clear her name and decided to sue Rennie and Promise in civil court on grounds of defamation. Her hope was that in the magistrate court she would find a “fair forum” where the issue could be seled.

3 A Fair Forum?

Mrs. K.’s day in court came on July 1, 2009. e morning was cold by Malawi standards and overcast. e courthouse, a modest single-story brick building, sits in the shade of an enormous tree, its ancient roots the size of a small house, entangled with bicycles. e courtroom was crammed. Everyone in town knew the witch was to be put on trial, and they had talked of lile else for weeks. Bicycle-taxi men, pedaling their fares on clunky old bikes—Chinese and Indian replicas of 1940s English Raleighs with padded cushions on racks at their back for passenger comfort—had ferried many of Mrs. K.’s colleagues from Mponda Village at the other end of town, home to the hospital and the drama’s protagonists. Nurses in pristine white starched uniforms with bonnets on their heads flocked to the court. Midmornings being slow in the transport business, the bike men stayed at the court for the 33

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show. Everyone who had nothing beer to do was there, and they were many—for like elsewhere in Africa, if time to spare were the measure of wealth, Balaka residents would be rich, indeed. Mrs. K. was suing her colleagues Rennie and Promise for defamation, for destroying her reputation by accusing her of being a witch: “Kundiyipitsira mbiri ponena kuti ndine mfiti?” (Defaming my character by saying that I am a witch). e case was assigned to Magistrate First Grade Damson Banda. I sat in the courtroom on the day of Mrs. K.’s trial. e benches, simple backless wooden planks, were packed tight with spectators. Denview, my assistant, and I found places on a bench at the back. I was not inconspicuous, being big and white, but no one made a point of noticing. e court’s marshal, Mabel Kapachika, steered latecomers to their places. As the benches filled, others were brought in until all available space in the room was occupied. Being one as unfamiliar with the decorum of a courtroom as of a church, I was struck by how easily Ms. Kapachika marshaled the crowd, who clearly knew how they ought to behave. People from all walks of life were there; besides the nurses and bike men, I recognized a prosperous local preacher and a number of schoolteachers, who, since it was a school day, actually did have something beer they ought to have been doing. Plenty of idlers and street people had also come to enjoy the show. When someone seated near me decided to leave, an old man, barefoot and in rags, tweed jacket shredded to the armpits, squeezed into place by my side, bowing to the bench as he did so and causing me to silently reprimand myself for a lack of similar dignity. A crowd of faces peered through the open windows. At a sign from the marshal, the courtroom fell silent and was called to order. e first person to take the stand was Mrs. K. Wrapped in a blanket, hunched against the cold and the palpable hostility, she scowled at the room from her platform to the le of the raised bench. She faced two judges on the bench that day. e primary inquisitor was an apprentice magistrate. e senior officer of the court, Magistrate Banda, the person who eventually would pass

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judgment, sat quietly at the far end of the bench for the duration of the hearing. No lawyers were present, either for the plaintiff or the defendants. Since this was a civil case, no police were involved. Mrs. K. was sworn in, and the magistrate asked her to tell her story. She spoke in loud staccato bursts in Chichewa, the “common” (national) language of Malawi. A er a few seconds, the assisting magistrate, who was transcribing her testimony by hand, raised his hand. I later saw that he was translating her testimony at the same time into the “official language” of English. is stopand-start procedure continued for hours. A raised hand signaled the witness to stop. A er each fragment of testimony had been transcribed, the magistrate would say, “Yes!” in English. e witness would then continue with her story. e testimony, as transcribed, began thus: On 05/02/2009 my daughter Priscilla Kuntambila got delivered of a baby boy through an operation and that baby having been born started crying and I thought it was due to hunger for milk had not yet started trickling out from the mother. . . .

Mrs. K.’s story, though it took several hours to tell, was simple: I didn’t do it. She did not aempt to deny that the children had been taught the evil trade of witchcra ; on the contrary, she made it clear that she did not doubt that part of their story. However, she was determined to prove not only that she was not their teacher, but also that she knew the true identity of the person who was. According to Mrs. K.’s testimony, the real story began with the birth of her granddaughter. In January, six months before the trial, her daughter had delivered a baby by cesarean section in the maternity ward of Balaka Hospital—the same place where our journal writer Alice first heard of Mrs. K. being a witch, as described in the “Prologue” above. “And that baby,” she told the court, “having been born, started crying.” And the crying never

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stopped. At first she assumed that all the crying “was due to hunger, for milk had not yet started trickling out from the mother.” But even when the milk came in, the crying would not cease. A month a er the birth, as is customary, her daughter’s husband took the mother and child home to their place in the town of Zomba, an hour or so to the south of Balaka, but the crying continued. At the beginning of March, Mrs. K. told the court, the parents decided to take the infant to see a traditional healer, or herbalist. ey went and I was briefed that the baby had been bewitched whilst in the labor ward where it was born and that is why it was crying continuously and that no names were mentioned[,] only that some herbal medicine had been given to treat the baby boy. I then told them that they should not worry at all as long as some help would be aained and that happened.

As she told her story to the court, Mrs. K. was careful to stress only facts, recounting dates and times with precision and describing the baby’s symptoms in clinical detail. She gave no outward indication of any hostility toward the staff in the maternity ward. According to Mrs. K., she was later informed by her friend Ethel, whom she would present to the court as a witness to corroborate her story, that a neighbor’s mother had been teaching witchcra to children in the area. Ethel had learned this from one of the accusers’ housemaids, who had heard it, she told the court, from the children themselves. According to the housemaid’s report—later repeated in court by Mrs. K. and by Ethel— the children had said that the local witch was regularly wrapping Mrs. K.’s infant grandson in a hyena’s skin at night, and this was the reason that he cried so much. is person, Mrs. K. insisted to the court, had also coached the children to point out Mrs. K. as the perpetrator. Mrs. K. further testified that a er the story of witchcra at

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Balaka Hospital had been broadcast on the radio, a man phoned the hospital with important news. He lived in the southern region of Chikwawa in the home village of Rennie. He told the matron of the hospital, who told Mrs. K., that Rennie’s mother had been accused of teaching children witchcra in their home village and was due to appear within days in the chief ’s court to answer the charge. Rennie’s niece and nephew who had started the rumor against Mrs. K. were orphans and the wards of their aunt. According to the report of the man on the phone, their mother, Rennie’s sister, had died some years earlier while “working at the lake”—a euphemism in rural Malawi for prostitution, since the presumption is that men from inland go to the lake to make business with fish and women go to the lake to fish for men. e children’s mother most likely died of AIDS, probably a er contracting the virus years earlier from a lover in her home village. e real witch, according to the mystery caller, was right inside their house in Chikwawa: the children’s grandmother, the mother of Rennie and her late sister. Notwithstanding this report of witchcra on the part of yet another accused suspect, Mrs. K. remained as objective as possible in her own testimony. On the witness stand, she stuck to her story about the witch in her neighborhood, Mponda Village in Balaka. She told the court that when she learned that her elderly neighbor was teaching witchcra , she resolved to inform the woman’s daughter and advise her to restrain her mother before harm could befall the older woman. e advice was twofold: Be cognizant of the rumors, because they can be dangerous; stop your mother’s nonsense because what she is doing is wrong. e daughter was a pharmacy student studying at the College of Medicine in Blantyre. Her mother had come to her place in Balaka to look a er her two-year-old child while she was away at school. Mrs. K. thought it particularly important to advise the daughter to tell her mother not to spend so much time chaing with Promise’s housemaid, for such behavior was suspicious and

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could prove dangerous if anything untoward should happen in the neighborhood. Mrs. K. insisted in her testimony that she did not gossip to others about the rumors, but merely warned her neighbor to discipline her mother. She seemed sure, however, that these warnings had inspired the rumors against her, Mrs. K., since they had spurred the old lady’s hatred—and, thus, her witchcra —bringing misfortune unto Mrs. K. ough Mrs. K. was officially in the witness box at the magistrate court testifying as the plaintiff in a defamation suit against her colleagues Rennie and Promise, it was clear to all in the court that morning that she was also the defendant—virtual, if not the actual—working to exonerate herself against the charge of witchcra . is was the charge that was on the lips of everyone in the town and a far more serious maer than a mere tarnished reputation. Again and again in her testimony, she returned to the fact that she had lived in Balaka since 1992 and had never before been accused of witchcra . e convoluted story she presented to the court of her own grandchild’s bewitching, completely irrelevant to the charge of defamation against Rennie and Promise, was testimony in her own defense in the virtual trial, which was the only one that really maered. Her case, in brief, was that rather than being a perpetrator, she was in fact the victim of witchcra . A er presenting her case, Mrs. K. called her lone witness, her friend Ethel. Short, rotund, with close-cropped hair and the air of a woman passing middle age who cares lile for others’ opinions, Ethel took the stand to corroborate the story of the pharmacy student’s mother. She confirmed the accuracy of Mrs. K.’s complaint that housemaids had been gossiping about children being taught witchcra in the neighborhood. Making the most of her platform, Ethel then launched into her own account of being wrongfully accused of witchcra . Her business of selling beer, she complained, was suffering as a result. At this point, the apprentice magistrate who had been transcribing the evidence, whose pile of papers was steadily growing as the morning dragged on, broke

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into Ethel’s testimony: “Are you laying charges,” he demanded, “or giving evidence?” Ethel, somewhat chastened, replied she was giving evidence. She admied, acknowledging the magistrate’s effort to focus proceedings on the actual legal issue at hand, that she had not actually heard her neighbor Promise call Mrs. K. a witch. Nonetheless, she took the opportunity to again confirm Mrs. K.’s identification of the pharmacist’s mother as the real witch before wrapping up her testimony. From a legal perspective, Mrs. K.’s stories about her grandchild’s colic and the neighborhood gossip in Mponda Village, along with the support of her corroborating witness Ethel, were completely irrelevant. Her suit was, a er all, charging defamation on the part of her younger colleagues. What she had to prove was that the defendants had deliberately and maliciously spread falsehoods about her: defaming her character by saying she is a witch—per the terms of the indictment. As Mrs. K. well knew, however, the virtual witch trial—in which she was the accused— was the whole point of the proceedings. It was a question of story versus story: whose was more believable? Given the general plausibility of narratives about children being taught witchcra and the widespread tendency to grant credence to the testimony of children who report being so taught, her only chance to clear her name was to divert this particular story from arriving at her door by proffering a beer one in its place. Since no one seemed to doubt that the children had in fact been taught witchcra , and since almost everyone worried that their children might be the next victims, the only way Mrs. K. could have proven her innocence would have been by demonstrating not only that she was not the witch, but by establishing conclusively who was. In order to do this, she could not just name names, since anyone can make accusations and a witch could be expected to try to deflect blame. She also had to provide a persuasive account of the real witch’s motive, to show why that person was more likely to be involved than she herself. And the best way of doing this would be to explain why that person, the real witch,

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wanted to aack her by coaching, or even inducing by means of magic, the children into accusing her, Mrs. K., of being a witch. Clutching this narrative lifeline, Mrs. K. set forth her story. According to Mrs. K., the motive driving the accusations against her was revenge. In her account, the real witch, her neighbor’s mother, was angry over Mrs. K.’s intervention to stem rumors of witchcra . Ironically, Mrs. K.’s motives in this had been entirely admirable—she had wished to protect local children from witchcra and the neighbor’s mother from the ill effects of rumor. is good deed, however, had led the old woman, probably using witchcra , to induce the children to direct false accusations against Mrs. K. Mrs. K., therefore, was a twofold victim: of defamation and witchcra —of defamation caused by witchcra . Looming over this tangled tale of curse and counter-curse, however, was the simple fact of the children’s accusations. ey had named the witch, and the name was “Mrs. K.” As the hearing dragged on in the magistrate court, it was clear that Mrs. K. was failing in her cause. A erward, everyone I spoke to was more convinced than ever that she was in fact a witch. Although in principle her narrative of victimhood was equally as plausible as the story of her perpetrating witchcra , it failed to drive the offending story from the currents of Balaka gossip. Part of the reason for this was sociological: Mrs. K. did not make a very good victim. As she said of herself, she demanded “respect.” In her workplace, she was powerful; in her community, she was comparatively wealthy. She was also disliked personally. Her colleagues thought her proud; “cruel” was the word I heard most o en. A figure such as her makes for a poor narrator in a tale of victimhood. Pride, moreover, is said to be a defining characteristic of a witch. But a more fundamental epistemological problem faced Mrs. K., as it faces anyone suspected or accused of being a witch: How can you prove that you are not a witch? is is difficult, if not impossible, because not only do witches act in secret (thus making the absence of evidence no impediment to suspicion), but they are also presumed prone to denial—since

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who, in their right mind, would confess to such abominations? Just as people who use illicit means to cause harm to others will deny what they do, it is in the nature of witches to deny their true secret identity. Mrs. K., therefore, was in a quandary: the more she denied, the more her denials were taken as evidence of her guilt. Mrs. K., moreover, as evidenced by her determination to clear her name, was stubborn—which, people say, is also characteristic of witches. Nobody appearing before the court disputed the fact that the two defendants had been instrumental in bringing the allegations against Mrs. K. to the hospital authorities, their workmates, and the wider public. e defendants did not deny their claims that Mrs. K. had taught their wards witchcra , nor did they recant their allegations that she was a witch. On the witness stand, her two young colleagues were quite open about the fact that they considered Mrs. K. a witch. Indeed, having sworn on the Bible to tell the truth, Promise told the court, among other things, that she believed Mrs. K. had been lurking around her house at night in the form of a black cat and had afflicted her with bodily pains by magically squeezing her head. Rennie alleged that Mrs. K. had tried to kill her. Neither did anyone question whether Mrs. K.’s reputation had been tarnished by the allegations that she was practicing witchcra and teaching the trade to children. Even to the casual observer in the courtroom, it was obvious that the younger women not only did not deny the plaintiff ’s complaint, but believed it was imperative that the children’s story be brought into the open, since the woman was a witch. Magistrate Banda was in a difficult position. On the one hand, if he were to rule in Mrs. K.’s favor and find the defendants liable for defamation, virtually everyone in Balaka—not to mention the wider readership of the national newspapers and radio audiences—would see him as the protector of a dangerous witch. His court would lose credibility, to say the least. And, as he told me repeatedly when we discussed this case some years later: “I am a human being, too. I live in the community.” at is to say, he

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knows what is going on and worries about the same things as his neighbors. On the other hand, he is also an officer of the law in a country where the law does not recognize the reality of witchcra . As magistrate, he has to be careful in framing his judgments in accordance with the Laws of Malawi. His judgments can be appealed to the High Court, and it is a universal principle of jurisprudence that judges in lower courts do not deliberately invite scrutiny from above if they can possibly avoid it. At the same time, he told me, he knows that if he fails to meet their needs, people will “take the law into their own hands.” Despite what the people of Balaka might have thought, the magistrate was not, he took pains to point out in his judgment in the case of Mrs. K.—at least officially—adjudicating a witch trial. He was, however, dealing with the problem of a witch. African jurisprudence has a long history of dealing with witches and witchcra . African leaders, like their counterparts elsewhere, have long founded their claims to authority on a capacity to interact with invisible beings of one kind or another to protect their subjects from putative dangers emanating from invisible realms or deployed by other persons in forms generically named as “witchcra .” Across Africa, colonialism touched, truncated, and transformed the powers of political authorities— now known, in English, by the anodyne name of “traditional leaders”—to deal with witches; but nowhere did it completely eradicate their power or eliminated the longing of ordinary people for someone, anyone it sometimes seems, who can connect with the powers of invisible realms and provide security for ordinary mortals trying to get by in a dangerous and uncertain world. In order to beer understand Magistrate Banda’s judgment in the case of Mrs. K., then, to gain a beer understanding of what people expect from legal authorities, we should look at some witch trials in courts of traditional leaders, where legal traditions predate the colonial-era laws of the magistrate court.

4 A Witch in the Family

Witch trials in Malawi are not everyday occurrences, but they are not exactly uncommon. While some cases end up in magistrate courts, such as happened with Mrs. K., most take place in the courts of village chiefs, less constrained by the strictures of formal law. Chiefs are not unconstrained, however. Unlike in pre-colonial times, for instance, they cannot lawfully execute people they find guilty of witchcra . Nor can they imprison offenders or banish them from their homes. ey would also be unwise to authorize torture or physical abuse, for fear of a visit from the police. Nonetheless, most chiefs do occasionally hear such cases. Customs surrounding the hearing of witchcra cases in chiefs’ courts influence the ways people like Magistrate Banda conduct cases in the formal court system, constrained as they are not only by formal law and judicial procedure but also by popular expectations of justice. e 43

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following is an edited version of an account of events occurring in a village in Balaka District in 2008, when the aunt of our journal writer Diston was accused of teaching children witchcra and the case was referred to the chief ’s court. Diston’s story has been supplemented with information drawn from his other journals, along with interviews and discussions with participants.1 One evening in February 2008, Diston was siing with his friends Clywell and Elium in the shade behind his younger brother Christopher’s house. eir talk, like everyone else’s in the village and its surrounds at that time, was consumed by the story of Fabson, a young boy about ten years old who had accused his paternal grandmother, Abiti (Auntie) Ganzani, of teaching him witchcra . e boy’s teacher of this infernal art also happened to be Diston’s aunt, a woman in her late sixties at that time. Fabson was living with his maternal grandparents. Following his father’s death, the child’s mother had moved to the capital, Lilongwe, with a new husband, leaving the boy with her parents. Apparently the boy had revealed to his guardians that he was tired of witchcra . He did not want to kill his younger brother, as the witches had commanded. He reported that he had been promised a promotion if he killed his brother to the position of pilot in the witchcra “aeroplane.” When Fabson broke the story of being taught witchcra , his worried relatives took the child to the family elders. e head of the family, Mr. Matemia, was the brother of the woman whom the child was accusing. He was also the group village headman, a “chief ” with responsibility for his own village as well as those of subordinate village headmen in surrounding communities, and thus the authority responsible not only for resolving this maer within his own family, but also for protecting the broader community of the village. In the past, Abiti Ganzani herself had occupied the post of village headwoman for some ten years, during the time her brother was working as a night watchman at a post 1. See, in particular, Diston_080219 and Diston_080312 in the Malawi Journals Project.

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office in a town in the south of the country. Our journal writer, from whom this account is drawn, was an adult member of the accused’s family, a nephew of the chief. He was thus privy not only to the private deliberations within the family and the public proceedings in the open court of the chief, but also the chief ’s confidential discussions with counselors as they struggled with what was to be a most vexing case. When informed of the problem with Fabson, Chief Matemia hastily convened a private family meeting in his compound with senior family members and his counselors. At this meeting, the child revealed the names of three other children who were members of his grandmother Abiti Ganzani’s witchcra team. One of these was a cousin whose mother had died of AIDS some years earlier and who was living in the grandmother’s home. e other two, aged twelve and fi een, were grandchildren of an elderly female neighbor. Fabson named that grandmother as a witchcra teacher working alongside Abiti Ganzani. No one questioned the truth of his allegations. When children speak of these horrors that everyone fears, they are usually believed. In this case, moreover, the family had their own reasons to suspect Abiti Ganzani of witchcra . Despite the fact it was private family business, the story of children being taught witchcra spread quickly throughout Chief Matemia’s and surrounding villages. Like everyone else in the neighborhood at that time, the young men chaing in the late a ernoon shade behind Diston’s brother’s house were idly picking at the bones of a tasty feast of gossip, extracting the last morsels of significance. “ose witches have started to be killing people like this,” said Elium, “so that they find meat to be eating during the coming maize harvesting season.” e months of February and March, when these events took place, are the heights of the hunger season, when food is scarce and the new harvest not yet ready. “at’s bad,” said Christopher, “very bad.” en Clywell added: “is is the second case of witchcra re-

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cently. e first case happened at Sakwata Village, where a young girl was told to kill her mother. But she refused. She was crying and told people it was because she was afraid to kill her mother as she knew she would have no one to rely on a er killing her.” “You know, nowadays,” said Elium, “the government is taking this thing of witchcra seriously. ere is no more a fine at a court of law, but rather ten years’ jail sentence because the government has noted that this is the same as murder.” “ese children have done well by revealing what is going on,” said Christopher, echoing the typical endorsement of the testimony of children. “It is good that these people who are practicing witchcra should be known by the public.” e fact that it was his aunt who stood accused did not arouse his sympathy, for he knew her history. e young men swapped more stories of witches and their cra until darkness fell, whereupon they bade each other farewell and departed to their homes. So goes the standard story: Taught witchcra by trusted adults and fed to his heart’s delight on fresh meat, the child is importuned to kill a relative so as to supply meat for feasts with other witches. Despite having dined handsomely over many visits, the child now rebels. Now that his turn to provide meat has come, he finds he does not want to kill his kin. Usually, the story is that the child realizes that a er killing the designated relative, he will have no one to care for him, so he reveals what he has been doing to his guardians and seeks their protection. Considering how precarious life is for most people in rural Malawi, depending as they do on unpredictable rainfall to cultivate gardens usually too small to feed their families even in the best of years, the promise of meat and feasting in these narratives serves both to explain the urge to participate on the part of otherwise ordinary children and also underscores the horror of cannibalism. For most families, meat is a very rare treat. Mostly small bony fish from Lake Malawi—dried or almost fresh (a er a long ride from the lake in a wicker basket on top of a bus)— are the prime luxury to make a “relish” to accompany the staple

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maize-meal porridge. And since huts in the villages are grouped closely, with everyone cooking outside over open fires, everyone knows who is eating what and who is not eating. It is not at all surprising, then, that stories of witches in these parts usually turn on the consumption of “meat.” e fact that these narratives also represent the witches as feasting while others are hungry serves further to emphasize their separation from the rest of society, governed as it is by norms of commensal reciprocity, the sharing of food at feasts and in famine. e anthropologist Monica Wilson observed something similar in neighboring Tanzania in the 1940s, where stories of witches also featured food. is contrasted with witchcra stories from Pondoland, in South Africa, which tended to feature incidents of incestuous sex: the complicated kinship rules in that region meant that virtually anyone could be related to anyone else without realizing it; but there would be potentially disastrous consequences if they coupled with the wrong person and angered the ancestors as a result (Wilson 1951). A few days later, the same group of friends gathered again at their customary place in the shade of the mango tree—away from the smoke of their wives’ kitchens and secluded from the stench of the pit latrine—behind Christopher’s house, where they usually met to play the game of bawo. Bawo is an old game, found in many variations across the continent, played with 64 seeds in 32 holes carved into a plank of wood, or with pebbles deployed in holes cut into the ground. It can become mind-bendingly complicated. Dedicated players like Diston and his brother devote days on end to playing bawo, when time permits, as it o en does. at evening Cousin Katchera, returning from a day at the trading center, joined them. Over the clicking of pebbles moving from hole to hole, Christopher began to fill Katchera in on the latest developments in their aunt’s witchcra case: that the hearing at the headman’s court was scheduled for the next day. Katchera knew that already and was eager to contribute a new edifying story. Katchera told them he had just returned from Balaka Town,

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where he had aended a case in the sub-traditional authority’s court—a trial of people who had been accused of teaching witchcra to children. Many people, from all over the town, he told them, were gathered at the court of the TA, or traditional authority—virtually the top of the tree as far as chiefs go. When the accused witches were found guilty, they were aacked by a mob. e TA’s people were powerless to stop them. But someone called the police, and with the Balaka Police Station being less than half a mile away, the police were able to rescue the accused witches before they were killed. “If Abiti Ganzani is found guilty of practicing witchcra ,” Katchera concluded, “she is going to be aacked, just like those people. ey beer have tight security at the court place on that day.” Accusations of witchcra , though rarer than one might expect given the prevalence of fear, are serious. Sometimes people do get killed. e next day, the people of Chief Matemia’s village gathered at his compound for the trial of his sister as a witch. rongs from adjoining villages joined them until the crowd numbered more than a thousand—far more than would assemble for an ordinary hearing at the court. e dusty open ground where the headman usually holds court under the big tree was packed tight, with the crowd overflowing into surrounding yards. People were craning to see, to catch a glimpse of the accused and accuser—for not only was the case a maer of public safety, about which all were concerned, but it was also a family drama involving prominent people in the community. Sparks were sure to fly. People were excited also because Chief Matemia, as group village headman, had summoned the headmen of the four other villages over whom he presided to assist him with the case. is also gave license to people from neighboring villages, containing a population of about four or five thousand, to come and enjoy the show. In the interest of fairness, since the accused witch was Chief Matemia’s sister, the chief of a neighboring village was asked to chair the proceedings. Once the assembly was called to order, with all dignitaries suitably recognized and the customary prayers dispatched to God

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and Allah—the region is predominantly Muslim, but with active Christian congregations—the chief ’s counselor read the charge: “Sister, you have been summoned by your relative for teaching one of his family members to become a witch and he wants you to tell why you have taught this child to become a witch and why you have told him to kill some of his relatives and promised he would be rewarded and promoted in the witchcra profession.” Silence reigned. ere is no presumption of innocence in a chief ’s court. e fact that most of those in aendance from her home village knew that Abiti Ganzani had buried five of her six children in the previous decade predisposed them to presume guilt. Abiti Ganzani said nothing. e accused was again asked to respond to the charge. She spoke. “No,” she said. She denied having taught that child, or anyone else, witchcra . Her denials were met with derision. Facing such a large crowd, her voice could not be heard beyond the inner circle of families accused and accusing. But Diston, our journal writer, was there at the front, making mental notes for the account he knew he would be writing later. en, with the witch still denying the charge, the child was called to testify. In the tumult arising as word spread across the crowd, for the child was too small to be seen by most, one of the four headmen assisting with the assembly called for order: “is child is a young boy,” he told the crowd, “so please, do not bother him when he is speaking. We don’t want him making false statements. And another thing, since he is young and his voice is not loud, we are going to have an adult repeat what he says so that everyone [can] hear.” e crowd clapped in agreement. e boy must be able to speak unimpeded and uninterrupted: “is grandmother has been teaching me witchcra ,” the child said, his voice barely a whisper. “So, we do go to Johannesburg by witchcra every night. And we go there in the company of other people . . .”—and here he listed four names, three of children and one of an adult. He also told of eating meat but gave no details of the instruction he had received at the hands of witches. As is common in these

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stories, the child merely told of being in the company of witches, flying through the night and eating meat. No one suggested this was anything less than true testimony of real events. His grandmother was challenged to respond: “Have you heard what he said?” she was asked. “I have heard all he has said,” she replied, “but I don’t know that I taught this child to be a wizard.” No longer denying the fact of her pedagogy outright, she is now denying responsibility. Saying that she doesn’t “know” that she had taught the child opens the possibility that she perpetrated the offense without being aware of it. Given what the child has just told the assembly, facing a multitude, to have denied the truth of his story would have been preposterous. e child had spoken clearly of what he had experienced. is is proof sufficient. But perhaps Abiti Ganzani is a witch and doesn’t know it? is theme of inadvertent witchcra is common in witchcra stories. Since events in such narratives are typically said to take place in a realm akin to the dreaming state, just as dreams can be forgoen on awakening, so, too, the activities of a witch in the darkness of the dreamworld might be unknown to her wakeful self. In which case, can the hapless mortal whose otherworldly activities have been revealed be held responsible in the light of day? On hearing her halearted confession, one of the counselors for the presiding headman stood and confronted the accused witch: “If you don’t accept that you are the one who has taught this boy to be a wizard, this maer will be referred to the traditional authority, and from there it will be going to the court of law. If you are found guilty there, at the TA, you are going to get arrested and will be sent to the court of law. From there you will be sent to jail. But here, if you agree to what you have done, you will just be cleansed of the witchcra , along with the boy, as he has said he is tired of those witchcra acts.” In his account of these proceedings, our journal writer, Diston, does not report how Abiti Ganzani reacted to these demands. But he does tell us that she was thoroughly questioned. Every word of the child’s testimony was turned against her until finally

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she accepted that she was the one who had taught the child witchcra . It is possible that she was persuaded of her guilt by the evidence produced in the form of the child’s testimony that she was in fact responsible, despite her lack of recollection. More likely, she realized that confession was the only way to make the torment cease. In any event, she promised that she would cleanse the boy of witchcra . Upon hearing her confess her guilt, the crowd began clapping and ululating and cheering. e noise disrupted the proceedings for several minutes until finally the chief ’s assistants secured silence. “Don’t laugh,” a counselor admonished. “One day it might be someone from your place facing the court.” When order was restored, the child’s maternal grandfather, the guardian who had brought the case to the chief ’s court, was asked to comment on the witch’s confession and whether he accepted her promise to cleanse the child. If he were to accept her promise, that would be the end of the issue. For the witch to walk away from the court with only a promise to cleanse her victims, however, would be a very light sentence indeed. Some in the crowd began grumbling. Since the accused was a sister to the chief, and a relative by marriage of the child’s guardian, the issue was delicate. But the question remained as to whether the witch could be trusted to undo what she had done. e grandfather said he would like some time to think about it, two or three days. When the grandfather sat down, the other three children who had been mentioned in Fabson’s testimony were called upon to speak, challenged to answer the charge that they, too, travel at night to Johannesburg by witchcra in company with the child Fabson and his grandmother Abiti Ganzani. ey all denied this was the case. Encouraging them to speak freely, the counselor leading the questioning assured them that they were in no danger from the court, even if they did fly by witchcra at night. He offered the analogy of police investigating an accident: “If a minibus has been involved in a road accident,” he told them, “the traffic officers might ask passengers for information but they are

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only interested in charging the driver. We are here only to learn the truth about this child’s grandmother.” e suspected co-conspirators, children between the ages of twelve and fi een, maintained their innocence and were ultimately allowed to sit down. While few would deny that child witches can be dangerous, if not, perhaps, as dangerous as adults, they are almost always treated as victims preyed upon by adults, rather than as perpetrators culpable in their own right. Many people in the crowd at the headman’s court were dissatisfied by the children’s denials. e grumbling that began as murmurs with the promise of a light sentence for the witch now grew to a chorus of discontent that had to be silenced by the chief ’s counselors. Most of those gathered felt that all of the people named by the child, particularly the other adult, should be thoroughly probed for more evidence of their activities. Until they also confessed and were cleansed, they remained a danger to the community. But it was not possible to hear their cases in full now, the counselors explained, as the present proceedings had only started in the a ernoon and it was already geing late. A er the questioning was over, the presiding headman called upon relatives from each side to make statements. ey rose in turn, thanked the headmen and counselors, and apologized to all for the problems that had been caused by their relatives, promising thereby a prospect of peace and harmony. en the assembled headmen and their counselors were asked if they would like to speak. e first to rise was a counselor of the headman from a neighboring village. “is should be an example to those witches who do teach the children of other people to become witches,” he said in a brief speech that managed to weave themes from global discourses of human rights and AIDS orphans into a tidy warning to local witches: “If you don’t stop this system, one day you will be accused. And nowadays the government is serious about witchcra acts, so you will be in trouble. You are abusing the rights of these children. And you are also creating orphans, because

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some of the people you are killing leave behind children with no one to care for them. We had a case like this a few months ago in the magistrate court. e witch was taken to prison. So you had beer take care with this system of yours.” Despite the fact that the Laws of Malawi, as currently wrien, expressly prohibit legal action, or any other kind of action, against accused witches, the headman managed to marshal the threat of the repressive power of the state bolstered by the well-intentioned international discourse promoting the rights of the child in his demand for witches to desist from practicing their cra . en the headman from a neighboring village rose to speak. “I had a sister who was having problems during the delivery of her baby,” he said. “When the time came, she spent seven days in labor, failing to deliver. So I gathered up all the witches whom I knew at that compound and I told them to enter that house where there was a victim. I told them that they would be coming out of that house only a er I heard that my sister had delivered. But if she should die because of that problem, I would not allow them to come out of that house alive. I was going to burn down that house, burn them together with the victim. Just some hours a er being in that house, one of them told me to open the door. When I opened the door of that house, she said that she wanted to get some herbs for that victim. So I allowed her to do so. A er a very short time, she went back into that house. Soon, the victim delivered her baby without any problems. So you see: these witches are hard-hearted people.” In other words: because you witches are “hard-hearted” and put yourselves beyond the pale of normal human compassion, we can be similarly hard and kill you at will, the law of the land be damned. Periodically, suspected witches are in fact killed and burned, usually in the heat of the moment by a mob enraged at a recent death they interpret as murder by witchcra . Chiefs tend not to publicly endorse such actions, but as with the headman addressing Abiti Ganzani’s trial, they know their duty is to prevent witches from killing the innocent, by fire if necessary, and rarely denounce violence against witches.

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Another of the visiting headmen then rose to speak. He told a story of being called to his brother’s house in 1998, where his nephew was sick unto death. He immediately realized, he told the crowd, that the boy had been bewitched. But the child’s parents knew no herbalists and therefore were helpless in the face of an occult assault. So the headman went to fetch a healer, who diagnosed the witchcra responsible for the boy’s condition and provided the necessary herbs for his treatment. e child recovered quickly. “For someone who had seen that boy’s condition,” the headman concluded, “you would not believe his recovery. So witchcra is really there.” e moral of this story? Not only is witchcra there, but so is the power to counteract it. As everyone knows, however, this power comes with a price. But as the chief reminds the crowd, those who can help have an obligation to do so. On a deeper level, the chief is saying that a chief ’s relationship with healers provides spiritual power to restore, and safeguard, health and harmony in the community. e other village headmen were invited to speak, but they declined. At last it was the turn of the headman of this village to speak: Chief Matemia, the one whose sister had been on trial. His words bore the weight of public humiliation for private trials. “I am very sorry about my sister,” he began, the shame of the family weighing heavily upon him. “We had a private meeting this morning, before coming here. She was given the opportunity of revealing whether she was the one teaching that child witchcra . But she refused. She said she knows nothing about that. She said she does not teach him witchcra . Now I am wondering why I have to hear her accepting this while at this large gathering. If she had accepted this morning, when we had that private meeting, we wouldn’t be at this big meeting in the first place. But I have heard what the boy’s guardian has said and will wait for his decision in three days’ time.” At this point, the headmen, the accusers, and the accused retreated into the headman’s compound for private discussions. A er some time, the headman’s chief counselor came out and addressed the crowd: “is case will be reheard

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on the next coming Monday, in this same courtyard.” at day would be the third of March 2008. e crowd dispersed. Diston, our journal writer, and his brother Christopher and their friends reconvened in their usual place on the veranda of Christopher’s house to mull over the case. One friend, named Jason, began: “When the child has been cleansed of witchcra , the person who taught that child must also be cleansed, so as to avoid hurting that child again, which would happen if only the child were cleansed.” He then recounted the story of a case from a neighboring village, which ended in the traditional authority’s court with both parties being cleansed. “But when a person has been cleansed of witchcra ,” Elium added, “he or she does not live more than two years. ere was a man in our village who was cleansed of witchcra , and he died in the same year.” “at granny should realize,” said Christopher, “and even the boy himself, that they are not going to live long a er this case is finished.” He was right. Abiti Ganzani died in December 2010, three months shy of two years a er the cleansing. She developed a sudden stomachache and died within two days. At her funeral, people were still talking about her witchcra , speculating that she had been aacked by her fellow witches for failing to repay her credit for meat already consumed. e last born of her six children had died a year earlier, leaving her with no one le to sacrifice.2 A er Abiti Ganzani’s death, her last born’s two children, who had been living with her, were adopted out to other relatives, and her simple hut of mud bricks and thatch was torn down. e group of men continued to discuss the problem. “You are right,” said Hannock. “e thing with their witchcra tradition is they are not allowed to teach the children of another family’s compound witchcra . So that is why that grandmother was summoned, because she was teaching this thing to other people.” 2. For the rest of this sad story, see Diston_101116 in the Malawi Journals Project.

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“But I am not happy with the way this case is being handled,” said Apatsa, a er a lapse in the conversation. “ere are other people involved in this thing, but there was no chance given for their names to be mentioned. ey should have come up with a list of names of all people involved in these witchcra acts.” “Yes,” agreed Donbel, who had been quiet to this point, “and if my grandmother was on that list, I was going to deal with her myself.” “I think there is a reason the complainant didn’t want those names to come out,” continued Apatsa, referring to Fabson’s maternal grandfather, who had brought the case to the chief. “I think he was afraid he was going to be mentioned by the child, and maybe others of his family members could be mentioned also. So I think that is why we didn’t get the full list of names.” With this, all agreed. en the conversation switched to the sort of politics that is reported in the newspapers until the men departed for their homes and the food set aside for them as fathers. Five days a er the public hearing at his court, Chief Matemia summoned members of his family, including the confessed witch Abiti Ganzani, to a private meeting. Since the family of the child accuser had agreed to sele the case with the promise of a cleansing as suggested at the trial, the meeting was called in order to discuss with Abiti Ganzani her plans for cleansing the child of witchcra , as she had promised at court. Before she had a chance to explain what she was going to do, however, some of her relatives pressed her again to reveal the names of the other witches with whom they were convinced she must be involved. At the trial in the headman’s court, the child had named three other children and one adult, an elderly neighbor, as passengers on the witchcra airplane. Abiti Ganzani’s relatives, however, were sure that others were involved. More particularly, they suspected that some of the child’s maternal relatives were also engaged in witchcra , along with his paternal grandmother, about whose guilt no one raised a doubt. Moreover, they suspected that these others were not only inducting the children into witch-

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cra , but were also instructing the child accuser to name only his paternal grandmother while remaining silent about the others’ involvement. Despite the family’s insistence, Abiti Ganzani refused to implicate anyone else. She said she does not know any witches on that side of the child’s family. e headman, her brother, refused to believe her. “ese witches are hard-hearted people,” he reminded the assembled relatives. “ey have very strong principles. at is why they don’t reveal their real secrets. at’s why she is refusing to reveal their names, although she knows they are there.” e politics of family life, in happy and unhappy families alike, become infinitely more complicated when the possibilities of witchcra are factored into the ordinary dynamics of resentment. Although it is clear from references scaered through Diston’s journals that Abiti Ganzani’s relatives realized that all of her children died of AIDS, this fact in no way diminished her culpability as a witch responsible for their deaths. A er all, as a witch, with all the amazing powers at her disposal, she could easily have arranged for them to die with symptoms resembling AIDS in order to cover her real purpose of providing meat for fellow witches to feast on. Recall that Fabson, the child accuser, was living with his maternal grandparents because his father was dead and his mother had moved to the capital with a new husband. It is unlikely his mother was remiing money sufficient for his support. ese events, moreover, took place during the hunger season, when the last harvest’s bounty had long since been consumed and the new crops had yet to ripen, and when the addition of even a child’s mouth causes a serious strain on a family’s food supply. Hunger is particularly hard on the ill and infirm. e time of hunger is also the rainy season, when mosquitos flourish, transmiing malaria and other parasites, while people huddled together sheltering from the rain share respiratory infections such as influenza, pneumonia, and TB. And when illness spreads and

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deaths increase, questions of witchcra inevitably arise. Stories of witchcra in such circumstances resonate with histories of old resentments over neglected obligations within families and communities. e fact that Abiti Ganzani was refusing to name her accomplices, then, demonstrated that her loyalty to fellow witches outweighed obligations to kin. Among other things, the relatives asserting hard-heartedness would in the future feel less obligated to assist the witch in her hour of need and feel less guilty in refusing her aid. Realizing the futility of pressing further for names of accomplices, Headman Matemia brought the discussion to the point, asking Abiti Ganzani: “What have you planned so that you should cleanse the boy? e day for you to do that is growing closer.” “I have done nothing,” Abiti Ganzani replied. “I just want them to take us to a herbalist, so that we should get cleansed.” “Have you found the healer to do that?” “No.” Evidently annoyed, the headman pressed: “Who will pay for that work that will be done by the healer? is is not done free of charge.” Abiti Ganzani was desperately poor, depending for her survival on handouts from her own relatives, particularly her brother the headman (who, despite his title, was hardly any better off than other villagers) and her nephew Diston, the journal writer. When her last-born daughter died, she was unable to raise the money to buy a winding cloth and reed mat in which to bury her (a sum of MK2,000, or about US$20 at the time), having already sold her only asset, a government-issued fertilizer subsidy coupon, in order to bring her dying daughter home. “I will try my best that I should pay that healer,” said his sister to the chief, her eyes downcast. No one was happy with her response, especially the chief, whose reputation in the village was at stake. ey all knew she had no money to pay for the herbalist. As a witch, she surely should be able to undo her evil handiwork on her own without the assistance of a professional healer. By speaking of the need to engage a healer, she was implicitly deny-

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ing the fact that she was a witch—despite her earlier public confession during the trial. is meant that the lenient selement of the case arrived at in the court—involving merely the cleansing of witchcra , intended as it was to allow the witch and her putative protégé to be reintegrated into the community—would now come undone, subjecting the witch to further trials and harsher penalties, and the family, more particularly the headman, to further embarrassment and shame. e meeting ended without a concrete agreement as to how the cleansing would be arranged. Returning to their various homes, Abiti Ganzani’s relatives grumbled that she was making things tough for herself by not revealing the names of her accomplices. No one had defended her during the meeting; no one raised doubts about her guilt. “She is ready to die for them,” one said, meaning the other unnamed witches—voicing the thought all shared and deepening their resentment as they walked together back to their respective compounds. Despite having long been known as the witch of the family, Abiti Ganzani seems not to have been mistreated in the ordinary course of everyday affairs—at least as she appears in Diston’s chronicle of Matemia Village life. Rather, she seems to have been treated in the regular manner as an elderly impoverished aunt, part of the family. Relatives and neighbors would chat cheerfully with her in the a ernoons, despite knowing her as a witch, sharing local gossip and intrigues. ey would grumble from time to time, without undue malevolence, about her not having raised children to support her in old age. e six children she bore, they would say, were too “movious,” promiscuous. e boys, improvident, were heedless of consequences; the girls all sought lovers in excess of the number they needed to “depend” on for support. All, the word was, eventually killed themselves with AIDS. All of which also suggested that she was a witch. Everyone knows a witch will kill kin, though no one knows how they do it. AIDS, obviously, would be as good a method as any. Despite knowing this, when she grew too old to work in neighbors’ fields, her relatives

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helped her and her orphaned grandchildren when they could. Being a witch is one thing; doing witchcra , another. So long as she was not hurting anyone, Abiti Ganzani could be accepted as part of the family—flawed, potentially dangerous, but included nonetheless. A er all, the five children who had died to date (her last daughter died the following year) were her own. She was the one to suffer most. But this new story, involving Fabson in witchcra , was disturbing to all. Abiti Ganzani only had one of her own children le , a daughter, and she was sick. By making Fabson a witch, she was puing others at risk. Eventually the alloed day arrived when the grandmother was to cleanse the young boy, her pupil, of witchcra . Crowds gathered at the headman’s courtyard to witness the spectacle, though not as many as at the trial. Everyone was eager to see how Abiti Ganzani would go about cleansing the boy. It is not every day that one gets the chance to see a witch in action. Since nobody knows what witchcra is, or how a witch does what he or she does, everyone is curious when one is called to account. Once again, because the headman’s sister was the subject of the proceedings, other headmen were there to relieve him of his duties and ensure impartiality. A er the requisite opening for malities were concluded, Abiti Ganzani was directed to do what she had prepared for the cleansing to take place, as she had agreed at the trial. But she did nothing. She had prepared nothing. She merely stood silently, head bowed. Murmurs of discontent swept across the crowd. e presiding headman called for quiet as angry words began raining down on the witch. By failing to cleanse the boy, Abiti Ganzani had repudiated her previous commitment to the court. She was flaunting her witchcra in their faces. e crowd was furious. People began shouting over each other, demanding justice. e headmen and counselors struggled to call the court to order. When order was finally restored, the chairman ruled that the case would be reopened. Immediately. Several people quickly rose to speak, demanding that the other woman named by the child be called to the court

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to answer the charges as well. A messenger was dispatched to bring her to the assembly. When she arrived a short time later, the crowd erupted in cheers and clapping. Finally, they were going to get the truth about the witchcra plaguing the village. But when the woman was asked about her role in the child’s story, she denied being involved. She said she knew nothing about teaching anyone witchcra . Despite repeated questioning, she maintained her innocence. is obstinacy in the face of clear proof, as revealed by the child’s testimony, angered the crowd once again. e complainant who had brought the case to the court in the first place, the boy’s paternal grandfather, was livid. He announced that he had changed his mind about allowing the cleansing and was now going to take the case to the higher court of the TA Luka for further hearings. Chief Matemia, the accused’s brother, agreed. His sister was proving a major headache. Ultimately, as head of the family, he knew he would be held responsible for her behavior. e meeting closed and the headman wrote a leer for the complainant to take to the TA, granting permission, according to protocol, for the maer to be brought forward. A week later, Chief Matemia received a summons from TA Luka, requesting his aendance at the TA’s court in the nearby town one week hence and instructing him to bring along the two grandmothers and the four children named in the witchcra case. ey were told to bring the sum of MK500 (about US$5 at the time) as a summons fee. When the day appointed for the hearing arrived, however, Abiti Ganzani’s case at the TA’s court had to be postponed, as there was to be a funeral in Chief Matemia’s village. e deceased was the widow of a neighboring village’s headman, subordinate to Chief Matemia. e headman had died a year or so before, a er a long illness. His wife died with similar symptoms, suggesting the same disease. At the funeral, she was described in a eulogy as a “well-mannered” person. In a country where tens of thousands of people were dying each year of AIDS, and had been for nearly two decades, everyone present would have known what that meant:

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that she had been faithful and thus was not to blame for her death. None of the speakers at this funeral of this well-mannered widow, however, said publicly what would have been obvious to all: that her husband had killed her. In private conversations, however, tongues were set free. “Her husband was a delivery driver at Siku Transport Company in Blantyre and was promiscuous,” one mourner noted to Diston quietly a er the burial, “while the deceased herself was so faithful to her husband that she has died innocently.” Victims and perpetrators, innocence and guilt—these are the stuff of narratives of death, for stories of untimely death must answer one burning question: Who is to blame? Yet while gossipers speculated about AIDS and the family eulogized her good manners, it was the presiding pastor’s sermon that really started people talking. A member of the Zambezi Evangelical Church, a Baptist ministry founded more than a century ago by Australian missionaries, the pastor started mildly enough, reading from the Gospel of John (14:2) the piece about the many rooms in the Father’s house—which is a reassuring text to preach at funerals, suggesting as it does the comforting thought that the deceased, despite her human flaws, will find a home in heaven. He then went on to remind people of the need to repent, since one day we all will die—and, without repentance, there will be no salvation, the doors of the Father’s house remaining closed. Such reminders are funereal commonplaces. en, rising to the occasion, as pastors are wont to do before a captive audience, he denounced the sinfulness rampant in the village—including, for some reason, the appalling sin of incest. But the pastor neither dwelled on details nor named names on the incest front, for he had a more important point to make: “And the other thing we are hearing,” he bellowed, addressing the crowd of several hundred without the benefit of amplification, “is that some people in this village are teaching witchcra to the children so that such witches do kill some people through magic as is the case here, where those witches do kill that person before his or her actual God’s planned time for death is there, which is bad.” e pastor,

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as the master of ceremonies, was delivering the official verdict on the widow’s death: She was killed by witches! For the pastor to speak so without approval of the family would have been unconscionable. Narrating a death is a highly political act, since the answer to the question Who is to blame?— which every narrative of death must answer—can have serious consequences. Had he chosen to speak of AIDS as the cause of death, in the manner of the gossipers reported by Diston, he would have been indicting the deceased husband, sparking outrage, most likely, among his family and friends. By naming the widow’s killer as one in the village who was teaching children witchcra , however, the pastor was making an even more dramatic accusation. Everyone knew to whom he was referring— Abiti Ganzani, Chief Matemia’s sister, and her so-far-unnamed accomplices. Anyone in the assembly who was not aware of his references, upon hearing the pastor speak would have sought out someone who knew and would have been readily informed of the case pending at the TA’s court. e pastor’s mention of witchcra aroused a general murmuring of approval, seing heads nodding in agreement. Everyone present, according to Diston, was “happy” that the pastor spoke as he did. Everyone, that is, except the witch’s brother, Chief Matemia. For the chief, his sister’s case was becoming a political burden, potentially undermining his authority as group village headman. Had the witch not already been found guilty in the chief ’s court, it is unlikely the pastor would have been so brazen in making the additional accusation. Holding the chief ’s sister publicly responsible for the widow’s death, as the pastor did, increased pressure on the chief to make sure the case was dealt with thoroughly and impartially. At the very least, he had to compel his sister to renounce her witchcra in public, reveal her accomplices, and cleanse her pupils of all evil influences. A week later, the case of Abiti Ganzani and her accomplices was finally called at the TA’s court. All of the people named by her grandson were present: two older women and four children.

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ey were accompanied by scores of relatives and neighbors, along with a slew of headmen from surrounding villages, plus throngs of curious onlookers. e TA’s seat is in a trading center, a selement with market stalls that is somewhat smaller than a small town but inhabited by more strangers than any village. Many people pass through the market for the day, and most have time to spare. Most of the onlookers in the audience at the TA’s court this day would have been gathered there for sport. ey would not have known the protagonists or their families personally; nor would they have known the complex knot of stories behind the stories told in court. But upon hearing of witches being tried for their crimes, they would have eagerly gathered to see justice done. A er the TA’s senior counselor had dispensed with the customary prayers, invocations, salutations, greetings, and instructions to the crowd, the children named by Fabson, his fellow students of witchcra , were called to testify. One a er another they appeared before the assembly and stood firm. ey refused to accept that they were involved with the evil trade of witchcra . ey denied all complicity in the old woman’s incubator of evil. ey claimed to know nothing about the witchcra airplane, in which Fabson had been promised the job of pilot. But the questioning persisted. One a er another, the TA’s four counselors rose, pressing the same questions: Why would this boy make this up? Why would he name you and not others? Time and again, the children replied with the same answer: I don’t know. With each denial, the crowd expressed their growing disapproval. But the questioning was relentless. Eventually, the children—potentially co-accused children—admied that they did in fact practice witchcra , as Fabson had revealed, along with Fabson and the two grandmothers—one of whom, Abiti Ganzani, had already been convicted. e confessions were greeted with relief by all present. Devoid of options, the other grandmother, who had denied all involvement in witchcra to this point, had no choice but to confirm the

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accusations. To do otherwise would be to eliminate the possibility of mercy from the court. Her fate rested in the hands of the chief, in this case the TA. Yet the chief was in a bind, too. Without her confession, he risked discontent. Witchcra accusations are rarely unchallenged, but it is a hugely complicated maer to figure out the social implications of any particular verdict. Only with the witch’s voluntary acceptance of her misdeeds could the punishment be inflicted, the healing commence, and harmony be restored to the community. When the investigative and interrogatory proceedings were completed, it was the TA’s turn to speak. Before passing judgment, TA Luka reminded the gathering that in the past people who were found to be practicing witchcra were chased away and banished from the area. ese days, he told the assembly, if witches continue to deny their practice a er a child has revealed what they are doing, their cases are given to the police and taken to the magistrate court, where they can be sentenced to ten years in jail. Of course, under the terms of the Witchcra Act, such action by the police and courts would be completely illegal. As we shall see, however, in practice the police and courts are actively involved, along with traditional authorities, in aempting to resolve these issues. In conclusion, TA Luka decreed that the two accused adults must pay fines of MK3,000 (about US$30) each, while for the children their families were required to raise MK2,500 (about US$25) to pay for a healer to come and cleanse them of witchcra . ey were given one week to raise the money. e leniency of this sentence caused some discontent in the village, considering the seriousness of the crime. People speculated that it was favoritism because the main accused witch was Chief Matemia’s sister. Despite the relatively small sums involved, about the price of a goat at the time, the convicted witches were unable to raise the money to pay their fines. Adding to their misfortunes, a couple of weeks a er TA Luka passed judgment, Fabson, the boy whose accusations had started the whole affair, fell ill. e child had been

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sickly for some time, probably suffering from pediatric AIDS. According to his family, however, he had been struck down by magic during the night, as his maternal grandparents reported to Chief Matemia—suggesting that the witches’ promises to cease their activities was somewhat less than entirely sincere. Hearing this news, Chief Matemia returned to TA Luka, who instructed him to bring the witches to his court the next day. Luka was extremely angry, threatening to have them imprisoned without further hearing. (Again, TAs are not legally permied to issue custodial sentences, but if he wanted to, TA Luka could hand the witches over to the police, who would lock them up and bring charges against them.) In the end, the witches were not imprisoned, but the saga dragged on for another two months until May, when Chief Matemia raised the money for a healer himself, arranging for the witch and her acolytes to be cleansed of witchcra in a private ritual at his compound. e child’s illness not only delayed the cleansing but also underscored its importance, for his health depended on being free of witchcra . In December the issue of witchcra was back in Chief Matemia’s court. Once again Fabson’s family was involved. is time, his aunt, the daughter of the grandfather who reported Fabson’s case to the chief, was being challenged for accusing a neighbor of bewitching her ten-year-old daughter, causing her to fall sick. She had denounced the neighbor in public, causing the neighbor to report her accuser to the chief ’s court. But unlike in the earlier case, where the child spoke directly of his being taught witchcra , the accuser in this new case was unable to produce evidence that the neighbor was the one “masterminding,” in Diston’s term, the daughter’s illness. Chief Matemia ruled that she was making false accusations and, since she was involved in bringing the earlier accusations against Abiti Ganzani, ordered her to be sent to TA Luka’s court, where she would be dealt with harshly. at way, too, Chief Matemia could avoid being held responsible for the extent of her punishment. Fortunately for the accuser, her father immediately apologized to the chief and the whole village for dis-

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turbing the peace, and their apology was accepted, so she was allowed to return home. She was lucky, for a year or so earlier, she had roused fears in the village by claiming her late aunt, recently buried, had failed to reach her destination and was coming as a vampire to sit on her windowsill at night, causing people in the village to go to bed early for a time for fear of being accosted by a bloodsucker in the dark. By threatening to punish her severely this time, Chief Matemia was reminding people that accusations of witchcra were not to be made lightly and that there were consequences for making accusations without evidence. ough tried and convicted as a witch, when Abiti Ganzani died, less than two years later, her funeral was aended by hundreds of mourners showing respect for the deceased and her kin. She had, a er all, once been headwoman of the village, presiding over trials in the same courtyard that witnessed her shame.

5 The Case of the Kasitos

On the morning of ursday, May 7, 2009, about a month before Mrs. K.’s trial, Masautso Kasito, a fellow resident of Mrs. K.’s in Mponda Village, the selement abuing the hospital, entered the Balaka Police Station to report a crime. His father, sister, and nephew, he informed the police, were teaching witchcra to children in his family. e family had engaged traditional healers, subjected the old man to a poison ordeal, and reported the case to the courts of traditional leaders, he told the officers. But now he feared for his life. e witches were coming for him. e story of how Masautso and his family came to the police in quest of justice and security, a er having tried and failed in the village courts, reveals much about how law actually works. Remember, witch trials are forbidden—for chiefs as well as magistrates—under

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the terms of the Witchcra Act, as are poison ordeals to prove a witch’s guilt. Moreover, there are no formal procedures for transferring cases from the informal courts of traditional leaders to the formal legal system of police and magistrates. Still, Masautso went to the police and the magistrate court a er hearings and ordeals in the chiefs’ courts. And the police, in court, applauded his “courage” in doing so. A er all, it is no small maer to take on those with superhuman powers. According to court records (the same court that subsequently heard the case of Mrs. K.), Detective Sub-Inspector Gauti of the Malawi Police Service recorded Masautso Kasito’s statement. He later told the court: In brief, the story is that it is some time back he himself, the reporter [Masautso], fell sick—general body pains—and in the course of that he visited a herbalist and he was told that he had been hit with a hammer by the three suspects. at he then a er a few days heard from the children who were being taught the witchcra practices. . . . Later one of the relatives in the Kasito family fell sick and that person died and those children revealed that the man had died because he had been hit by a hammer. . . . In view of that this is why Mr. Masautso Kasito gathered courage to report the maer at our office.

In his statement to the police, Masautso also reported he had learned from one of the children that when the witches had failed to kill him with their “hammer,” they had tried to persuade the children to do the killing. But the children refused. At that point, Shybu (the son of Masautso’s sister Annie, who will also figure in the story), killed his uncle Fabiano, Masautso’s brother, with the hammer. A traditional healer—“herbalist”—then revealed to Masautso that he was to be the next victim, selling him “charms” for protection. e police documented all these facts from Masau-

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tso’s complaint, neglecting to mention that the Witchcra Act actually outlaws the techniques of divination that the herbalist used in order to detect this threat to the complainant. At the trial, DSI Gauti commended Masautso Kasito for his courage in coming forward. Clearly, as the intended victim, Masautso felt himself to be in immediate danger. He also knew that unless they were stopped, he would not be the witches’ last victim. As he reported to the court, he had first consulted traditional healers and received “charms” to protect against the witches. Despite being so fortified, or perhaps emboldened by being so, he decided to take direct action against the malefactors. A er all, it is no small maer to take on people with superhuman powers without arming yourself beforehand. He also turned to his local traditional leaders for protection, taking the case to his village headman– the chief who deals with most maers of local contention—and then the group village headman, a higher-level chief, both of whom held public hearings and prescribed remedies involving trips by family members to traditional healers. But these efforts proved inadequate. Only a er all other possible avenues had been exhausted did he turn to the police. To his credit, he had not, so far, taken the law into his own hands this time or taken any actions that might have stirred up a vengeful mob as happened on the day his brother died. A er hearing Masautso’s story, DSI Gauti summoned the children to the police station so he could hear the story directly from the victims. As he testified in court, when asked for their stories, the Kasito children—Vincent (age eleven), Trintas (age seven), and Davie (age ten)—contended that they were being taught witchcra practices by three relatives—their greatgrandfather, Bartret Kasito; Bartret’s daughter Annie Ulambo (their great-aunt); and their uncle, Annie’s son Shybu Osman. DSI Gauti then opened a docket laying charges against the three under the Witchcra Act. He summoned the suspects to the station and formally charged them with the crime. When Annie Ulambo, Masautso Kasito’s thirty-eight-year-

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old sister, heard she was wanted at the Balaka Police Station, she assumed it was in regard to an assault she had recently suffered at the hands of some nephews. On the night her brother Fabiano died, his sons dragged her from her bed and beat her severely— “to the extent of not being able to walk,” she later told the court. She was accused of being a witch and killing her brother through witchcra . Earlier that same night, before Fabiano died, her brother Masautso—who later made the charge with the police— had confronted her with the same accusation and swore, as she later told the court, that when their brother was buried, “she too would be buried.” A er the beating, Annie contemplated reporting the affair to the police but decided not to do so since it would result in the boys being “put in custody,” which would only make maers worse for her. When she answered the summons and arrived at the police station, however, she was stunned to find that she was the one being arrested. She was charged with the crime of witchcra and imprisoned. When the trial began, Annie was listed as the “Second Accused.” Annie’s son Shybu was at school when his mother was arrested. Twenty years old at the time, Shybu was a pupil in Form 4 at a private school in Balaka Town, preparing to write his Malawi School Certificate of Education examinations. As he told the court, he was shocked when he returned home to find his mother had been arrested. He was even more shocked to hear from his uncle George that the police had sent a leer with a summons for him to report to the police station as well. Shybu was named as the “ird Accused.” e “First Accused” was eighty-seven-year-old Bartret Kasito —father of Masautso, Annie, and the deceased Fabiano; grandfather of Shybu; great-grandfather of the children making the accusations. Although this was the first time he had been arrested by the police, he had been suspected for years of being a witch and had appeared several times before village-level tribunals in Mponda to answer charges of witchcra . Recently he had been required to appear at a succession of public hearings in

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chiefs’ courts, having been charged with teaching witchcra to children, including his own great-grandchildren. Masautso, who brought the charges to the magistrate court, was not the only one of his children making accusations against their father. Working his way up from the village headman’s court to the group village headman’s court to the sub-traditional authority’s court—each presided over by “traditional” authorities responsible for progressively larger aggregations of residents in an area—he had been required to respond to the accusations of this crime. According to later testimony presented in the magistrate court, the headmen had dispatched him to a herbalist to undergo an ordeal, which he successfully endured. DSI Gauti and his colleagues remanded the suspects in custody and questioned them at length. Conditions in the prison were harsh, particularly for the elderly Bartret Kasito, who later complained to the court that none of his children had come to bring him food or tobacco. He “hastened to say,” however, as the magistrate later reported, that “he was not backbiting anybody.” Mr. Kasito did not need any more enemies. e accused witches were arraigned, according to procedure, in the dock of the Balaka Magistrate Court. ey were read their rights and charged under the Witchcra Act, which makes it illegal to represent oneself as a witch or to make claims about having or exercising the power of witchcra —though the police did not specify under which provision of the act they were being charged. All of the accused pleaded not guilty and were remanded in custody for trial in the court of Magistrate First Grade Damson Banda. e transcript of the trial says lile about the prosecutor’s choice of a witchcra charge. Given that the conflict hinged on interpretation of the death of Fabiano as a murder resulting from an assault with a magic hammer, one might be excused for thinking that some variety of homicide might be the most appropriate charge. Indeed, Magistrate Banda, in ruling on the case, did note at one point that if sufficient evidence had been collected to implicate the third accused in the death of his uncle, he should have

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been charged with murder under c/s 209 of the penal code in the High Court of Malawi. We shall see later what Magistrate Banda thought of that idea, but from the perspectives of both the court and the community, the indoctrination of children into witchcra is a far more serious crime—so witchcra was the charge. e case against the Bartret, Annie, and Shybu was heard in the Balaka Magistrate Court in June 2009, with Magistrate First Grade Damson Banda presiding. e transcript does not specify the date of the hearing, though judgment was handed down on the twenty-ninth of that month. e trial began with police prosecutor, Sub-Inspector Mponela, calling his first witness: elevenyear-old Vincent Kasito. Before the boy could be sworn in, Magistrate Banda conducted a voir dire examination; he was aware of the problems with the testimony of children in witchcra trials, so he was careful in each instance to make sure that the young witnesses knew the meaning of “truth” and “God” and understood the consequences of telling a lie under oath. But he also knew that the testimony of children might be the only way of knowing the truth about what had happened to them. e testimony of children, as developmental and forensic psychologists have shown, is deeply problematic (Mart 2010). In the United States, systematic research on the reliability of children’s testimony really only began a er a disastrous series of criminal trials in the 1980s based on rumors of satanic child sex abuse at day-care centers. We now have good evidence, however, to show not only how children’s testimony can be shaped in response to interlocutors in interview situations (Ceci and Bruck 2006), but how memories of experiences can be falsely created in response to rumors and overheard suggestions in their social groups (Principe et al., 2012; Principe et al. 2010). Children, bless them, also lie (Talwar and Crossman 2012). In a context where stories of witches and their cra circulate widely and are recounted avidly, o en inspiring real terror, it is not surprising that children sometimes sincerely report having been taught witchcra or tell of performing outlandish acts in defiance of the laws of physics and morality.

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Once the magistrate determined that the boy Vincent was of “sufficient intelligence” to give sworn evidence, he was sworn in and proceeded to tell a shocking story. Vincent testified that the first accused, his great-grandfather, had taught him witchcra . e old man used to come to Vincent at night and “sprinkle some herbs on him.” When this happened, the boy told the court, “he would wake up and go to his [great-]aunt” Annie, the second accused—although what he did with this aunt was unclear. He apparently spent some time with her; however, it was only “later” that he would wake the other two children and Shybu, the third accused, for their nocturnal adventures. Together “they used to go to the graveyard on an aeroplane,” a magical plane, of course. At the graveyard, they would play football with the head of their deceased infant cousin, Anastaziya. A er football, “they would eat human flesh” from disinterred corpses. One night, Vincent testified, the three accused witches attempted to persuade the children to kill their uncle Masautso, but the children refused. en the third accused—Shybu—proceeded to kill Fabiano by hiing him with a hammer on the head until “he started vomiting blood.” (e boy did not mention whether this uncle was physically present at the graveyard with them when this murder occurred.) Vincent concluded his testimony by telling the court that “a er the graveyard games they were flown home and come the next morning they would go for classes as pupils” at their regular schools. Following the conclusion of his sworn testimony, Vincent was subjected to cross-examination by the three accused. ey all challenged his story, but he stood firm. Under cross-examination by his great-grandfather, Bartret Kasito, he insisted “that he had told the court the truth that by night times they [the accused] have been teaching him to practice witchcra .” He repeated the same accusation when his aunt Annie confronted him. Facing Shybu, Vincent accused him to his face of killing their uncle with a hammer. e next witness called was Vincent’s younger sister, Trintas.

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With Trintas, the voir dire examination presented a problem. When questioned by the magistrate, she had said: “I do not know God and I do not know Satan.” As a result, the magistrate concluded that “she did not understand the significance of an oath” and thus could not be allowed to give sworn testimony. She was still allowed to testify, however, only not under oath. In her unsworn testimony, Trintas confirmed the story about the children’s trips to the graveyard to eat human flesh, this time adding the detail that her great-grandfather was the pilot of the airplane and had instructed the children “to never reveal what he does with them by nighime.” Like her brother Vincent, she did not flinch under cross-examination. When challenged by her greataunt Annie, she retorted that “she [Annie] knows what she [Trintas] is talking about” because she is one of those who “comes to pick them by night times for witchcra practices.” When questioned by the magistrate about whether she was a witch, Trintas told the court that “she was a witch in the past but she is now not.” During the voir dire examination, she had told the magistrate, “I go to church so that witchcra practices should go.” Like the children in the case of Mrs. K., her parents had sought protection through prayer. ey also sought traditional means of protection through treatments by a “herbalist.” As another son of the old man later testified, following the deaths of the infant Anastaziya and the uncle Fabiano, herbalists had cleansed all the young children in the family. Like Trintas, ten-year-old Davie Kasito was found by Magistrate Banda during the voir dire examination to be incapable of testifying under oath. In his case the problem was that “he does not know the reasons why one should not tell lies.” In his unsworn testimony, however, Davie also corroborated everything the court had been told about the witchcra in the family and asserted, further, that all the children in the family had been taught, not just the three present in the courtroom as prosecution witnesses. He confirmed that they used to fly at night, play football with Anastaziya’s head, and eat human flesh at the graveyard. To

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the general narrative, he added this detail: “ey had been instructed to kill uncles but they did not manage to do so.” Instead they had flown to Machinjiri, about seventy-five miles away on the outskirts of Blantyre, where Shybu had killed Fabiano with a hammer. He also told the court that these activities had stopped since the arrest of his relatives. With Davie’s testimony concluded, the prosecution rested its case. At this point, the magistrate was required to make a judgment as to whether the evidence available was sufficient for the case to proceed. He could have declared the case closed, ordered the charges withdrawn, and sent everyone home. Indeed, an observer less auned to the implications of the case might conclude that he should have so ruled, since not only did the case rest on the sworn testimony of a single child, but also the accused were charged with a crime that does not exist. As the magistrate would remind the court later, the Witchcra Act merely outlaws the pretense of witchcra , not the fact of being a witch. Section 6 of the act, he told them, states that “any person who by his statements or actions represents to be a wizard or as having or exercising the power of witchcra shall be liable for a fine of 50 pounds [the colonial-era currency] and to imprisonment for 10 years.” However, this section, as the magistrate pointed out at various moments in the trial, “penalizes any pretenses to witchcra , while the whole act ironically does not recognize the practice of witchcra .” In this case, therefore, the police had charged three defendants with something that is not a crime. Why, then, did the magistrate allow the trial to proceed? When we met in 2013, Magistrate Banda took pains to explain to me that there are in fact things that happen that only witchcra can explain. “I know about these things,” he said. “I live in the community.” He told me a story of when he was a young boy. One night when he was out harvesting termites from their mound with some friends, he saw a ball of fire rising up above the height of the trees. “ere are wizards there,” he said to his friends as they watched in amazement. “So these things really

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happen,” he told me. “ey cannot be explained.” In the Kasito case, the magistrate knew perfectly well that he would be conducting a witch trial. e fact that witchcra is not illegal and that the police therefore made a mistake in formulating the charge was a minor technicality. e magistrate also knew that a refusal to hear the case in full would have le everyone dissatisfied—not only the accused (and accusing) family, but also the citizens of the town at large. Trust in the authority of his court and his office would be undermined. People would feel vulnerable. e result, he told me, would be people taking the law into their own hands. So, rather than shuing down proceedings by noting the police’s mistake and closing the book on the case, the wise magistrate heard the case in full. Well aware of the limits of the law, he took upon himself the responsibility of assessing the evidence of actual witchcra as well as the evidence of infringement of the formal law. Despite the fact that the three accused denied “in totality” the charge of practicing witchcra , they might still be guilty of pretending to the powers thereof, thus being in contravention of section 6 of the act. If it could be proved that they did actually aempt to teach the children witchcra , that would indicate a pretense to the powers of a witch and constitute an offense under the terms of the act. Indeed, even if it turned out that they were technically innocent of infractions of the law, the magistrate had to consider that they might in fact be witches and thus pose the sort of danger to society that a magistrate is duty bound to forestall. ey might even be guilty of practicing witchcra —in this case, teaching children the trade—while yet being safe from conviction by virtue of their refusal to confess. “Sometimes a case may fail because of a technicality,” he told me later, “and people will be very upset. Sometimes, you know things are happening but you have to dismiss the case on a technicality.” e magistrate understood these issues and how people feel about them. His job, as he saw it, was to make sure that conflicts are resolved within the framework of the law, without people taking the law into their

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own hands and commiing crimes against suspected witches by beating or even killing them. In announcing to the court his decision to proceed with the case, the magistrate did not elaborate on the legal reasoning he had followed, much less the extra-legal complexities described above. He merely stated there was a case to answer: “e Prosecution closed their case and then this court made a ruling of a case to answer on the charge leveled against them.” In general, the standard of proof for such a ruling is prima facie evidence: the determination that “a reasonable tribunal, properly directing its mind to the law and evidence could convict if no explanation is offered by the defense.”1 Magistrate Banda, then, judged that the stories told by the children of their flying through the night to eat human flesh in graveyards under the tutelage of their three relatives were, on the face of it, plausible. It was now up to the defense to present the counter-argument. e magistrate would then weigh the evidence. Magistrate Banda’s commitment to the rules of evidence can be seen in the opening of his wrien judgment in the case, where he engages in an extended discussion of the concept of “beyond a reasonable doubt”—the standard of proof required for conviction in a criminal case. He quotes at length the famous judgment of Lord Denning in the case of Miller vs. Ministry of Pensions (1947 2AllER 372) in which the English lord defines reasonable doubt as meaning: “It need not reach certainty, but it must carry a high degree of probability.” In his ruling, Magistrate Banda also takes pains to emphasize that in a criminal case, the “burden of proof” lies on the prosecution, and the accused is innocent until proven guilty. Like the vast majority of people subject to the common law, Magistrate Banda was probably unaware that these bedrock prin1. is quotation, taken from the judgment in another of Magistrate Banda’s trial, derives from the 1961 guidance of the Chief Justice of England, Lord Parker (1 All E.R. 448 [1962]), which was incorporated into Malawian legal procedure by the High Court in the 1970s. See High Court of Malawi, No. 208 of 2003, Republic vs. Gwazantini.

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ciples of evidence and procedure had roots in English witch trials of the seventeenth century, or rather in the absence of witch trials. Let me explain. For roughly a century and a half, until 1736, witchcra was a crime punishable by death in England. Even a er passage of the Witchcra Act, prohibiting witch trials, witches were very much feared in England, by educated and uneducated people alike. A er the mid-seventeenth century, however, relatively few witches were brought to trial, despite the fact that the main manuals for magistrates instructed that, given the inherent problems of evidence in such cases, “half proofs, or probable presumptions” were sufficient for indictment, leading the historian of law Barbara Shapiro to conclude that despite popular pressure, magistrates were reluctant to bring witchcra cases forward because of difficulties of proof (Shapiro 1991, 166–67). It is also possible that English police and magistrates turned a blind eye or were unduly lenient in cases of assault against known witches, though this issue has not been researched by historians of English witchcra to the best of my knowledge. Like his seventeenth-century predecessors, Magistrate Banda was reluctant to take on witchcra cases, but would do so when necessary—as in the case of the Kasitos. Magistrate Banda faced a daunting task when he ruled that the case could proceed and the three accused Kasitos had to respond to the charges. In hearing the case, he knew he would have to determine, mostly on the basis of evidence presented by children, whether or not the three accused persons were in fact witches. He would also have to dispense justice in a way that not only punished these particular wrongdoers, but also gave citizens at large a sense of security from possible future crimes of witchcra . And he had to do all this in a context in which witchcra is not recognized as a crime by the law governing his court, where his judgment could be taken on appeal to the High Court. In ruling that the accused did indeed have a case to answer, he showed he was prepared to take on this challenge. e trial proper commenced.

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e first defense witness to be called was Bartret Kasito, the first accused. He told the court that he was a retired builder, originally from Zomba (a town some fi y miles distant and the old colonial capital) but currently living in Balaka Town, in Mangelengele Location, where he engaged in “small business.” Mangelengele is a relatively prosperous part of Balaka. As residents of this neighborhood, the Kasitos were, if not exactly affluent, most likely not impoverished. Mr. Kasito opened his defense by telling the court that “before this case started he has ever [sic] been taken to herbalists to undergo some herbal ordeal/tests on [the] allegation that he is a wizard and that he has ever [sic] been given herbs and told that he would die within five days but here he is.” Mr. Kasito, whose ethnicity is not noted in the wrien judgment, would most likely have been speaking in Chichewa, the national language, when addressing the court. e court’s judgment, wrien in English— the official language—does not mention the precise Chichewa word he used to describe his experience with the herbalists, but the magistrate translated it as “herbal ordeal/tests.” is was the central pillar of Mr. Kasito’s defense: that a er one of the hearings in the chief ’s court, he had been sent to a herbalist and given “herbs,” which, he was told, would kill him within five days if he were a “wizard.” Mr. Kasito clearly believed that if he had failed the test, he would be dead. at he was still alive surely was proof that he was not a witch and therefore could not be guilty of teaching children witchcra . e magistrate did not comment on Mr. Kasito’s testimony regarding the hearings before the village headmen—although since the hearing of such cases by chiefs is illegal under the terms of the Witchcra Act, he could have taken the opportunity to make this point had he wished to. Nor did Magistrate Banda in his judgment comment on Mr. Kasito’s testimony about his “ordeal”—another interesting omission, since the same Witchcra Act under which the Kasitos were charged also outlaws such ordeals. Indeed, since the same act outlaws the making of accusa-

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tions, by a strict legal reckoning Mr. Kasito’s accusers were the individuals who should be on trial. Wise to his duty to uphold respect for his court, the magistrate chose to ignore these technicalities in favor of dealing with the substantive issue of whether children were being taught witchcra . is was a question for which the whole community demanded an answer. If Mr. Kasito had in fact been subjected to a poison ordeal, how would he, and those who administered and witnessed the procedure, imagine it was supposed to work? What principles of evidence constituted the ordeal as “proof ”? In twel h-century Europe, ordeals were a central element of the criminal justice system. By requiring a defendant to plunge an arm into a cauldron of boiling water or grasp a red-hot poker in his bare hand, courts imagined themselves calling upon God to give the sign of innocence or guilt though the wounds, or lack thereof, that resulted. Pope Innocent III banned the procedure in 1215 as blasphemous in presuming to force God to pass judgment for the convenience of mortals. e pope also knew that the procedure was unreliable and could easily be manipulated to achieve the desired outcome (Pollock and Maitland 1911). African ordeals involve a similar dynamic of supernatural verification. Working through the medium of poisonous herbs, invisible beings, who by their very nature can detect actions and beings that are invisible to ordinary mortals, pass verdict on the persons undergoing the ordeal. Canny healers could also vary the dosage to support the spirits in their decisions on innocence and guilt. Poison ordeals in central Africa seem to have been fairly common before colonial conquest and persisted in the early decades of the twentieth century under colonial rule, despite efforts to suppress them (Chanock 1985, 95). Colonial-era witchcra ordinances outlawed ordeals, but they continued nonetheless— puing the herbalists who administered the medicine and the chiefs who authorized the procedure at risk of arrest on charges of murder. Witchcra Acts, it seems, carried less weight than the papal decree of Innocent III. In colonial Nyasaland, magistrates

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dealing with cases of death by ordeal were instructed to distinguish between cases in which the procedure was requested by the victim in order to prove innocence, and those that were forced upon an unwilling victim in order to verify guilt. In both instances, however, the crime was to be treated as “manslaughter” rather than “murder,” with penalties weighed accordingly. Mr. Kasito, at age eighty-seven, was old enough to have witnessed in his youth poison ordeals similar to those described in colonial-era ethnographies. In the 1960s, the English anthropologist Max Marwick, writing of witchcra in neighboring Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), for example, described at length the mwavi (or mwabvi) ordeal in which the bark of the tree Erythrophleum africanum was boiled in water and an infusion administered to suspects, sometimes individually, sometimes en masse (Marwick 1965, 88). e innocent would vomit up the brew; the guilty would die. us was justice done. Participants in the ritual understood the action of the active elements of mwavi not in terms of toxicology but rather a medium through which spiritual power operated. Given the secret, inherently unknowable nature of witchcra , the forensic procedure of the poison ordeal served an invaluable social function. e English anthropologist Mary Douglas, who worked in the region in the late colonial period, summed up the virtues of the ordeal thus: e verdict of the poison ordeal was above challenge. If a man survived it, he confounded his accusers. e whole knot of antagonisms and accusations, which probably carried many charges of sorcery, was cut. Of the many who took the ordeal at one time, some did not survive, and the whole onus of the refuted charge was passed on to the dead. e acquied man could demand compensation, and start again, richer and more powerful than before. If he died, convicted, his physical existence was cut off at the point where social life had become impossible. His kin and supporters had no

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longer any grounds for taking his point in the village. ey had no choice but to pay compensation for the deaths he had caused, and this done, they could start again in a new alignment of social forces. (Douglas 1963, 135)

As one informant informed Douglas, it was not the poison that actually killed the witch but rather “the hand of God”—much as in the European ordeals of old. Unfortunately for old Mr. Kasito, however, the verdict of his ordeal turned out not to have been above challenge. According to the court record of his testimony, Mr. Kasito underwent the ordeal and survived, yet failed to persuade his accusers of his innocence. Most of his children remained convinced he was a witch. At the trial in the magistrate court, even witnesses for the defense, including his son Humphrey and his daughter Annie, the co-accused, testified to that effect. Annie testified that at one point, as the family saga unfolded, she had gone so far as to ask her father directly whether he was or wasn’t a “wizard,” and he had denied the charge. But as Annie told the court, if he were in fact a wizard, she did “not think that he would have told her so.” Such is the witch’s paradox: the only way for the innocent to escape suspicion is to falsely admit guilt before renouncing witchcra and seeking forgiveness, for the true witch will always deny the charge, so no amount of denial by the innocent will satisfy accusers. One possible reason that the ordeal failed to vindicate Mr. Kasito in the eyes of his family and community was that it was not actually an ordeal. Mr. Kasito’s son Humphrey told the court that a er the hearings in the chiefs’ courts, his father had been “given a leer to go to an Herbalist together with the grandchildren . . . and that they went and were there for one week[,] the herbalist casting out from them witchcra powers.” Assuming this is the same event that Mr. Kasito called an “ordeal,” it would not have functioned in the way that Mr. Kasito claimed it did—as a kind of forensic procedure assigning innocence or guilt. e business

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Humphrey described was more in the nature of an actual judicial sentence, a consequence of confirmed guilt, and a procedure for preventing his re-offending. By Humphrey’s account, it would seem that rather than punish the old man with banishment from the area (or, in the extreme, order him killed), as might have happened in days of old, the chief was seeking a form of restorative justice through reconciliation. By sending the old man and the children to the herbalist for cleansing, a ritual predicated upon confession and renunciation of witchcra , the chief was opening the way for the old man and his young pupils, the child witches, to be reintegrated into their families and the community. Indeed, in his testimony, Humphrey suggested that this was in fact what had occurred, for a er the trip to the herbalist, another brother, George, “briefed him [Humphrey] that the 1st accused confessed that he was wrong on what he was doing and they shared gi s of clothes and that by then the 1st accused was staying at his house.” By accommodating his father in his home, George was signaling that the witchcra was in the past. Was Mr. Kasito, then, subjected to an ordeal or a cleansing? e old man, insisting on having survived an ordeal, may have been confused about what really happened to him. His family and others in the community, not having been present at the event, may have had different opinions about what was going on at the herbalist. From a legal point of view, however, much rides on the answer to this question. According to the Witchcra Act, if it was determined to be an ordeal, both the chief who ordered it and the herbalist who performed it would have been guilty of a criminal offense. On the other hand, if it was to be deemed a cleansing, requiring confession, then the old man would have been guilty of pretending to have the powers of a witch. e fact that the old man stuck to his story about the ordeal having proved his innocence was central to the eventual verdict in the trial, though not because it proved he was not a witch. It proved, rather, that he had not confessed to being a witch, either in the chief ’s court or in the magistrate court.

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Whatever seeds of reconciliation that might have been sown in the Kasito clan by the hearings in the chiefs’ courts and their visits to the herbalists proved short-lived. Within a few months, they were in the magistrate court, litigating a case that, among other things, involved an accusation of aempted murder by means of witchcra and an actual murder by witchcra . ere was a curious irony in the progress of this case, wending as it did through the local hierarchy of customary forums to the courtroom of the First Grade Magistrate Banda bearing the gavel of a legal authority imposed by an imperial power. When the colonial rulers introduced these courts in the early part of the twentieth century, they were bierly resented by Africans, particularly in regard to maers of witchcra . As Martin Chanock observed in his classic study of the history of law in this part of Africa, under the colonial judicial system, African ideas about conciliation, restitution and compensation were given no procedural place, nor were African ideas about which offenses were most seriously punishable. e result was that colonial courts were, in African eyes, unsatisfactory not simply because they punished severely, which they did, but because they treated lightly things which were deeply offensive in African eyes. (Chanock 1985, 50)

In the Kasito case, it seems prospects for conciliation, restitution, and compensation were exhausted when Masautso gave up on the traditional authorities and took his complaint to the police. In order to seek justice, he turned to the colonial heritage of the magistrate court for punishment of witches. Unlike the colonial forebears, contemporary Malawian magistrates take witchcra cases seriously. When the Kasitos’ case came to trial in 2009, as many as one hundred witches were imprisoned in Malawi, either convicted of witchcra or awaiting trial (Association for Secular Humanism 2011). Given the harsh conditions of these prisons, such a fate for the eighty-seven-year-old Bartret Kasito

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would have been tantamount to a death penalty—probably the result that his son desired. e problem confronting the Kasito family when Masautso laid his complaint with the police was both perfectly simple and immensely complicated. Everyone, with the exception of Bartret himself, agreed that the old man was a witch—though they disagreed about who else was involved with him in the evil “trade.” As a witch, he was a serious threat to the health and safety of his family and community. But short of killing him, it was not clear what else could be done to stop his witchcra . He had been beaten, threatened, cleansed by a healer, and chased away from each of his children’s homes. Despite all these efforts, however, his son Fabiano died. is death, for many in the family, revealed once again that witchcra was still rampant, indicating that the old man was unrepentant and unreformed. Yet, despite these suspicions, his daughter Annie had continued caring for her father, giving him a place to stay, food, and a lile cash. Unfortunately for her, she later realized, helping the old man in this way had provoked her siblings to implicate her in the old man’s evil cra . For, surely, only a witch would tolerate another witch in her home. At the heart of the complex knot of this troubled family’s relationships was an intractable problem of knowledge and authority. ey had passed the point of wondering whether or not the old man was a witch. Now they needed to know how to protect themselves. No available authority—political or judicial, from the village headmen up through the ranks to the sub-TA—could provide the security their plight demanded. Herbalists had tried, and failed, to put an end to the danger. According to court records, members of the family—including all of the accused—had consulted traditional healers on at least four separate occasions and at considerable expense. Some in the family had turned to their church, where they evidently hoped, in the words of the child Trintas, that “this witchcra should go.” Despite all this effort and expense, they remained insecure. Indeed, Masautso, the

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person who brought this maer to the aention of the court, was living in fear for his life. In order to arrive at a judgment, Magistrate Banda had to piece together an account of the Kasito family quarrels in all their myriad details. Si ing through the evidence presented by the various members of the family—three witnesses for the prosecution, the three accused, and the uncle Humphrey, who testified for the defense—took sixteen of the twenty-two single-spaced pages of the judgment. Among other disputes, the judgment tells of the time, some years earlier, when Annie’s house was “torched” because she was suspected of witchcra ; and of the time the uncle Fabiano confronted her while he was drunk and then sought forgiveness in the morning for calling her a witch; how her nieces regularly taunted her; how her nephews beat her when Fabiano died; how her children were threatened and her house almost burned down again when her brother died. From the skeins of this testimony, an image emerges of an extended family spanning four generations riven by fear, distrust, resentment, and violence. In the words of Shybu, the third accused, relationships in the family were “sour.” e three accused family members denied being witches, though they acknowledged that witchcra was rampant all around them. ey also all agreed on one point: that the three children present in court had in fact been taught witchcra . e question, pressing on all, was this: Who was teaching the children? Figuring this out became the magistrate’s burden. In passing judgment, Magistrate Banda began by summarizing the evidence, which, as we have seen, took some time. He followed with a brief explanation of the legal issues in question. “Ironically,” he told the court, the Witchcra Act penalizes pretense to witchcra without recognizing the existence of witchcra per se. In the present case, the three accused persons had denied “in totality” the charges of practicing witchcra . ey couldn’t, therefore, be convicted for the pretense of having witches’ powers. However, if they had pleaded guilty to the nonexistent crime of

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witchcra , they would have been commiing a real crime, since by confessing they would have been representing themselves, in violation of section 6 of the act, as having the power of a witch. e prosecution’s case was based on the evidence provided by three young children—only one of whom had been permied to testify under oath. ese children, the magistrate wrote in his judgment, “told this court they were taught the trade of practicing witchcra by the accused themselves and that they have over the period been flying out to Mponda graveyard, uncovering grave pits and then eating human flesh at the instruction of the accused in the dock, and that the late Fabiano Kasito was actually hit by a magic hammer by the 3rd accused person [Shybu] at about 13:00 hours.” ese were serious charges. e magistrate dispensed with the murder of Fabiano first: “In defence the accused have said that the said Fabiano Kasito was a sick man and had been told never to be drinking beers by the medical authorities, but that he did not take heed of that advice and that his death should be aributed to non-compliance with the advice.” In short, Fabiano drank himself to death—and by “beers” the magistrate was referring to the potent, and deadly, home-brewed corn liquor known as kachasu. If, as the police prosecutor had alleged, there was evidence that Shybu had killed his uncle with a hammer, a charge of murder should have been brought. Fabiano was not murdered, the magistrate ruled. In other words, the young man was not a witch. us was the case against Shybu concluded. In relation to the first and second accused, grandfather Bartret and his daughter Annie, Magistrate Banda rehearsed in greater detail the evidence that they might be witches. Regarding Annie, the magistrate noted that when she and her father had been taken to the herbalist, she was not revealed as a witch. Indeed, according to reports of what transpired at the healer, Annie was found to be a victim herself, since “the head of her lile child is used as a ball in the night by people who practice witchcra .” To this, Magistrate Banda added, showing how seriously he was taking this mat-

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ter: “but then the unfortunate part of it is that this court was not told as to [what the healer had determined as to who] are said to be doing that.” ese comments, effectively, closed the case against Annie. e court did not agree that she was a witch. Regarding the first accused, Bartret Kasito, the magistrate noted that he had had many accusations made against him. He had been taken before village headmen and had been “made to drink some mankhwala [medicine]”—which may, or may not, be proof of his innocence. Even his own children, the magistrate pointed out, were unsure about Mr. Kasito. His son Humphrey, for instance, testified that “he has the belief that his father is a wizard because of the many rumours which have been made against him.” e magistrate made it emphatically clear in delivering his verdict, however, that beliefs or rumors did not qualify as evidence. “People believe that he is a wizard, but to prove the point is a problem since he denies to be such,” he said. He also said, however, that Mr. Kasito “boasted that he has never been caught at anybody’s house practicing witchcra ”—a loaded statement suggesting his own suspicions of the man, since an innocent man would not boast of not geing caught. But, despite lingering suspicions and accusations against the old man, throughout all his trials and ordeals he had denied charges of witchcra . is meant there was no evidence supporting a conviction under section 6 of the Witchcra Act. Having signaled his opinions regarding the substantive issue of witchcra , Magistrate Banda’s reading of the judgment returned to the questions of evidence and the law: If this court were to believe that the story by the prosecution as per the evidence given by the three children witnesses, that the three accused persons have been teaching them witchcra practices, and then that the 3rd accused is the person who using a magic hammer hit and killed the late Fabiano Kasito, that would amount to this Court agreeing with the issue that there is witchcra in our midst out of customary or

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traditional belief and not covered by the law under which the accused persons have been charged. (emphasis added)

e possibility that there was, in fact, “witchcra in our midst” was not questioned by the magistrate, nor would it have been by the people in his court witnessing his judgment. Unlike “traditional authorities” hearing cases under “customary law,” however, statutes and the rules of evidence tie a magistrate’s hands. ese rules he proceeded to explain. In cases charged under section 6 of the Witchcra Act, the magistrate explained, guilt can be proved in three ways: first, by statements or actions in which the offender represents himself “to be a wizard or a witch”; second, by the accused representing himself as “having the power of witchcra ”; and, third, “the suspect must claim to having the power of exercising witchcra .” However, as Magistrate Banda told the court, at no time did any of the accused persons admit to being a witch or represent themselves as having the power of witchcra . Nor was evidence produced establishing that they made such claims outside the court. e only evidence was the uncorroborated testimony of the children, only one of whom testified under oath that they had been taught witchcra by their three accused relatives. Nor was evidence presented of actions by the accused—such as conducting witchcra classes—demonstrating a claim to such powers. Here is where the question of the ordeal/cleansing ritual that was the centerpiece of the old man’s defense became important. e magistrate explained that if the old man had represented his drinking of mankhwala a er being sent to herbalists as a cleansing procedure, rather than a forensic ordeal demonstrating his innocence, he could perhaps have been found guilty under the act. For by confessing to witchcra and agreeing to be cleansed of the evil, he would have been representing himself as a wizard, albeit a repentant one, and thus in breach of section 6. But “he has . . . been taken before the Village Headman and to the herbalists to be cleansed of a thing he denies to be and that has been

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done on him but he has survived the test.” Under the provisions of the law, then, all three of the accused persons would have to be found to be innocent, since they failed to confess and there was no evidence corroborating the children’s accusations. In principle, teaching children witchcra could satisfy the evidentiary requirements for conviction under section 6, for who but a witch could teach witchcra ? e activity of teaching witchcra , were it to be proven—by testimony of a pupil and admission of a teacher or by observation by an independent witness, for example, or by the production of teaching materials—would suffice as an action tantamount to representing oneself as having the powers of witchcra , and thus it could be grounds for conviction. is was the principal reason Magistrate Banda ruled that the prosecution had established a prima facie case for the defense to answer, enabling the trial to proceed. e problem for the prosecution, however, was that two of their three witnesses were ruled ineligible to give testimony under oath because of their young ages. Further jeopardizing the case was the fact that the testimony of the single sworn witness was not corroborated by independent witnesses or by admissions of the three accused. In explaining to the court his reasoning for excluding the younger children, Magistrate Banda cited a recent ruling by Judge Chipeta of the High Court, in an appeal against a witchcra conviction, who wrote that even if children testify under oath, “the evidence of such witnesses would require corroboration.” Underlining the point, Magistrate Banda told the court that corroborating evidence could only come “from either the suspects themselves or by their activities[,] as it were”—that is, by confession or eyewitnesses. Allegations and rumors would not suffice: “A belief alone[, regardless of] how strong it may be[,] is not evidence that an individual is guilty of an offence, there must be proof to whatever is alleged to be done or having been done.” For justice to be done in a court of law, therefore, either the witch must confess or proof must be presented. One source of what the magistrate termed “independent evi-

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dence” could have been the testimony of a herbalist. In another witchcra case in the same court some three months a er the Kasito case, he noted that the accusers of an old woman cited for teaching witchcra had consulted a herbalist, but “unfortunately the state did not bring forth the herbalist (sing’anga) in question.” Had they done so, the case might have been allowed to proceed, although even here the magistrate would still have insisted on corroborating evidence. A herbalist’s testimony alone would not be sufficient. Although the evidence presented in court was insufficient for a conviction, Magistrate Banda clearly found the testimony of the children in this case credible. In an earlier case, for example, the central witnesses were two teenaged girls, one of whom claimed to be currently practicing witchcra with the accused “teacher,” having been taught the trade as a baby. In that case not only did Magistrate Banda find the testimony unreliable, but he also warned the witnesses that they were commiing an offense under the Witchcra Act for accusing a person of witchcra . In the case of the Kasitos, by contrast, the magistrate agreed with the police and the Kasito family—and, no doubt, most of the other Balaka residents who heard about this case—that the testimony of the children was credible. e narrative of his judgment makes clear that he had no doubt that someone had taught them witchcra . e evidence presented to the court, however, did not meet the strict requirements for conviction, that is by establishing the truth beyond a reasonable doubt. Before pronouncing the final verdict on the charges of contravening section 6, the culmination of the formal legal proceedings, Magistrate Banda passed what might be called an informal sentence on Bartret Kasito. Speaking from the bench, he addressed the Kasito family regarding their father. ough he referred to himself in the first person as speaking personally, it is unlikely that his audience would have heard the words as anything other than a verdict delivered by the court, something more than mere obiter dicta, the superfluous verbiage of judges’

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opining: “It is my view that his own children should make arrangements to have him seled at his home district in Zomba other than here in Balaka where there have been too many stories against him.” In much the same way would a chief impose a sentence of banishment on a witch spared the death penalty. us the old man was found guilty of the substantive charge of witchcra while remaining innocent of violating the law. His family was entrusted with deciding what was to be done. Finally, wrapping up his argument, the wise magistrate pronounced judgment on the legal case before him: is Court has found as a fact that the prima case the Prosecution had established against the accused in the dock has been outweighed by the evidence in defence, and this is also per the law now in place which ironically does not recognize the existence of witchcra .

us was the old man, his daughter, and her son found not guilty, while at the same time the old man was named as a witch. And thereby was justice done.

6 When a Witch Confesses

In the court of Magistrate Banda, a confession of witchcra could lead to conviction for a crime. In a chief ’s court, however, confession can serve to open the way to redemption. But confessions are complicated things. In a chief ’s court, there is no presumption of innocence. Rules of evidence are rudimentary. People o en arrive with their minds made up. Few are alert to the possibilities of false confession. As judge, however, the chief does not have to worry unduly about the empirical truth of a confession. A witch might even confess to crimes she was unaware she had commied; yet justice might still be served. What maers is that the accused witch speaks and performs an acknowledgment of guilt. Consider the case of Abiti (Auntie) Makeba. On Easter Sunday 2009, at about the same time that the rumors were building against Mrs. K. and Mr. Kasito 94

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was undergoing his ordeal by herbs, one of our journal writers, Steliya, along with many of her neighbors from her home village of Ngaatume, a selement of about a thousand households in the district of Balaka, went to the chief ’s court to watch a witch be tried. What follows is an account of the trial drawn from her notebook, supplemented with my own conversations with the chief.1 Chief Ngaatume, a er whose clan the village is named, was a man in his mid-fi ies at the time. In addition to his jurisdiction over his own village, Chief Ngaatume was a group village headman, or GVH, one step up the hierarchy from the local-level village headmen (also known as “chiefs”), for whose subjects he acts as a court of appeal, and a step below the sub-traditional authority, himself subservient to the traditional authority (TA), who oversees the larger territory. e Balaka District consists of two TA jurisdictions: Kalembo, with a population of about 100,000, and Msamala, with about 150,000, each divided into two sub-TAs. e chief, a Yao (the predominant ethnic group in the district), wears the cap of a Muslim, though he is not so observant that he declines the enjoyment of a beer. His villagers are both Muslim and Christian. Chief Ngaatume’s compound is only marginally more substantial than the rest of the mud and thatch houses of the village, with a long open-thatched structure to shelter villagers from the weather and a half-built hut, now fallen into ruin, that was once intended to be the home for an income-generating chicken project that proved in the end, like most such projects, unsustainable. He receives a small payment each month from the government through the District Commissioner’s office, supplemented with the occasional “fine” collected through his court, o en in the form of a chicken or a bag of maize. For the most part, Chief Ngaatume, like most of his fellow traditional leaders, shares the hardships of the people with whom he lives.

1. Steliya’s original account can be found in Tadziwana_090329 in the entry dated 11/04/09 in the Malawi Journals Project.

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e hearing involved accusations of witchcra against a villager named Abiti Makeba, a woman in her fi ies living in the hinterland of the villages. It was well aended. More than a hundred people were siing on the ground, gathered around a tall shady ficus tree in an open space in the middle of the court and spilling out into the bright sunlight. In many ways, the proceedings in the chief ’s court are similar to those of the magistrate court, save that the chief ’s senior counselor presides, with the chief only speaking once the case has been resolved. e main difference in procedure is that the audience at the village court is very much part of the event, clapping in agreement and shouting disagreement—behavior that the magistrate’s marshal, Mabel Kapachika, would never permit. e prosecution, defense, and witnesses are also permied to speak without interruption and questioned only when they are finished. No one keeps notes. e chief ’s counselor, Mr. Chakholoma, opened the proceedings with a prayer and then called the people involved in the case to the front. Two women came forward: Abiti Sibusiso, the accuser, and Abiti Makeba, the accused. e counselor called on Abiti Sibusiso and asked her to explain why she had come before the village headman. Abiti Sibusiso began her testimony. Like the magistrate, the chief insists on evidence, although the standard of proof, as we shall see, is not quite the “balance of probabilities” or “beyond a reasonable doubt” standards of the magistrate court. e object of the hearing is not so much to demonstrate proof that specific events actually happened than to achieve a consensus regarding the broad context of relations among the actors and possible motivations of all involved. Guilt or innocence emerges from judgment of the character of these relations. Addressing the assembly, Abiti Sibusiso explained that recently her son had been sickly, tired, and lacking appetite. Most of the time, when we have breakfast in the morning hours, my son Shepherd always says, “I don’t want to eat,

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I am okay.” But what did he eat? Was he eating during the night? No. is was happening for a long time. So, one day I took him to the hospital, where I wanted the doctors to see whether the boy was sick or not. I explained everything and the doctor examined all the body of the child, but at the end he told me that he is not sick. It made me angry, that result, because I thought the doctor was going to tell me what the problem was with my son. So I went back home. In the evening I started praying in my house with my sons. I begged God to help me so that my son can start eating the way he was doing before. Now, in the morning God answered my prayer. I woke up and prepared a breakfast and went to work in the garden. A er a while, I saw my son Shepherd coming across. He started with yawning and then he said, “Mummy[,] are you cooking tea?” I said, “Yes, I want you to drink.” He said[,] “Mummy[,] I won’t because I am tired.” I asked him[,] “Why are you not going to drink and why are you tired as if you were working during the night?” He said, “Mummy, I went to the mountain where Abiti Makeba is staying. Mummy[,] I am tired.”

Anyone listening to Abiti Sibusiso in Chief Ngaatume’s court would have understood two important implications of her testimony. First, since the doctors at the hospital could find nothing wrong with her son, the suggestion, ipso facto, was that supernatural causes were most likely involved in his malaise. And second, since Abiti Sibusiso had prayed to God, God had prompted the boy to tell her his story of being taught witchcra . e child’s story, in other words, was divinely authorized and had to be taken seriously. Abiti Sibusiso continued with her son’s account of his nighttime visits: So, I was surprised to hear that, because he is a child of five years. Since he was born he has not visited that place with

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me. So I tried to ask him: “Did you know Makeba’s place?” He said, “Yes! ere is a grass-thatched house and iron-roofed house there. I know the place, Mummy. We always go there during the night. We always board an aeroplane. Jota is the pilot.” I was shocked. So I called other relatives to hear what my son was saying. at’s when one of them started asking my son: “Where were you last night?” He explained that he usually goes to Makeba’s house in the night.

Abiti Sibusiso then mentioned a crucial point that explained why she had brought the case to court: other children were involved. “He’s not the only one who goes there,” she said. “ere are a lot of children. ey gather together when they want to start going.” e maer, therefore, was not just an individual problem, but rather a widespread situation that could not be handled by prayer alone or by confronting the witch privately. Abiti Sibusiso continued: Whenever they feel like it they can go. My grandmother started asking him to mention other names. is is when he started mentioning people like Glowell’s five-year-old, Panopo, the six-year-old boy, Hudson, Sulumuka, ten years old, and other children who stay some distance from us. ese children who I mentioned are our neighbors, so it pains me a lot. is pained me because I knew that somebody is teaching my son witchcra . I asked him again: “Who do you accompany there? I mean the elder person.” It’s then when he said[,] “Nobody but Abiti Makeba.” So that is why I came here, so that the village head can assist me in this case. Had it been that it was another story I could go to her straight. But this involves witchcra . at’s why I came here with my relatives, so that they should witness this story. I brought my son, also, so that he should explain if he likes.

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In line with the general protocol in these courts, Abiti Sibusiso’s testimony was uninterrupted, although it was accompanied by a great deal of discussion and conversation among the crowd, some of it related only tangentially to the case at hand. Since the chief ’s primary objective is to restore peace and harmony in the community, this collective participation is not considered a distraction, but rather an essential part of the proceedings. e chief ’s counselor thanked Abiti Sibusiso and asked if there was anything else she wanted to tell them. “at’s all I have to say,” she said. e counselor then called upon the accused, Abiti Makeba, to respond. “I don’t know what the mother is talking about,” she said. She did not contradict the children’s story of having been taught witchcra or their account of flying to her house in an airplane. Nor did she impugn the mother’s motives in bringing such accusations to the court. But she strenuously denied responsibility for these activities. No one questioned the possibility of flying by airplane at night or expressed doubt that the children could have done so. Abiti Makeba, however, denied that she was a witch. And then, expressing surprise and emphasizing her innocence, she turned the accusation back on the children: “Maybe those children come to my house in order to bewitch me?” she posited. “So this is an opportunity for me also to know the truth. Because if those children are saying that they usually come to my home at night that means that those children are witches. ey come to play magic at my house. at is all I have to say.” Like Mrs. K., Abiti Makeba sought to bolster her denials with a claim to victimhood. e counselor then asked if the children mentioned in Abiti Sibusiso’s testimony were present at the assembly. ey were, so he called them to the front and proceeded to question them one by one. He began with Shepherd, asking him how it was that he was familiar with Abiti Makeba’s home, which was located almost ten kilometers from his own home and on the other side of

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a mountain. “How can a small child like you get there?” he asked. “Who escorts you?” Shepherd replied: “I know that place. We usually go there during the night. We board an aeroplane and I am not alone. We are many. I have my friends Sulumuka and Glowell. We go there together. And Abiti Makeba gave us meat last night.” By “meat,” of course, he meant human flesh. e counselor then called ten-year-old Sulumuka to the front and asked him if he knew about these events. Sulumuka replied: “I know. And I will explain, but only because you asked me to do that. Otherwise, we are not supposed to explain this in front of other people. ey told us not to do that. Once we do that our mother will die.” When he said this, the counselor interrupted, assuring the boy that his mother would be safe. Sulumuka continued: “We are tired with flying at night because we fly to the mountains. Sometimes we go to South Africa. So in the morning I find that we are tired because of this flying. Sometimes when my mother tells me to go to school I ignore her because a er flying during the night I feel tired to go to school.” Heads in the crowd nodded as the boy confirmed the testimony of the mother whose anxieties over a listless son had started the whole proceeding. “Who is teaching you this flying?” the counselor asked. “It is Abiti Makeba,” Sulumuka replied. “It’s Abiti Makeba who teaches us flying. She comes during the night and tells us to go. at’s when we board the aeroplane. Nobody teaches us but Abiti Makeba. She is the one. So I am also tired of flying. I don’t want to fly during the night. She always gives us meat, but I am tired with this meat. She has to find another one, not me, because I am tired with that. Maybe other friends can do that, but for me I don’t want.” As is typical in the confessional narratives of child witches, Sulumuka emphasized his resistance to the witches’ demand that he sacrifice a relative in return for the meat he has consumed. In this case, perhaps because the initial narrative had

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been framed by the anxious mother’s seeking of an answer to her son’s lassitude, the boy, his accomplice, reiterated the same. e counselor again turned to Abiti Makeba for her response. A er Sulumuka’s testimony, it was clear her protestations of innocence and her claims of victimhood at the hands of the children had failed to gain traction. She tried another tack, suggesting she had been framed, that someone had been impersonating her to make the children think she was a witch and to make these accusations: “If those children are saying that,” she said, “maybe somebody has put on a mask with my face on it to make it look like I am a witch. Maybe it went like that.” At this point, however, she added an odd comment that turned out to seal her fate. Perhaps flustered and sensing the skepticism of the counselor and the crowd, or perhaps searching for a yet another tactic of selfdefense, she made what was either a deliberate or an inadvertent confession: “But I don’t know that I am a witch.” e counselor continued his questioning, even though Abiti Makeba had by now virtually acquiesced to the charge: “Do you think someone can wear a mask so that the children should think it is you?” he demanded. “If it’s like that, what can make those children to follow at your house? How are those children able to locate your house? I am saying this, because if it was a mask, those children couldn’t know your house and they couldn’t know how to climb the mountains. So this is telling us that you are the one who is teaching the children witchcra .” And then the counselor, having presented the incontrovertible argument and having heard her virtual confession, concluded with this demand: “So we want you to stop that, because you are abusing the rights of these children. Is that clear?” Human rights and witchcra mix in mysterious ways. “Yes,” she said. At the moment of her confession, the crowd, hitherto mostly quiet and respectful, had begun to murmur with disapproval, and now the observers erupted in angry denunciation. “You are a

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witch,” someone screamed. “How can you agree to stop teaching children witchcra and yet you are saying that you don’t know anything about it?” A man stood up and demanded that he be allowed to ask some more questions. e counselor granted permission. Pressing the accused with rapid-fire questions, he forced Abiti Makeba to agree that she knew the four children, that her home was located at a considerable distance from their compound, and that there were many other elderly people in the area whom the children could have accused instead of her. “So why have these children failed to mention all those people?” he demanded. “Some are neighbors to them. Some are far away from them. Why have they failed to mention these people but called you the one who is teaching them?” Murmurs of agreement swelled through the crowd; angry voices arose. Evidence of a relationship between the children claiming to have been taught witchcra and a woman whom they should not ordinarily be acquainted is taken as evidence of the laer’s malfeasance. Abiti Makeba must have known then, if she did not know before, that there could be no escape. She had no option but to fully confess. Continued denials would have enraged them further. Her fate, she must have known, would depend not only on the mercy of the chief and the forbearance of her accusers, but also the quelling of anger in the community. “I am sorry,” she said, at last, her voice a murmur. “I am sorry, because I am not the one who likes to be a witch. I just learned that thing from others, and that made me to teach other people so that they can be witches. But I will not do that again. I am finished with this thing of witchcra .” e counselor repeated her confession for the benefit of the assembly, whose number stretched beyond the reach of the penitent woman’s voice. e headman’s counselor then turned to Abiti Sibusiso and asked whether she was satisfied with these promises. “What I want to hear is an agreement with this woman that she will stop taking my son,” Abiti Sibusiso said. “My God is the one

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who helped me to overcome this. I know that my God will not fail. If she can lie to me, the God that I know is going to assist me. So she has to assure me what she thinks, and what she is going to do. Because everyone now knows that she is a witch. So I want her to say what she thinks in the presence of people. Because if it happens again, these people should be the witnesses of tomorrow.” e headman’s counselor turned again to Abiti Makeba for her response. “I heard everything,” she said, her words barely above a whisper that again needed to be repeated by the counselor for the benefit of the crowd: “And I want to assure everybody that I will not take these children again.” e assembled villagers were not entirely convinced. “She won’t take them again?” someone shouted. “Who will know that she has stopped taking them?” One man rose, gained the aention of the assembly, and, acknowledged by the counselor, said: “I have a suggestion. What if we call a sing’anga to remove the witchcra from these children and give them protection scars? Because, one, if they will have the protection scars, it means no one will touch them during the night. at is the best way I know that will make the witches fail to come again.” By “scars” he was referring to the incisions that healers make, into which they rub “charms” to protect against magical assault. is suggestion inspired applause from the others in the courtyard. A sing’anga could give the children protection from future aacks while at the same time causing death to the witch if she tried her evil tricks again. Abiti Makeba would thus be caught in a double bind: if anything happened to anyone else, she would be the main suspect; if anything happened to her, her guilt would be confirmed. us would the community be secured against further assault. en, the proceedings drawing to a conclusion, it was the chief ’s turn to speak: I have heard the whole story. is woman has agreed on her own. So I will demand her to pay K2,000 [about US$20, at

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the time]. Of this, K1,500 will be used to pay for the sing’anga who can remove the witchcra from these children. e K500 is for me, the village headman. Now, I want to advise every person here that you must stop teaching children who are not related to you. Even if you are related, so long as they are children, you must stop. is is because you will make them witches in these coming years, which is not a good thing. So this is a warning to everyone who is listening. You have to take a lesson from this woman. e next time I see a case such as this, the one who is responsible will have to pay K5,000. If they fail to pay I will send them to the sub-TA Kasegwe. He will also send you to the Police.

In pronouncing the sentence, a fine of K2,000, the chief was pursuing the twin objectives of justice and security: the fine would punish the witch (and in so doing, provide a warning to anyone else contemplating witchcra ) while at the same time paying for the herbalist who would protect the children against further injury. It would also supply him, the chief, with a lile pocket money—about the price of three beers at the time. “So this is a lesson to everybody here,” he said in conclusion. “Is that okay?” e people said “Yes!” and the chief told them to go home. Most were indeed pleased with the conclusion, although there was no way of knowing what Abiti Sibusiso herself thought about engaging a sing’anga. She had spoken of her appeals to God and may well have been a member of one of the many Pentecostal churches in the region, but this certainly would not have been an opportune time for her to voice any objections. ere were also some murmurs of dissatisfaction from some who wondered, for example, how Abiti Makeba would manage to pay such a large amount of money, especially since she appeared to have no income. In this village at that time, a fine of K2,000 was substantial; that amount of money could have bought enough maize—the staple food—to feed a family of five for two months. And it was

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particularly unlikely that a convicted witch would be able to raise the cash from relatives. If she failed to pay, many wondered, what would the consequences be, both for Abiti Makeba herself and for her child victims? For me, the most puzzling aspect of the trial of Abiti Makeba, when I first read it, was her confession. Unlike Mrs. K., who denied the accusation to the end, when Abiti Makeba realized that her denials were failing, she rolled with the punches and admitted to being a witch. But was her confession genuine? Does it even maer? Since there was no firm evidence presented at the hearing other than the stories of young children—who, as children, were easily suggestible—it seems unlikely that Abiti Makeba was in fact guilty as charged. e confession she gave to the chief ’s court was probably false. Even if false, however, its falsity does not necessarily mean it was a lie. She may well have believed she was a witch and been genuinely repentant for her actions, as she claimed. And for purposes of securing peace and harmony in the village, the raison d’être of the chie aincy, Chief Ngaatume might not have cared either way whether the confession was genuine or not. Until comparatively recently, confession to a crime was considered an unassailable proof in most legal systems. Following a series of moral panics regarding allegations of ritual child sexual abuse in child-care centers in the United States in the 1980s, however, social psychologists began to develop more sophisticated understandings of how and why people might confess to crimes they had not commied. Although these researchers were unaware of the extent of contemporary witchcra accusations and trials in Africa, their insights are relevant to cases such as that of Abiti Makeba’s. In their pathbreaking work on the psychology of false confession, Saul Kassin and Lawrence Wrightsman distinguish between three different types: “voluntary,” “coercedcompliant,” and “coerced-internalized” (Kassin and Wrightsman 1985). Voluntary false confessions can arise from factors such as

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a desire to protect someone else or a “pathological need for fame, acceptance, recognition, or self-punishment” (Kassin 1997, 225). In the context of a world in which witchcra is a widely recognized danger, another factor can be the desire to arouse fear by asserting one’s power, or else the desire to demonstrate one’s future blamelessness by confessing and renouncing the appalling sins commied in the past—even if they are not literally true. Such confessions are widely reported in the ethnographic literature as marking moments of great danger such as childbirth; misfortune in such cases is likely to result in a witch being blamed, and preemptive confession on the part of a likely suspect is o en the best defense (see Ashforth 2005, 77ff.). Similar confessions are a staple of Pentecostal “deliverance” testimonials, in which a person demonstrates the power of being “born again” by renouncing the crimes of witchcra . (For examples, see Bannerman-Richter 1984; Eni, n.d.; Migwi 1998.) ese voluntary confessions are not necessarily insincere. Indeed, whether they are factual or not is mostly irrelevant. What maers is the persuasive performance of a plausible narrative of misdeeds and repentance in a social setting conducive to a ritualized breaking with the past in order to secure the future. “Coerced-compliant” confessions, in the Kassin and Wrightsman scheme, are made for instrumental reasons, usually a er intense interrogation. While the extreme case of confession under torture is well recognized, many confessions are made under less “enhanced” circumstances. Indeed, as the U.S.-based Innocence Project has found, some 25% of cases reviewed and overturned with DNA evidence were convicted on the basis of a suspect’s confession (Innocence Project 2013). Innocent people confess not only to make the pain stop, but in the expectation that they will be able to prove their innocence later or else receive a mitigated punishment for apparent cooperation (Gudjonsson 2013; Gudjonsson and Pearse 2011). In cases of witchcra in contemporary Africa, compliant confessions are common. Being publicly denounced

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as a witch before an assembly of your community, such as happened to Abiti Makeba, must feel coercive in the extreme. Here the distinction between being a witch and actually practicing witchcra is critical. A witch may confess to being a witch while denying a particular crime ascribed to witchcra , particularly if that crime is serious, such as having caused a fatal illness. In such circumstances, a person long suspected of being a witch knows that total exoneration from the “fact” of being a witch is unlikely, though it may be possible to deny responsibility for a particular offense, typically, as we saw with Mrs. K., by deflecting the blame to another. Unlike “voluntary” confessions, “coerced-compliant” confessions do not need to be presented as persuasive performances since, as psychologists have shown, statements of selfincrimination are prone to being believed even when they go against countervailing evidence. For example, in the famous 1989 case of the Central Park jogger in New York City, DNA evidence exonerated the five young men who had confessed to the crime, but the jury believed the district aorney’s insistence that there must have been a sixth rapist who, unlike the five, ejaculated and escaped. e young men were convicted and spent between six and thirteen years in prison before the actual rapist, serving time for other rapes, confessed and the confession was confirmed with DNA evidence (Kassin 2012). In the case of Abiti Makeba, her strangely ambiguous confession (or non-confession)—first, that she did not know she was a witch, then that she did not like being a witch—was an irrelevant addendum. From the perspective of the villagers crowding around the chief ’s court, her reluctant confession confirmed their suspicion that she must be a witch because of the children’s knowledge of her home and the existence of their relationship with her where there should not have been one. Indeed, since the work of a witch is conducted in secret, and only the witch can know what a witch does, the persuasive power of a confession of witchcra is greater than one for lesser sins

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that we have all commied or imagined commiing. e mere hint of a confession in a witchcra case, then, forestalls the need for further evidence. e third category of confessions, “coerced-internalized” confessions, are those made by suspects who genuinely believe in their own guilt, usually as a result of the confusion and anxiety aroused by the process of interrogation. As Kassin puts it: “is type of false confession is particularly frightening because the suspect’s memory of his or her own actions may be altered, rendering the original contents potentially irretrievable” (Kassin 1997). e phenomenon, he argues, is closely related to that of “false memory,” or “recovered memory,” debates over which wracked the psychology and legal professions in the 1990s in relation to cases of child sex abuse, particularly those of “ritual” abuse (Laney and Lo us 2013). One of the most famous instances of what Kassin calls “coercion-internalized” confessions was that of Paul Ingram, who confessed to multiple counts of child abuse, including one concocted by the sociologist Paul Ofshe for the purpose of demonstrating Ingram’s actual innocence despite his being convinced he commied crimes (Ofshe and Waers 1994; see also Olio and Cornell 1998). Evidence of the internalizing of false confession has been widely documented in recent years, both in experimental studies and criminal cases, particularly in the light of DNA evidence (Kassin and Gudjonsson 2004). In cases of African witchcra , the potential for internalized confession is heightened by the fact that persons accused of witchcra must countenance the possibility that they may have been witches without being aware of the fact; this indeed, is one possible interpretation of, and explanation for, Abiti Makeba’s cryptic statements about not knowing, or wanting, to be a witch. is possibility is inherent in the phenomenon of witchcra itself and is widely reported in the ethnographic literature. For example, given that witchcra can involve putative action in a separate dimension of existence (which may be experienced much like the world of dreams), it is conceivable that witches have no aware-

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ness of, or memory of, their actions in this other domain once they return to the quotidian realms of the waking world. Or, were the activity to be considered as a product of demonic power—as many Africans now interpret the power of witches—a person may be the instrument of Satan without being aware of the fact. Another possibility that must be considered, however, is that Abiti Makeba’s confession was not false at all—that she was indeed practicing witchcra . is is a possibility, I would argue, that needs to be considered apart from any consideration of whether the purported feats of witchcra are empirically possible. Given a widespread conviction regarding the efficacy of ritual action in Africa, from simple prayers to elaborate collective healing rituals, it would be surprising if a great many people were not secretly involved in actions aimed at causing harm to others by occult means. Moreover, given the high prevalence of misfortune arising from poverty, violence, and disease, there is also a fair probability that some such “witches,” observing a correlation between their mischievous activities and a targeted victim’s distress, will become convinced of their powers. Further, since witchcra accusations tend, predictably, to follow preexisting paerns of conflict, it is not unlikely that an accused witch might make a true confession to a malicious motive, perhaps even to the deployment of what he or she considered efficacious means, in pursuit of causing harm to a generally recognized personal enemy. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, when making his famous distinction between “witchcra ” as an innate capacity and “sorcery” as the manipulation of magical materials, asserts that while a witch, as the Azande conceive it, cannot exist, many people are probably trying their luck with potions brewed with a view to harming their friends, neighbors, or relations. But if we consider recent work in the neuropsychology of dreaming (Bulkeley 2016), it is not inconceivable that a person might experience forms of action in dreams that provide them with compelling evidence of witchcra . at is to say, a person—in their waking state or their

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dreams—might want to be a witch, might believe themselves to be a witch, and experience dreams that fit standard narratives of witchcra in their community in such a way as to convince them that they are in fact a witch. Furthermore, given the prevalence of misfortune in most of Africa, they might very well witness harm befalling others in a manner foreshadowed in witchy dreams. Considering the ubiquity of seemingly heartfelt and sincere confessions on the part of “witches” in Africa, particularly in contexts of safety such as Pentecostal churches, it would be a mistake to presume that they were all mendacious.

7 A Child’s Tale

Early one October morning in 2007, while preparing for the planting season on the few acres she tills to feed her family, our journal writer Alice went to buy maize seeds from the Admarc store, the state-owned agricultural supplies and grain merchant, in the market town of Ulongwe. Ulongwe is about forty miles from Balaka, on the road to Mangochi, the town at the southernmost point of Lake Malawi, the southernmost of the African Great Lakes. While waiting for the store to open, she overheard two women, strangers to her, exchanging a story about witches in their village. In her journal, Alice wrote an account of this tale of a child telling a story about being taught witchcra . Her account shows how stories such as these circulate in local gossip and, with every retelling, gather up the weighty solidity of truth. e following is based on an edited version of Alice’s journal, along 111

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with interviews and conversations with Alice during visits to her hometown.1 Alice’s account reports a story told by one friend to another, which she overheard but did not participate in. e narrator, an unidentified woman who was a stranger to Alice, purports to have direct knowledge of the story of witchcra told by a child to his mother. “Sister,” the first women said to her friend, “people these days are not ashamed. e world is now going to end, for sure. Do you know what has happened in our area? Was that good? Ah, no. e witches are able to take children who are not their own and teach them to become witches, making them to kill people. Why is it happening so o en here in Malawi? Is it because of poverty? I think so, because many people here have no jobs, they do nothing at their homes. Maybe they just decide to become witches and use that thing as their business.” “Tell me clearly, my sister,” her friend replied. “I heard that something happened in our area but I don’t know how it ended.” “I’ll tell you,” said the first woman, proceeding to recount the story, as told by a child to his mother. “What happened was that the witches took Miss Salim’s son. ese witches have been coming to take that child many times, to teach him how to become a witch. In fact, his grandmother is the one who is among the witches and she was taking her grandson to teach him to become a witch. en the time came for the child to do whatever is supposed to be done if you are a witch. e expert witches told the boy: ‘You have managed well. Now we would like to promote you so that you should have a position here. You should have a chair to be siing on when you come here.’ ey were telling the child that he must kill his mother in order to become an elder among the witches. e child heard what they were saying about killing his mother but didn’t answer. He was thinking to himself: ‘If I kill my mother, who will be looking a er me? Who will be coming

1. e original of Alice’s text can be found at Alice_071011 in the Malawi Journals Project.

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with food for me? Who will look a er my two young brothers, and the one is still being breast-fed? My mother is breast-feeding him every day, if my mother dies, who will feed him?’ ” us far, Alice’s unnamed narrator has sketched the outlines of the standard story of a child being taught witchcra who refuses to kill his kin. Virtually all of these stories take this form, where the child’s refusal to kill kin to satisfy the witches triggers the impetus to confess. is narrative device serves to answer the implicit question of how the secret has come to light—since everyone knows witches operate in secret and will not ordinarily speak of their activities. But a summary narrative such as this is inadequate for establishing the authority of the narration. For that we need concrete details, direct testimony. Fortunately, the gossipers had them to hand. According to Alice’s account of the conversation she overheard on the Admarc porch that morning, on the day the witches came for him, the boy was at his mother’s home. He had refused to eat nsima, the maize-meal staple, all day. He just sat on the veranda like he was ill. His mother asked him: “Are you ill?” “No, I am not ill,” he replied. “Why are you crying, my son?” He said nothing. His mother le him to rest. When lunchtime came, she cooked food and asked her son to come and eat, but he refused. He said: “I am enough. I don’t want to eat food today.” At four o’clock, the mother noticed that her child was missing but gave it no thought, assuming he must have gone to chat with his friends. She continued with her jobs around the house. When it was nearly seven and dark, the boy was nowhere to be seen, so she walked around the village asking if anyone had seen him. He could not be found. She became worried, so she went to the village headman, and also the area chairman (of the formerly governing Malawi Congress Party), to report him missing and to ask for help looking for him. People did not sleep that night, walking here and there searching for the boy. But they did not find him.

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e following day she went to the police to report him missing. She told them that he is about six years old. And she told them he is not mentally disturbed; he is not someone to go wandering off for no reason. Alice’s narrator supplied few details about Miss Salim, the mother. ose few she does supply, however, are designed to establish the fact that she is a good mother and thus innocent of any evil afflicting her child. As the narrator makes clear, before her son went missing, she aended to her child’s needs, then spent her a ernoon doing household chores; when she noticed him missing, she took action. She is thus implicitly not to be held responsible for any misfortune of the child. e child’s grandmother, however, is in no wise so innocent. . . . e story continues: All this time, the grandmother was with Miss Salim, pretending to help. Later they realized she knew where the child was all the time, but she did not reveal this to her daughter. While her daughter was crying for her child, the grandmother just looked at her, pretending to care. e next day, in the a ernoon, Miss Salim found her son. He was asleep, lying down beside the house. When Miss Salim went to him, she saw he was very weak, looking as if someone had beaten him. She cooked him some maize porridge, but he was too weak to eat on his own and had to be fed like a baby. Now, we know that the boy was sick in the a ernoon before he disappeared. It’s possible he had collapsed in the bushes near the house, perhaps a er going to relieve himself, and been missed by the searchers, who would likely have been concentrating on areas farther afield. When he was found, his mother thought that he had been “beaten” by somebody. Tellingly, her story includes no details of the beating: no bruises, lacerations, or broken bones, only the self-evident signs of weakness. Few who heard her story would have questioned her conclusion. Worried about the child’s weakness, his mother, Miss Salim, took him to the herbalist, where he was given some herbs for him to start speaking, since by that time he was not speaking at all.

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Before he began speaking, he vomited blood and other bad things from his body. e herbalist said that those things he vomited would have killed him. He said the boy was not feeling well because he had been beaten very badly. e herbalist said to take him to the hospital first, before further treatment. A er the hospital, he promised Miss Salim, the herbs he had given the child would compel her son to reveal the truth about who was assaulting him. Note what is happening: e child was too weak to speak. For the mother, the key thing was to find out where he had been and who had beaten him, and whether the beating had been inflicted by magical means. To this end, the herbalist administered a potion, evidently some sort of emetic, which led to the vomiting of “blood and other bad things”—as Alice reports in her account of the gossipers’ conversation on the porch of the Admarc store. e sputum, presumably, included the porridge the boy had been spoon-fed, along with substances the healer administered as medicine. For the mother and the healer, these “things” were taken as evidence of an aempt on the child’s life by means of witchcra . While a child vomiting blood is always alarming, as the Internet teaches, it does not necessarily indicate a serious underlying condition—though it could. e fact that the healer advised the mother to take her child to the hospital suggests that he seemed seriously ill. e healer would not have wanted him to die on his watch. So the child was taken to the hospital, where he was admied for two days. When they returned home, Miss Salim was greatly worried. She needed to know what had happened to her son. e fact that the hospital admied the child suggests they recognized his condition as serious. e mother’s story, however, as retold by the woman on the Admarc porch and reported by Alice in her journal, neglects to note any diagnosis of the boy’s condition or treatments given to him at the hospital. It is possible that this was because hospital staff never informed the mother, or that she did not fully understand whatever it was she had been told;

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indeed, it is quite likely that no doctor examined the child, and no diagnosis was given, since medical staff are in short supply. It is also possible that the child received lile or no treatment, perhaps other than some oral rehydration therapy, and that he was discharged when his condition stabilized. For narrative purposes in the narrator’s account of the mother’s story, however, the crucial point is that the child had been close to death, but survived through his mother’s intervention, underlining the conclusion that someone had made an aempt on a child’s life and that his mother, intent on saving his life, was innocent. e story continues: As a result of the treatment administered by the herbalist, the child began to reveal his secret. e narrator, as represented by Alice, gives voice to the child’s account, as given to his mother and passed on to our narrator by the mother: Mother, my grandmother has been taking me to somewhere at Chapola, where there is a big tree. [But the child does not know Chapola, the narrator reminds her interlocutor, interrupting her voicing of the child’s story. She explains that his mother has a brother there, but the child has never been to visit. Someone else, therefore, must have been taking him there.] My grandmother has been taking me there, the boy told his mother, to chat with her friends and aend some meetings there at Chapola at night. I have been looking at what they do there. A er some time, she told me that I should be practicing what she was doing with her friends. I have been doing the same. en they came with meat and my grandmother gave some to me to eat. Since last month they have been telling me that as I have managed everything that is supposed to be done there, I must have my own chair. I did not know that they meant me to kill someone at my home. I told my grandmother that she should buy a chair, or I could ask my mother to buy one for me, as I did not want to kill, but she refused. ey told me that I should not tell my

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mother anything. If I reveal what I have seen there to my mother, or to anyone, I will die. When I told my grandmother to buy me a chair, she was just laughing at me. On the following day her friends told that for me to have that chair, I will have to kill my mother. I did not answer anything. When we came home, I asked my grandmother if it is true that I should kill my mother for me to have a chair for siing on at our meeting. She said that is what everybody who goes there does. You cannot have a chair to sit on if you don’t kill your mother. People there will be respecting you if you have your own chair. She told me to do what I have been told. But I refused. I told her that I have nobody to look a er me. I told her my mother is looking a er her, too. If you are saying I should kill her, who will be looking a er us? Do you think you will manage to look a er my two young brothers and me? My grandmother said nothing. I told her she should stop taking me to that place because I will not manage to do what they have told me. When the next meeting day came, she did not take me. She le me here at home and went there alone to be with her friends. She then told her friends that I am refusing to kill my mother. She told them they should come and take me and do whatever they want to me. So they came to take me. My grandmother was there as well. ey asked me why I am delaying to kill my mother. en I told them that I have nobody to be looking a er me if I kill her. So they began to beat me and said that they will kill me if I don’t want to kill my mother. en my grandmother said to them: “Leave him. Don’t kill him today. Wait until I talk with him. You know that he is young; he does not know what he is doing. I will be teaching him lile by lile until he will know the goodness of killing his mother. Don’t kill him today. Wait for me.”

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All the witches were very furious on me. When my grandmother said that, they said they don’t want to see me there. Take your grandson back home. But my grandmother was afraid to take me back here because I was very ill. ey had beaten me very much. So I stayed the whole day of yesterday without eating anything. Yesterday I was refusing to eat anything because I knew that they are coming to take me to force me to kill my mother. Since I did not want that, I was not feeling well in my heart. When grandmother told them to leave me, they took me and went to put me where my uncle stays. ey told me that I should ask people to tell me where Mr. Mbwana is. But I was failing to speak, so my grandmother asked them to take me back here. It was then that they took me and put me here.

Note how the child’s voice, in Alice’s report of the two strangers’ conversation, is represented in the first person, unlike the mother’s, which is in the third person. is is crucial, underlining the narrative claim to truth based on direct testimony. Notice, also, that the child’s voice is said to emerge only a er the administering of herbs by the healer. e witches had tried to silence the child, but the healer sets his tongue free, enabling him to speak the truth. And the truth of this tale is that his grandmother is a killer, a witch. As noted before, the child’s tale is a version of the standard story of witchcra pedagogy, the general plausibility of which is rarely questioned. e veracity of this particular story, however, as with every iteration of the narrative, has to be independently established. e key element for this lies in the details supplied by the child narrator. First, and most important, is the reference to an uncle’s village, which the child has never visited by day. Any knowledge of this place, therefore, can only have been gained by supernatural means. Further, he specifies what goes on at the meetings of witches—the eating of “meat” and the maer

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of the chair. (Chairs are rare in the villages and a status symbol; chiefs and their counselors sit on chairs at court, others sit on the ground. e grandmother tells the child that if he has a chair, he will be given “respect.”) en the boy speaks of the beatings he endured, which explained his weakness; the need to recover from the beatings before being returned home serves as explanation for his absence on the night he went missing. ese are things, surely, a child could not make up. Finally, he names names, specifying his grandmother and her “friends” as the agents responsible for his condition. Note how in this retelling of the child’s story of abduction, cannibalism, and entreaties to commit murder—of a child being taught witchcra —no one involved, neither the original cast of characters in the gossiping women’s stories, nor those women themselves, as reported by Alice in her account of their conversation, is reported as having raised the slightest doubt about its veracity. No one says the equivalent of: “Hold on, lile buddy, are you sure you weren’t dreaming?” Nor does anyone chide him for being hard on his granny, whom he is accusing of ploing murder. No, his words are taken literally, at face value. ey are the direct expression of everyone’s worst fears. ey are, in Monica Wilson’s famous phrase, speaking the “collective nightmare” of all concerned (Wilson 1951). Only, for these people, the horrors the boy reports are not understood as figments of his imagination represented in a dream. ey are taken as real. e story continues: Miss Salim (the bewitched boy’s mother) began to cry when she heard that her son has learned to be a witch and that her mother is among the witches. She cried too when she heard that her mother wanted to kill her. She asked her mother: “Have you heard what my son has said?” “Yes, I have heard,” the grandmother replied. “Do you have anything to say?” “No. I know nothing about that; therefore I have nothing to

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say. If he was taken by witches, I was not among them. He knows the people who took him, but it wasn’t me.” Miss Salim went to the herbalist again. She wanted herbs for removing the witchcra from her son. e herbalist came to her home and removed the witchcra in her son. Her mother did not want to drink the same medicine to remove witchcra . She kept saying, “I am not a witch, so there is no need for me to drink that medicine.” Angry at her mother’s refusal, the daughter told her: “If you don’t want to drink this medicine and stop whatever you are doing, I will leave you here alone. Maybe your relatives will be looking a er you. But myself, I will migrate to somewhere else. I cannot live with you knowing that you are a witch. You are teaching my child to become a witch so that he should kill me. It means that a er killing me, he will be killing his brothers and sisters here, too. at is happening because of you. If you want to live with me as your daughter, take this medicine and stop your witchcra .” In the end, according to the woman recounting the story overheard by Alice, the grandmother agreed to drink the medicine. In theory, the grandmother’s renunciation of witchcra and treatment by the healer should have been sufficient to end the maer, allowing all to live happily ever a er. But, as the child’s story revealed, the grandmother was not alone. Her “friends” remained at large, free to practice their arts untouched, ready to strike again. In the days following the child’s escape from the witches, his story spread quickly around the village. People were worried, for the issue went beyond Miss Salim’s family. e fact that people other than the child’s grandmother were involved in witchcra meant the whole community was at risk, and while the grandmother had been disarmed by drinking the herbs, others remained at large. So the chief called the villagers to a meeting. At the meeting he castigated people over the amount of witchcra in the village and announced that he would be imposing a levy on all households to raise money to pay for a traditional

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healer to come to the village in order to cleanse all of witchcra . Anyone who refused to drink the medicine, he added, would be chased away from the village. It is unlikely he knew such actions would constitute a criminal offense under the terms of the Witchcra Act, which specifically outlaws the raising of money to hire specialists to identify witches. It is even less likely that he would have cared.

8 Judgment Day for Mrs. K.

Unlike the people accused in the chiefs’ courts, in the court of Magistrate First Grade Damson S. Banda, Mrs. K. did not confess. e children she was accused of teaching did not testify. Indeed, technically, she was not supposed to be the one on trial. And, besides, there is no law against witchcra . She had merely brought a civil case of defamation against two junior colleagues at the hospital for damaging her reputation by calling her a witch. Nonetheless, everyone was awaiting the verdict in the trial of the “witch.” Magistrate Banda, as his judgment makes clear and as he later explained when I met with him in his office, realized he was conducting two trials at the same time: one in his courtroom, where the Laws of Malawi rule; the other in the court of public opinion, where people are fearful of witches and demand justice and security in the face of their assaults. 122

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e judgment in the case of Mrs. K., delivered by the magistrate several weeks a er the hearing, presents an extended explanation of the legal issues before the court, including two brief lectures on the Laws of Malawi. e first was an excursus on the laws pertaining to libel, slander, and defamation. For a case of defamation to be proven, the magistrate explained, the plaintiff had to both demonstrate that he or she had suffered a material injury as a result of the defendant’s words and prove that the offending statements were untrue. e second mini-lecture was an explanation of the criminal provisions of the Witchcra Act, which he addressed in detail, despite reminding the spectators at several points in his judgment that the case under consideration involved an alleged civil offense (defamation) rather than a criminal one (witchcra ). He began by quoting section 6 of the Witchcra Act: “Any person who by his statement or actions represents himself/ herself to be a wizard/witch or as having or exercising the power of witchcra , shall be liable for a fine of 50 [pounds] and imprisonment for 10 years.” He then explained that for a person to be found guilty under S.6, “it must be proved that the person has confessed” or demonstrated the claim to such powers by, for example, actions such as indoctrinating children. But, he reminded the court, there had been no confession here—and, besides, this was not a criminal trial under the Witchcra Act in the first place. Following his explanation of the necessity of confession in witch trials, Magistrate Banda launched into an extended disquisition on witchcra : In this case I am of the view that owing to the many issues which are being talked about and allegedly experienced out there, certain things have got to be done if we are to forge ahead as a country and in particular to issues about witchcra . We should not pretend that the practice does not exist. Rather, Malawi as a country should come up with an enabling law to sort out the problem. I think that there are things we can do as a country:

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(1) Acknowledge the existence and widespread use of witchcra and traditional medicine; (2) Be open about it and not be ashamed of it; and . . . (3) Try to bring modernity in the use of this traditional medicine, do not use it to kill or bewitch others, engage the witchcra experts and asing’anga [traditional healers, “herbalists”] and let them know that they can be useful to the country if they did their stuff in a way to help the country.

Since the trials of Mrs. K. had become the focus of national media aention, Magistrate Banda may have been directing these comments to a larger audience than simply the people in his courtroom. Moreover, at the time of Mrs. K.’s case, the Witchcra Act was under review by the Malawi Law Commission for precisely the purpose, as Magistrate Banda put it, to “come up with an enabling law to sort out the problem.” e problem, of course, was that the law, while criminalizing the claim of practicing witchcra , did not recognize the reality of witchcra per se, whereas the citizens seeking the protections of the law are living with witchcra as their most feared crime. e Law Commission, a er issuing a brief “Issues Paper” on the Witchcra Act in 2009, let their inquiries lapse (Malawi Law Commission 2009).1 In regard to Mrs. K.’s complaint of defamation, Magistrate Banda could have used the Witchcra Act to justify refusal to hear the case. For, if it is not a crime to be a witch (as opposed to claiming to be a witch), how can it be defamatory to call a person such? He could have cited, as a precedent, Civil Cause No. 547 of 2006 in the High Court of Malawi, in which Assistant Registrar T. R. Ligwe overturned a lower court’s ruling of defamation in a case similar to Mrs. K.’s. e judge in that case argued that for slander to be actionable, it must impute a criminal offense or “general charge of criminality.” Since, under the Witchcra 1. e South African Law Reform Commission has also recently completed an investigation into reforming their version of the 1736 law (see South African Law Reform Commission 2016).

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Act, being a witch is not a crime, Judge Ligwe ruled that calling someone a witch could not, therefore, be considered defamatory. (It could, however, be an offense under the said act as the primary purpose of the Witchcra Act was to outlaw accusations, but that was not the issue before the court, neither in that case nor this one.) Magistrate Banda’s actions in the case before him suggested, however, that he knew that the charge of defamation was just a technicality. e community expected him to proceed as if he was adjudicating a witch trial, which he did—while at the same time denying that was the case. A er his long and, for the purposes of this trial, legally irrelevant discussion of the law on witchcra in Malawi, Magistrate Banda stated, somewhat disingenuously: “is Court would like to put it on record that the issue whether the plaintiff is a witch or does practice witchcra is not what is before this Court and as such I am not going to decide on an issue which has not been complained of.” He then proceeded to make precisely that judgment: In case of defamation it must be proved that the statement made by the defendant(s) against or about the plaintiff is false and that the defendants despite being aware that there is no truth in it went ahead in publicizing such kind of information to other people or the world at large. In the same vein the issue as to whether the plaintiff is not a witch is not what is before this court of law, because there is no evidence which has been tendered or else by any of the people who gave evidence to show that the plaintiff is or is not a witch. Only if it had been proved that the plaintiff is not a witch or does not practice witchcra then there and then the two defendants would have been found liable to the claim as lodged by the plaintiff. (emphasis added)

Dear reader, it might be worth rereading that statement, a couple of times, before we proceed.

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Note how central the issue of evidence is: “there is no evidence which has been tendered or else by any of the people who gave evidence to show that the plaintiff is or is not a witch.” But, and here is the rub, Mrs. K.’s complaint would only have succeeded had she been able to prove she was not a witch: “Only if it had been proved that the plaintiff is not a witch or does not practice witchcra . . . .” is she clearly failed to do. In passing judgment, then, Magistrate Banda ruled that since Mrs. K. had not proved that she is not a witch, the defendants could not be liable for naming her as such. Under the circumstances, this is tantamount to the magistrate ruling that she is, in fact, a witch. e judgment continued: For this issue [of whether or not Mrs. K. is a witch] to be put to rest then I do believe and rightly so, that the children like Mishel, Bradley [sic], Chifundo and or Annie the servant to Miss Chibwana should have been the people to explain it all for they know something about the issues. It is therefore the considered view of this Court that the maer here has lost direction because the two defendants are people who heard it from other people saying and in a way complaining about what is alleged to be done by them in the company of some people probably including the plaintiff in this case. (emphasis added)

Again, the magistrate was reminding the court of the likely veracity of the children’s claims of being taught witchcra by Mrs. K. During the trial, nobody expressed doubt that the children had been taught witchcra by someone, the question was Who? According to the magistrate, Mrs. K. was “probably” among the “people” who taught them. e magistrate then proceeded to dismiss a crucial detail in Mrs. K.’s testimony—namely that she couldn’t be a witch since she has lived in Balaka a long time and no one had ever accused her before. “at is not evidence,” Mag-

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istrate Banda pointed out. It could merely mean she had not been caught before. And then came the verdict: “is Court having considered this case in its entirety has found as a fact that the plaintiff sued the wrong people.” Mrs. K., the magistrate ruled, should have sued the children, since it was they who had uered the defamatory statements (which were not in fact defamatory as Mrs. K. probably was a witch). At the same time as he was delivering his formal verdict in the defamation trial, the magistrate was also speaking as a member of the community who, understanding his audience, was pronouncing on a witch’s guilt. By implying Mrs. K.’s guilt in the subtext of his decision, the magistrate conducted a virtual witch trial alongside the actual defamation trial. For this virtual trial, the judgment was also clear: since she had not proven other wise, and since her testimony in self-defense was not credible, the plaintiff, Mrs. K. was a witch. Mrs. K. wanted her day in court. As she said to my assistant, Denview, when he interviewed her a few months a er the trial, she wanted “a fair forum where the issue could be seled.” In effect, she wanted a witch trial, only one in which she could demonstrate her innocence, place the blame where she believed it belonged, and be publicly exonerated. And a witch trial was what she got. In the interview with Denview, she aributed the outcome of the trial to corruption, claiming that a court officer had offered to swing the case her way for a fee of MK10,000 (about US$100 at the time). Whether or not this was true, and it might have been, she misjudged the likelihood of winning her case. Instead of having her name cleared in the court of public opinion in Balaka, she was damned. And while the magistrate was circumspect in his official judgment, the court of public opinion was emphatic. Once convicted, the witch, in effect, was banished from Balaka. Mrs. K. never returned to work at the hospital. She sought help from the ministry and was granted a transfer to a small clinic in her home village where her husband owned a small

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shop. “My heart pains me every day,” she told Denview when he met with her later. “A day does not pass without me thinking of this story.” Despairing of seeing it in this world, Mrs. K. clung to a last hope for justice: “God will be my magistrate.” Mrs. K. died in 2014.

9 Human Rights, Norwegians, and the “President of Witches” One a ernoon in October 2015, two friends joined our journal writer Simon to pick mangoes from the trees near his house. While one friend climbed into the branches, tossing the ripe fruits to his friends on the ground, the two on the ground chaed idly about village affairs. e following is adapted from Simon’s journal describing the conversation.1 A neighbor, evidently sick with AIDS, had recently delivered a child, the friend reported, adding that he had seen her walking in the trading center some weeks earlier looking “shy,” a far cry from the arrogant deportment of the former beauty who used to behave as if she owned the place. 1. Simon_151018 in the Malawi Journals Project.

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“How did you know she was HIV positive?” Simon asked. “People around the family were talking a er she came from the clinic,” his friend replied. “But nowadays people are not laughing at a person because of AIDS,” the second friend interjected from his position above them in the tree. “We are past the days when those who are dying of AIDS are only prostitutes who sell their private parts with money. Even those who are innocent are dying of AIDS.” “And people nowadays are not dying with AIDS so much,” the first friend said, “but they are even staying longer in life because of the ARVs.” e three friends agreed that with the antiretroviral therapy now widely available in public clinics, along with messages on the radio and in newspapers as well as the activities of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), people with AIDS were mistreated less than in the past. “But still,” he insisted, “if that lady heard them talking about her sickness, she would sue them in the chief ’s court. You still can’t talk openly in front of a person such as that.” “Yes,” agreed the second friend, climbing down from the mango tree. “Because of mabungwe (human rights organizations) who are working closely in the villages and everywhere. Definitely if you are found talking that such and such a person has the virus without his or her consent, definitely you can be in trouble. e coming of these organizations has really helped a lot, because now people’s rights is respected.” e others agreed. e proliferation of NGOs over the past couple of decades, however, bringing messages of rights, democracy, and AIDS awareness—along with a substantial infusion of cash into this poverty-stricken land—has not been an unmixed blessing. “e problem is,” the mango picker added, “these are the same organizations which are fighting for the mwasanguluka chilo!” (People who fly at night; that is, witches.) “I heard on the radio that there is a man called indwa who is fighting with the government, the parliament, that there should be a law that whoever calls someone a witch that one should be arrested forthwith.”

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“Can backing up the witches be good?” asked Simon. “Ah, no,” the friend replied. “It is very bad. Whoever supports a witch then he must also be a witch.” At this, the friends all laughed. “I was so surprised to hear such an educated man like Mr. indwa supporting the bill to pass in parliament that witches have the human rights. He says they should not be put in the chiefs’ courts as well as the magistrate courts. And no one must point [out] a witch. Such a kind of man must for sure be a witch himself.” e conversation lapsed for a while as Simon summoned his young brother to bring water for them to wash their hands and they seled down on his veranda to feast on the fruit. e three friends were evidently unaware that the law Mr. indwa was promoting was not new. Modeled on a law passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom in 1736, it had been on the books in Malawi since 1911. A century later, in 2012, the Association for Secular Humanism (ASH), which Mr. indwa leads, was awarded a grant of nearly US$600,000 by the Norwegian embassy in Malawi to organize a campaign raising awareness of the Witchcra Act among law enforcement officers, traditional leaders, and the public—particularly the provisions outlawing the making of accusations and the hearing of trials—prompting headlines such as “Anti-God Activist indwa Urges Police to Enforce Laws on Witchcra ” (Nyasa Times, August 15, 2013). e fact that the Norwegian government was sponsoring an African activist to promote a century-old British law based on eighteenth-century legal principles was, to say the least, curious. George indwa is one of the most famous people in Malawi. While most would tremble at the thought of being called “antiGod,” indwa relishes his role as the country’s leading atheist. Once, tired of the constant harangues of an itinerant preacher on a long-distance bus journey—the sort of Bible-thumper that abounds in virtually every corner of the subcontinent and is, if not always revered, at least tolerated as a hardworking

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toiler in the vineyard of the Lord—indwa piped up and demanded quiet, in accordance, he proclaimed, with his constitutional rights. Uproar ensued. indwa was ejected from the bus, dumped in the middle of nowhere to find his own way home and to seek more publicity for the cause of reason. In 2010 he gained further notoriety by offering a prize of one million Kwacha (about $2,500 at the time) to anyone who could successfully bewitch him. e prize remains unclaimed. At the time, indwa and his colleagues in ASH were working to free people imprisoned in Malawi on charges of witchcra . A er surveying prisons and courts, ASH identified some eighty-six persons being held on witchcra charges, and they successfully petitioned the state president, Bingu wa Mutharika, for their release. News of scores of “witches” being released in Malawi was reported with bemusement by the international media, heralded by activists as a victory for human rights. In the villages, however, few greeted the news with satisfaction that justice had been done and rights respected. One of the last witches to be released, in December 2012, described the village that had once been her home as now nothing but a “camp” where she was not welcome.2 I first met George indwa while visiting Malawi in June 2013 to work with our journal writers on the Malawi Journals Project. For the previous year or so, he and I had been in regular e-mail contact, introduced by a mutual friend. When the taxi driver on the road into Lilongwe from Kamuzu Airport asked why I was visiting Malawi, I mentioned that, among other things, I would be meeting with George indwa. He laughed a nervous, hesitant laugh. “Do you know George indwa?” I asked. “Everybody knows Mr. indwa,” he replied. A heavyset man with a slightly lopsided smile bespeaking a taste for irony greeted me warmly in the garden of the Kiboko, a modest hotel in the center of town where we had arranged to

2. “Malawi Frees All Witches from Jail,” Malawi Nation, January 20, 2013, hp://mwnation.com/malawi-frees-all-witches-from-jail/.

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meet. I recognized indwa immediately. He thanked me for my support in their campaign to free the witches. I greeted him as a fellow atheist. He ordered a Sprite; I took a beer, Carlsberg “green.” We began to chat. I asked how the campaign to free the witches was going. He told me how, in 2010, they had managed to draw up a list of all the prisoners and suspects awaiting trial. To do so, they had to visit all the prisons and police station lockups in the country and ask about the inmates being held as “witches.” Wrien records, even of criminal convictions, if they exist at all, are unreliable. In Malawi the only way to know if something is happening somewhere is to be there. e ASH researchers found eighty-six people incarcerated as witches. ey then presented the list of prisoners to the late president Bingu wa Mutharika, who ordered all of them released in November 2011. But there were two who were not on the list, having been missed when the list was being drawn up as they were still awaiting trial, so they languished in jail for months, even a er they were discovered and their cases taken to ASH and made public. e last two were freed a year later, in December 2012. “e project was a great success,” said indwa in conclusion. “All the witches are out of prison. No more are being arrested. Whenever cases come up to the High Court, they are thrown out.” I congratulated him, then asked: “Aren’t you being accused of protecting witches?” “I am.” He chuckled. “ey are calling indwa the ‘President of Witches.’ ” We laughed. “NO!” he added, meaning yes: “I am well known these days over the whole country. And whenever one of these cases comes up, someone says: ‘Phone indwa!’ ey contact me because most of the time they feel pity for those who are accused. So I work closely with the police and the magistrates, and even the chiefs and the elders. Because most of them, they know I will bring aention and insist on the proper law being applied. And many of the victims they are elderly, so the police and prison people feel sorry for them. So they let us know.”

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He told me of the new project funded by the Norwegians. “I now have funding,” he said. “A lot of money.” I didn’t ask how much, though I later learned from the Progress Report he gave me that it was US$588,571 over three years. “It’s to sensitize the people on the Witchcra Act.” When people such as indwa talk of “sensitizing,” which those involved with African NGOs do incessantly, they are referring to the workshops, “trainings,” and sundry meetings wherein the money and mantras flow from the capitals of the global north in ever-diminishing streams—as cash is scooped out to cover costs on the way down—to the towns and villages of places like Malawi. When villagers get invited to “a training,” they are usually happy. At the very least, they will get a Fanta and a bun for lunch, along with, perhaps, a per diem allowance and some money for transport. ey will also get a taste of the verbiage that, flowing from the source along with the money, offers the promise, given mastery of the art of proposal writing, of swimming higher up the streams of global altruism into sweeter pools of cash. e ultimate prize is a job with an NGO, the dream of virtually everyone with an education in Malawi, as in other places like Malawi across Africa and the world. (For an extensive analysis of this phenomenon, see Swidler and Watkins 2017.) Starting a new NGO and geing funding to support projects is the jackpot few dare dream of. anks to the good people of oil-rich Norway, George indwa had won big. “We are even taking workshops into the rural areas to educate chiefs about the content of the Witchcra Act,” he told me, after describing their meetings with police and magistrates, all of which were going smoothly. “How are the chiefs taking it?” I asked. “Very well,” he replied. “We are always very welcome. Because these chiefs, you know, they are not happy to deal with these sorts of cases of witches. So they are quite pleased to learn they have an excuse to dodge them because of the law. You know, o en these chiefs, being elders, are suspected of being witches them-

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selves.” In my experience, too, chiefs are reluctant to even talk about witchcra cases in their villages. is is not because they are aware that holding trials is against the law. e ASH project found that only about one in twenty chiefs were even aware that there is a Witchcra Act. Rather, the existence of witchcra accusations in a village signals the fact that peace and harmony, the fundamental raison d’être for the chie aincy, are not prevailing in the village. Like Chief Matemia when his sister was accused, most chiefs usually try to resolve witchcra conflicts privately first. Dodging trials is very much in their interests, until they have no choice but to hear the case. But if the provisions of the Witchcra Act were enforced to the extent that chiefs could no longer deal with the cases they couldn’t dodge, their subjects would feel greatly insecure. “And how are the victims of witchcra taking the campaigns?” I asked. indwa’s recitation of unmitigated successes was beginning to sound tedious, like an NGO’s progress report to a donor. Time for one atheist to needle another: “A er all, there are many, many more people who feel they have been the victim of a witch than there are accused witches. Your report shows there are at least ten times as many people who see themselves as victims of witches as there are people accused of witchcra .” I was referring to the research report prepared for the Norwegian Embassy by Charles Chilimampunga and George indwa on the extent of witchcra violence, which formed the basis for the big grant that was funding the current project (Chilimampunga and indwa 2012). “I don’t think of that,” he replied. “But how can you not?” I pressed. “Surely the fears of the people are real, even if we deny that witches actually exist?” “at’s why we have to educate the people,” he replied. “Witchcra is just a belief, like the belief in God. ere is no evidence.” I expressed my skepticism at the prospect of eradicating either of these beliefs, widespread as they are. “People have the right to believe whatever they want,” he said, reciting what

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was beginning to sound like a party line: “But we must prevent people from being harassed. Most of the time, these accusations are just machinations against women and children, especially the elderly. And you get people using it as a tool, a vendea, because of jealousy. ey will just accuse somebody out of crookedness.” I agreed, of course. I asked how he became a skeptic about witchcra , and he told me a long story about when he was growing up in a village, a relative was accused of witchcra , but there was no evidence, and this caused him to begin questioning the whole enterprise of religion, spirituality, and witchcra . It’s a long story. But while many people are skeptical about particular accusations of witchcra , indwa’s path from doubting one accusation to denying them all is a path few tread. Everyone is happy to doubt another’s claim to know what the invisible forces are up to, but few will deny that such knowledge is possible—let alone claim that invisible agencies intent on shaping human life, God among them, do not exist. People like George indwa should be celebrated, and I was glad the Norwegians were supporting him, even if I thought his project fundamentally misguided. I tried returning to the question of justice for those who felt themselves victims of witches, arguing that justice for accused witches needs to be balanced against the desire for security in fearful communities. I argued that perhaps reinforcing the provisions of the Witchcra Act might have unintended consequences, particularly by removing the possibility of accessing institutions of justice by those who saw themselves as victims of witches, making them more inclined to take the law into their own hands and perpetrate violent mob justice. I asked: What if enforcing the provisions of the Witchcra Act makes things worse for accused witches? At least if they end up in court, I suggested, they are still alive. Like Mrs. K., they may feel aggrieved, but perhaps that is a price worth paying for their personal safety and a community’s sense of security. Defending witches in the name of human rights also risks

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tainting the concept of rights. Surely it is beer to adopt the position of Magistrate Banda in the case of the Kasitos when Shybu was accused of killing his uncle with a magic hammer, and insist that accusers actually prove their case as one of murder not some ill-defined magical business called “witchcra .” indwa was having none of it. Having set himself up as an adversary of ignorance and superstition, defender of the innocent victims of accusation, he has no time for the foolishness of the majority in this country who fear witches. But the more I pushed, the more he seemed to acknowledge that there was a problem. He told me how at a recent meeting he was denounced as a protector of witches. He seemed, at that moment, chastened somewhat in the face of the anger his project in defense of accused witches threatened to unleash. indwa relishes his status as Malawi’s most famous atheist and laughs at the designation “president of the witches.” Standing up for “witches” in Africa, however, is no joke. Having finished eating their mangoes, and washing their hands again, Simon and his two friends resumed their conversation. “e first time I heard Mr. indwa promoting the freedom for witches,” the first friend said, “I was very disappointed indeed. is is completely welcoming Satanism into the country to be practiced everywhere.” “Yes,” the second friend agreed. “Satanism is the same as witchcra . It’s the same because it involves magic.” “No, it’s not really the same but halfway it’s the same,” the first averred. “What do you mean, halfway the same?” asked Simon. “Well, both involve magic, but Satanism involves the killing and shedding of blood so that the people involved for the mission of the bloodshed become extremely rich. You know this Satanism is now high indeed in Malawi nowadays. at’s why Mr. indwa came with the move of legalizing witchcra . And indwa has a lot of money indeed. But it’s not by himself that he started this

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move. ere are several organizations that have pumped in lots of money in his account as well as lots of money from Satanism side.” At this Simon laughed heartily. “Ha, you think I’m cheating you,” his friend responded. “But in reality I am telling the truth.” “Money,” the other friend interjected, “is the source of all these problems. Because of money there are lots of enmities, and wars, and the huge spread of HIV.” “Yes,” friend two agreed. “Even in the time of Jesus Christ, the son of God was crucified on the cross because of money. And nowadays the whole world is being run under the influence of money.” Friend one returned to the question of indwa: “Maybe he is not a witch,” he said, “but he got influenced by the donors. ey pumped in a lot of money inside his account that people should practice witchcra to encourage Satanism in this country. at’s destroying the world. Because when witches heard about that, they have freedom to do whatever they want, either spelling or bewitching someone. at may lead to lots of people’s death.” Simon nodded in agreement. “You know,” his friend continued, “if witches are laughed at and pointed out, say at home in their villages, they live with that fear of knowing that if someone dies suddenly, they can be accused and put to shame. at’s why there’s been less deaths due to witchcra in recent years. But deaths now will become high, because witches are being given freedom.” e conversation ended suddenly when they heard people quarreling in the distance. Some young boys had climbed the mango tree in a neighbor’s field, and she was chasing them off with a stick.

10 “Material Dreaming” and the Ways Witchcraft Stories Work On the frontispiece of this book is an epigram, from the sixteenth-century French humanist Michel de Montaigne, extracted from his famous essay “Of Cripples,” asserting: “A er all, it is puing a very high price on one’s conjectures to have a man roasted alive because of them” (Montaigne 1948, 790). In this passage Montaigne is recalling how, a er a prince he was visiting afforded him an audience with a group of imprisoned “witches,” he deemed them worthy more of treatment for madness than execution for witchcra . Montaigne’s skepticism about these particular cases of witchcra is o en interpreted as a general skepticism about the existence of witches. Not so. Earlier in the same essay, he notes the “certain and irrefragable examples” in “Holy Writ” regarding witches (Montaigne 1957, 788). Exodus 22:18, a er all, commands: “ou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Montaigne was not 139

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one to deny the authority of Scripture. His point is more circumspect: that identifying witchcra at work in “our modern events, requires greater ingenuity than ours.”1 at is, witches exist, but they are difficult, if not impossible, to identify—so don’t kill someone on the basis of a mere conjecture. For conjecture is not proof. Magistrate Banda, as his jurisprudence shows, would agree. But I cite Montaigne, not to merely decorate my text with an early, and elegant, assertion of a disposition, which, I assume most of my readers now take for granted. And I certainly do not want to suggest that contemporary Malawians are behind the times and will catch up with us the enlightened in five or six centuries or so. Rather, I will argue that Montaigne offers an insight into the questions of what it is that makes these stories of witches and their cra believable: What are the fundamental conditions of plausibility that make it possible to fashion a story about people defying the laws of physics and morality in the manner of a witch? In the following chapter, we shall return to the question of what makes particular stories, such as we have heard in earlier chapters, believed to be true. In other words, we must figure out two things: How do stories of witchcra work? And what work do these stories do? e fact that stories of witchcra are intended to be taken literally is troublesome for those of us who would resist the conclusion that people who say such things are either backward, foolish, or hopelessly deluded—which was prey much the aitude of European colonialists in Africa, at least in the laer part of their rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In recent decades, under the onslaught of Pentecostal missionaries waging war on the legions of Satan, stories of witches have increasingly become linked to Christian mythologies of demonic powers. And although the idea of “primitive mentality” has long ago been dis-

1. For a discussion of whether Montaigne’s aitude toward witch trials reflects a general liberal disposition on his part, and an argument that it does not, see Ribeiro (2009).

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credited, outsiders encountering these stories for the first time still find it hard to avoid the suspicion that they are a product of backwardness that could be removed with the enlightenment of education, particularly education in science. Nonetheless, we—and by “we,” I mean those of us in the small minority of the human species who do not interact with invisible beings in the ordinary course of our lives—must resist the temptation to reduce witchcra stories to metaphors or idioms describing other maers we are more comfortable in accounting as “real.” We also need to avoid the temptation to reduce the stories to propositional “beliefs” with their own inherent paerns and logics, histories and geographies—even if, like E. E. Evans-Pritchard, we do so in order to show that those who hold such beliefs are not primitive and pre-logical. Rather, we need to understand how the plausibility of these stories is derived: Upon what must a story be predicated in order to be believable? What does it take for someone to consider that it actually is true? And what is the work these stories do in shaping the social lives of those who share them? Notice, we are not talking about “beliefs” here. Stories are not propositions, though their meaning can sometimes be translated into propositional forms. A proposition, put simply, “is what one believes, or thinks, or means when one believes, thinks, or means something” (Briggs and Jago 2012, 1). Reducing stories to beliefs, elements of cognition organized into logical systems, obscures much of the work that the telling and hearing, reading, performing, and consuming of stories does in the messy business of human lives, not to mention the complicated cognitive and emotional effects of performance. Later we shall consider why particular witchcra stories are actually believed, which involves taking time to empirically examine them in their particular contexts of telling, such as in the chapters above. First we need to investigate the conditions of believability, the preconditions that need to exist in order for a story about witches to work. e history of Western writing about African witchcra has been marred, if not fatally flawed, by a persistent insistence that

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stories of witches and their cra be reduced to distinct propositions, of the variety known as “beliefs.” Stated as propositions, the stories Africans tell of witches—stories of flying through the night, being in two places at once, effecting miraculous transformations, feasting on the flesh of kin . . . to name but a few of their putative hobbies—seem irredeemably absurd. Understood as stories, however, we can begin to see how they work. Montaigne’s skepticism, as illustrated by his reluctance to torch witches, is justly celebrated. We should all read his essays, again and again. But it is the paragraph in Montaigne’s famous essay following his doubt about witch trials that I want to explore. He seems to be touching on issues I have struggled with for years in Africa: Why do people believe these stupid stories? In it, he reveals a more profound problem, underpinning his skepticism about identifying witches: How do we determine the nature of realities experienced in dreams? (And what should we do about them?) He points to the predicate that makes witchcra stories plausible. Let me quote the passage in full: ey [the “worthy men” who take issue with his skeptical position on executing witches] relate various examples, and Praestantius [the most prominent, most worthy of the “worthy men” with whom he’s been arguing about witches— probably the prince] tells one about his father, that having fallen into a sleep much deeper than any ordinary sound sleep, he imagined he was a mare and served some soldiers as a packhorse; and what he imagined, he really was. If sorcerers thus dream materially, if dreams can sometimes incorporate themselves in reality, still I do not believe that our will should be accountable to justice for them. (Montaigne 1957, 790; emphasis added)

ough Montaigne reports having been shown “proofs and free confessions” relating to the witches held for trial, and he cites

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“objections and arguments that worthy men have brought up against me,” this story of the dreamed packhorse is the sole concrete example he chooses to present as an example of the strongest arguments for identifying witchcra . As far as I can tell, Montaigne scholars, of whom there are many, have not dwelt on this passage. ere is, however, a profound argument encapsulated in these two sentences. It is this: while human action might be possible in multiple dimensions of reality, such as when a person “dream[s] materially,” responsibility for action, holding a person “accountable to justice,” should be limited to conscious actions taken in the waking state. is was a radical position in Montaigne’s day. It has radical implications, too, for those who live in the world with witches today. As far as I am aware, the law in most jurisdictions now takes this connection between “will,” or conscious intentionality, and “justice” for granted. e mens rea, or guilty mind, that the law requires for conviction in cases of crime is a wakeful mind, not that of a dreamer. While many might rise of a morning perturbed by the immorality of their activities in the dreamworld— typically when these involve illicit sex—nobody, as far as I am aware, has been hauled before a court in recent centuries to account for their filthy dreams or other acts of somnial malfeasance, although the extent of discussion among Christians about the phenomenon of the “spirit spouse” suggests that many still fear nocturnal intercourse with demons.2 Today, when court officers argue about criminal responsibility, they debate the conscious intention to commit a crime. Courts also sometimes inquire as to whether a defendant’s mental illness is sufficiently severe to render them incapable of responsibility, of knowing what they were doing. We don’t worry about what they did in their dreams, unless they acted on the dream in the light of day—or were incapable of distinguishing between night and day. 2. A search for “spirit wife” or “spirit husband,” even for their medieval counterparts succubus and incubus, will find that the Internet is awash in video testimony and theological exposition regarding the problem of sex with demons in dreams.

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is was clearly not the case in sixteenth-century France. Montaigne’s friend, whom he nicknamed “Praestantius”—that is, the most eminent of his interlocutors—was probably not an idiot. Nonetheless, he told Montaigne that his father had been a packhorse. Presumably he believed his father’s story. Montaigne’s designation of the phenomenon as “material dreaming” suggests he might have thought it plausible, too. For most Malawians, and indeed many others in Africa today, the story of the prince made packhorse, though outlandish, would not be wrien off as impossible. In the case of mfiti-type witchcra stories, such as we have been hearing in the cases reported above, the essential predicate of believability is an openness, or inclusiveness—perhaps the proper analogy is porousness—in the boundary between the realities of the world as experienced in the waking state and the realities of the world as experienced in dreams: a willingness to hold those who “dream materially,” in Montaigne’s phrase, accountable to justice for what they have done in their dreams. ose of us accustomed to living in the dull sublunary realms of Western modernity tend, nay are required, to conceive of dreams as phenomena internal to the mind of an individual, products of the functioning of a brain (Schredl 2010; Windt and Noreika 2011). We might be willing to aribute symbolic significance to images experienced in the dreaming state, both in terms of our individual psychology and as expressions of the culture of which we are part, perhaps even as archetypal symbols in the manner of Jung. We might, indeed, follow Freud in thinking of dreams as the royal road to the unconscious and spend our days in analysis of them in hopes of learning who, or what, we are (Freud 1954 [1899]). If we follow the scientific literature of neurobiology, in recent years we will have been tending to think of dreams as a devilishly hard-tostudy piece of the puzzle of consciousness (Schredl 2010). Whatever else we make of them, and despite the capacity of dreams to affect our days long a er waking, those of us in the reality-based community recognize events experienced in

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dreams as ontologically distinct from the realities of the waking state. Real action of the sort for which we can be held accountable, most of us would not hesitate to affirm along with Montaigne, only takes place in the waking state—unless, of course, we have been sleepwalking. Despite the fact that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to provide a sound philosophical account of why this is so, a er we have awakened, the monsters that plagued our hours of sleep we know to be mere chimeras, figments of our imaginations (see Dreisbach 2000). Were we to conceive of the dreamworld as a domain of action wherein agents of one sort or another—such as spirits, souls, demons, deities, witches, or other invisible beings—actually do things with real effects in the worlds of the awake, we would most likely be deemed demented. In this, however, we are unlike most humans—probably in the present, certainly throughout recorded history (Palagini and Rosenlicht 2011). Indeed, it is tempting to speculate that the ubiquity of key elements in stories of witchcra —such as flying, exercising enormous power, paralysis and the sensation of crushing weight, experiencing sexual congress and nocturnal emissions, and so on—found through the enormous variety of times and places where stories of witches have been told derives from the universality of certain features of the dreaming state in human brains. Few in Africa live in a world where the capacities of persons can be assumed to be limited merely to that which they can achieve in the waking hours of their everyday lives. Few are willing to dismiss the realities of dreamed experience in the manner described above. Stories about witchcra in Africa, which worry just about everybody at some stage of their lives, o en speak of dreams as if the events experienced in them are in the same ontological domain as those experienced while awake. e puzzle is not that this is so, since it has been the norm for humans since time began and remains so to this day. (If you doubt this is so, try explaining to a fundamentalist Christian that the dream in the Old Testament story of Jacob’s ladder was a mere

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illusion.3) e question, rather, is how is this so? In what ways do particular people in particular times and places narrate events in their lives, enfolding both dream and waking experiences into the same story? Most dreams, in Africa as elsewhere, are just dreams—neither troubling nor interesting; rarely recounted, mostly not even remembered. Sometimes they are not even real dreams, just useful lies. Take sex dreams, for example. In 2010 our journal writer Simon had a conversation with a young man in a bar who was boasting of seducing a girl by telling her he had dreamed of her, perhaps hoping she would believe their union was blessed by the spirit world or maybe just offering a cover story for a mutually beneficial genital transaction also involving the promise of a cell phone (Simon_100701). Or consider the story Simon’s wife told him a few years later in which a woman, whose husband was away in South Africa, fell pregnant and claimed it was by chigonechesya, magical sex (Simon_120617). Sadly for pregnant woman, the skeptical women who heard her tale did not believe her; eventually she confessed to having taken a lover. Chigonechesya, however, remains a highly plausible subject of witchcra narratives, many examples of which can be found in the Malawi Journals Project, usually involving speculation about the aendant risks of HIV infection. Consider this exchange. It is 2007 and a group of young men are drinking in a local establishment in a village where they brew kachasu. Pointing to an older man drinking nearby, unknown to his interlocutors, the narrator of this story revealed all: “What that man does you cannot believe . . .” According to the gossip that our journal writer reports, whose journal (Chikondi_070903) I summarize, whenever this man sees a beautiful woman that he wants to have sex with, he just does it without her realizing it. Only when she wakes in the morning and finds sperm on her

3. For a good summary of the numerous references to conversations with divinities in the texts of the Abrahamic traditions, see Adams (2005).

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private parts does she realize what has happened. en she recalls a dream she had in which she had sex with that very same man, whom she can recognize during the day. But there is no evidence against that man. And this has happened to many women in the village, who were dreaming the same man, only to find his “sperms” on their private parts when they woke up. He even does it to married women while their husbands are sleeping beside them. He has told people what he does, though he does not mention the women’s names. Only they know. e journal continues: I tell you everybody was puzzled and another man asked a very good question which everybody there was not expecting since he asked that can’t that system contribut[e] in the spread of HIV/AIDS though he does that through the magic? Everybody’s was tongues tied to answer that question since it came at a time when everybody could not expect such kind of the question however it took time now that everybody there could think now what to answer by thinking the ways how HIV/AIDS can be spread and found out that automatically can help in spread of the disease HIV/AIDS but what remained was the fact the thing is done through magic not actual sex can that help in spread the disease HIV? We kept in asking ourselves if that can be possible and again what made us to believe was the found of the sperms at the private parts and definitely the viruses are found in the sperms so that means the action can help in the spread of the disease only that nobody can give evidence on the issue and again nobody can accuse the man due to lack of evidence otherwise with this disease AIDS that is a bad practice though here is no any proof that the system can help the spread of the disease. Everybody at the place really agreed that some people are really witches and can practice witchcra in different

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ways and that witchcra does not mean only to bewitch someone.

Curiously, the credulity of the drinkers, all male, about the risks of HIV infection through chigonechesya was not matched by that of women confronting one of their own who was claiming a pregnancy through the same magical procedure. Sex dreams are not the only ones that spill into waking-day life. One day in 2010, our journal writer Patuma was aending a church service in her rural village in the south of Malawi. e pastor, with a view to encouraging more women to take on leadership positions in the church, was preaching a message of trusting in Jesus to overcome “challenges.” He called on people to testify about problems they had faced in the past, presumably expecting upli ing stories to inspire others to overcome theirs in the present. A woman rose and told of how she had once been elected church treasurer. A er collecting offerings one Sunday, she took the money home for safekeeping. at night, the money secreted in a safe place in her house, she went to sleep. During the night, she dreamed that the previous treasurer came to her and took the money. In the morning, the money was gone. According to Patuma, the woman testified that when she next saw the other treasurer, he “told her that she must not be worried for he was the one who has taken the money.” Afraid of being contaminated by the “magic” of the former treasurer, the woman resigned her position in the church. Nobody in the congregation subjected her story to ridicule, suggested that either she or a member of her household must have stolen the money, or doubted that she had taken a wise course by resigning (Patuma_100325). Or consider this example: One a ernoon in late November 2005, Anna met her friend Deliby coming from the hospital in Liwonde, where as a result of a poorly treated “boil” on her uterus, she had been advised to have a hysterectomy. Deliby was worried about what her husband would say when he discovered she would no longer be able to bear children. Another friend who

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was with them advised Deliby to have the operation in secret and not tell her husband. More importantly, the friend added, she must not let her husband’s relatives know about her condition, as they were a family of witches and would surely move against her. Deliby agreed, relating in corroboration a story about the time when she dreamed she was fighting with her husband’s aunt. In the dream the aunt struck her on the side of her head. e next morning she awoke with her face swollen, unable to open her eye. She went to a “traditional doctor” who told her that her husband’s aunt had come to her “in witchcra ” in an aempt to kill her. e doctor gave Deliby medicine to protect her from further aack and to aid in her recovery. When the aunt realized her aempt to kill Deliby had failed, she became “shy,” aware that Deliby now knew the identity of the witch who was causing her troubles. Neither Anna nor the other friend expressed doubts about the veracity of Deliby’s story (Anna_051102). Deliby, it seems, was operating with a capacious understanding of the realities of material action in dreams when dealing with her in-laws.4 Deliby was not the only one in this part of the world being subjected to an occult assault in her dreams. In July 2007, for example, our journal writer Anna reported a story of a woman consulting a traditional healer because of her inability to hold on to boyfriends and get married. Her problem was that men would sleep with her once but not return for more. Meanwhile, immediately a er having sex, she would begin menstruating, regardless of the time in her cycle. She also complained that she dreamed of sex during the night and would wake in the morning to find semen seeping from her private parts, indicating that she really

4. In South Africa, people worry about a form of witchcra known as idliso, which is contracted through substances generically known as muthi ingested in food eaten by the victim (Conco 1972; Farrand 1988). Once consumed, the muthi of idliso witchcra is activated to form a creature—sometimes imagined as a crab or a lizard—that consumes the victim from inside (Ashforth 2000, chap. 14). e act of eating, however, does not have to involve physical movement and material substances. It can take place in a dream, yet the idliso will be just as deadly as if real food with real muthi in it had been consumed in a waking state.

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had had sex, though no man had been near her bed during the night. e healer told her that she was being bewitched by her grandmother, who was sending those dreams in order for her to be unable to satisfy a man, since whenever a man slept with her, he would find that she had already slept with another and thus he would not return (Anna_070706). Dreams are o en spoken of as a medium of communication between human persons and invisible beings of one sort or another. Few in Malawi, or elsewhere in Africa for that maer, deny the possibility of communication in dreams between humans and invisible beings such as ancestors, spirits, demons, Satan, or God.5 As mentioned before, one of the main ways of asserting authority in maers spiritual is to claim that God or some other being has spoken to you in a dream. Healers usually claim that they receive recipes for their herbal remedies through communications with spirits in dreams. Since there are no other witnesses to these encounters, however, people making such claims face a number of problems in making their cases. ey might, for instance, encounter skepticism that the communication actually took place. ey might also face doubt as to the real nature of the being whose purported message is being reported. Enthused by Pentecostalism’s obsessions with demons, everyone now knows that the beloved ancestor speaking to you in your dream might, in fact, be Satan seeking to lead the unwary dreamer into perdition. Some of the uncertainties surrounding dream-based claims to authority were illustrated in a performance by a couple of itinerant preachers that our journal writer Patuma observed in 2007 (Patuma_071007). Patuma is a great fan of all things religious, so whenever a preacher appears on the scene, she is eager to listen and join in with the singing and praying. One Sunday in early October, as she walked around the village trying to sell some of her wares from her market stall, she heard songs of praise playing on 5. For a small, but revealing, study of aitudes to the communicative functions of dreams among university students in South Africa, where the overwhelming majority of black students reported a connection with the spirit world while asleep, see Nell (2012).

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a cassee player and was drawn to discover the source. Under the big tree in the center of the village, Patuma found two preachers, dressed in identical garb, holding a prayer meeting. ey began singing, the gathering crowd joining in heartily; then followed prayers and Bible reading. A er a while the preachers called for quiet and told their story. No one was surprised to hear that God had commanded them, through a message received in a dream, to preach at this place, under this very tree. But their story had a curious twist. ey had found a way of endorsing each other’s spiritual authority while at the same time announcing their joint endorsement by God: they both claimed to have met in a dream and to have dreamt the same dreams. ey took turns recounting the story. In his dream, the first man said, he had seen a group of people dressed in white robes with shining lamps gathered under a big nthundu tree. He saw himself among them. is was on the thirteenth of October of the previous year, almost a year ago to the day from when Patuma had seen them preach. He took the dream as a message to start a church, but his efforts in that direction failed. He decided to seek further communication with God. So he went to the nthundu tree to spend the night in the gloom under its spreading branches, praying and reading his Bible. At about seven o’clock, in the dark, he saw people wearing white robes and carrying shining lamps approaching. ey joined together in singing and dancing for an hour or so. en he recognized the man who was to become his fellow preacher. At this point in the performance, the other man interjected, adding a detail the first had forgoen, which was that the first man was also dressed in robes and carrying a lamp. e meeting, it turned out, was happening in a dream. Now the two of them always dream together and have followed the command to preach together under the nthundu tree. Not everyone was persuaded by the story of the joint dream. “It’s a total lie,” Patuma’s friend said as they were leaving the prayer meeting. “ey just want people to take them as holy people.” She might not have been so skeptical had it been only the one claiming knowledge of the dream, but she did not believe

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two people could dream the same dream. Another friend told the skeptic to hold her tongue, because only God can know the truth about such things. To which a third chimed in: “Maybe he and his friend are following the foot of Satan because Satan has come with good things to trap the Christians so that his kingdom could expand.” In any event, despite the lively preaching and singing, the three friends decided to keep clear of the unusual preachers and stick to their own trusted churches due to the dangers of diabolical dissembling in these maers. Common, too, is the conviction that dreams can portend future events, particularly pertaining to illness and death. In August 2008, for example, our journal writer Alice wrote of a woman who fell ill with a serious disease and dreamed of someone telling her that she would not recover unless she le the place where she was living with her husband and returned to her natal home. is she did, but then her husband died. A er that, his spirit visited her in her dreams every night, causing her to be ill with a terrible headache until a year later when she joined him in the grave (Alice_080805). e ethnographic literature on witchcra in Africa reports many instances of people talking about dreams in relation to witches. In his seminal book Witchcra, Magic, and Oracles among the Azande, for example, Evans-Pritchard noted of the people with whom he lived in the south of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in the 1930s: “Bad dreams are not only evidence of witchcra but are actual experiences of it,” he explained. e Azande, he continued, perceive that the sensations of dream-happenings are not like the sensations experienced in waking life, and they realize that they are to some extent incoherent and therefore difficult to interpret. ey do not feel confident when speaking of dreams, for they confess that a man cannot know all about the adventures of the soul. Nevertheless, they are certain that in sleep the soul is released from the body and can roam about at will and meet

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other spirits and have adventures, though they admit something mysterious about its experiences. Likewise, they are certain that a witch who is sleeping can send the soul of his witchcra to eat the soul of the flesh of his victim. e hours of sleep are hence an appropriate seing for the psychical bale that witchcra means to a Zande, a struggle between his soul and the soul of witchcra when both are free to roam about at will while he and the witch are asleep. (EvansPritchard 1937, 136)

Like everyone else, it seems, Evans-Pritchard’s Azande informants recognize a difference between being asleep and being awake, between the “sensations of dream happenings” and “the sensations experienced in waking life.” ey are not, that is to say, merely delusional. eir dreamworld, however, is a vibrant and dangerous place that is difficult to speak of in the light of day. While the Azande, in Evans-Pritchard’s estimation, “recognize that the dream-happenings . . . are to some extent incoherent,” by his account they are not prepared to draw a hard line between experiences of dreaming and waking states. Both conditions of being, it seems, partake of the same reality, offering a continuous field for action by a person through night and day. Whether this reality is the reality of “experience,” however, or whether that term is imposed by Evans-Pritchard in translation, is by no means certain. is is not a trivial issue. e question of whether or not the content and character of dreams were real “experiences”—let alone whether they were experiences of the “real”—has preoccupied philosophers since the time of Plato (see Dreisbach 2000).6

6. Recent advances in neuroscience, however, seem to have resolved the issue. As Schredl reports in his review of the scientific literature on dreams: “Dreaming therefore is the subjective experienced correlate of the continuous brain activity. Differences regarding formal characteristics of dreaming and waking cognition as well as between dream reports of different sleep stages can be explained by factors such as cortical activation, blockade of external sensory input, and neuromodulation as described by the AIM model [activation input/output gating modulation]” (Schredl 2010, 137). For an overview of current and historical scientific approaches to dreaming, see Revonsuo 2010, chap. 13.

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Evans-Pritchard translates whatever it was that his interlocutors told him into the seemingly self-evident categories of “soul,” “body,” “will,” and “experience,” creating an authoritative, not to say dogmatic, statement of Azande “belief,” while yet acknowledging the inherent ambiguity in what he had been told on the subject of witchcra and dreaming: “ey admit something mysterious about its [the soul’s] experiences.” How would a passage like Evans-Pritchard’s read if the writer were less confident about his ability to translate the words of his African interlocutors into propositions he imagines his academic colleagues would find reasonable, language in which notions such as “souls” are meaningful?7 Moreover, how might it read if the author were not so confident about the ability of his interlocutors to speak with authority about these maers on behalf of their “culture” or “society,” that is on behalf of the Azande? What if, instead of being “informants” speaking of the “belief system” of the Azande, or whomever, they were just ordinary people telling and retelling stories while trying to make sense of their world and their place in it as best they can? What, in other words, would a passage like that look like if wrien by someone like me? Over the past three decades or so, I have had hundreds of conversations with people in Africa about both dreams and witchcra . e Malawi Journals Project archive contains dozens of examples like the ones recounted above, which the reader is free to peruse at leisure. In all these discussions, I have yet to find anything resembling a coherent “theory of dreams” or a systematic set of “beliefs” pertaining to witches and their cra , even a coherent narrative about the inner workings of the soul/spirit/ essence of a person that render them either vulnerable to occult

7. To an extent, Evans-Pritchard is recapitulating what the grandfather of modern anthropology, Edward Tylor, referred to as the “theory of dreams in savage psychology” (Tylor 1871, 399). For an account of the history of the anthropology of dreaming, see Mageo (2003). For an examination of anthropologists using their own dreams in the process of research, see Tremle (2008). See also Katie Glaskin’s (2011) work on Australian aboriginal notions of the dreamtime in relation to the neuroscience of dreaming.

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assault or capable of waging such.8 Rather, the typical discussion, like the debate we saw above about the dangers of contracting HIV through magical sex, revolves around a combination of certainty and uncertainty: certainty about the possibilities of mysterious action spanning realms experienced while awake as well as asleep, coupled with uncertainty about the nature and actions of invisible forces and a fervent desire for an authoritative statement of the truth of stories they share about “witchcra .” At times, this produces what I have described as a condition of “spiritual insecurity”—a sense of danger, doubt, or fear pertaining to the management of relations with dangerous invisible forces (Ashforth 2011). As it happens, there is no shortage of spiritual entrepreneurs peddling prescriptions for dealing with invisible forces in unseen realms, from born-again preachers to the most traditional of “traditional healers.” Across the continent, countless experts on maers spiritual proclaim impeccable authority, o en in strident tones and with great enthusiasm. Indeed, as with the preachers Patuma and her friends encountered with their mysterious shared dream, most healers and preachers establish their spiritual authority by claiming to act in terms of communications with invisible beings in the course of dreams, during which the gi of healing powers is bestowed upon them. Interpreting dreams as dreams is also a central part of healing practice in many parts of Africa, prompting some to compare it with Freudian psychotherapy (Buhrmann 1978). Further, when dreams are conceived as media transcending the limitations of bodily human senses, they open avenues for connection with other modalities of being through electronic media, offering opportunities for the imaginations of the spiritually inclined, such as New Age neoshamans like the old South African huckster Credo Mutwa or the scores of “white sangomas” who trumpet their connection with

8. For an example of one of these conversations with a traditional healer in South Africa, see Ashforth (2005, chap. 10).

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the motherland’s spirituality to lend credence to their claims to spiritual power (Chidester 2008). For most people, however, incoherence (to borrow a term from Evans-Pritchard) seems to be the norm when speaking of the relation between the realities of experiences, actions, and events in the sleeping and waking states. Nonetheless, a sense of openness between these realms is the norm, and stories of material dreaming abound. If pressed to explain the metaphysics of dreams, or of witchcra , most people talk about “souls” and “spirits” and such like, translating equivalents between languages without much concern for philosophical precision. When I ask questions like: What is the relation between this element of the self—perhaps that selfsame bit that Evans-Pritchard referred to as the “soul”— which is active in the dreaming state and that which is operative in ordinary waking life? ey mostly cannot say. e question, of course, is not one that would ordinarily arise or need answering if it did. But despite the absence of philosophical certitude, few would deny the possibility of human action transcending the boundaries of sleeping and waking states or of invisible beings interacting with sleeping persons, showing them, for example, what must be done or telling them what is going to happen. is porousness between sleeping and waking realities, then, is the essential predicate of witchcra stories. is is what makes such narratives capable of representing the realities of lived experience in seemingly bizarre realms impervious to the laws of physics and all the dull weights burdening life in the light of day. is is what gives witchcra stories the power to represent alternative worlds distinct from, but connected to, the pedestrian experiences of the daylight hours, worlds in which amazing and terrible things can, and do, happen. It is also what should make those of us who do not live in a world of witches dubious about efforts to reduce these stories to mere propositional statements—“beliefs”—whose truth is, in principle, falsifiable. And it means we should not be sanguine about education or the light of reason eradicating belief in witches. For stories of witch-

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cra draw on a much deeper source for their power. Moreover, if one is incapable of demonstrating the ontological ground of the metaphysical distinction between waking and dreaming states of consciousness—as I, for one, am not—we should resist treating stories of witchcra as if they were tales told by idiots. e porousness of boundaries between what is real most of the time, while at other times is not, and the interpenetration of lived reality between the worlds of dreams and waking also make stories told by children about witchcra , such as we find in the trials discussed in earlier chapters, particularly difficult to deal with. For children have much livelier imaginations than most adults. Yet stories by children about witchcra must be taken very seriously for, in their innocence, they also have a disarming way of speaking truthfully. For people who worry about witches, this produces the same quandary faced by those who would determine the truth in stories of sexual abuse by children, such as the rumors of ritual abuse that proliferated in the United States in the 1980s (Principe et al. 2010). And while we must expect the adult witch to maintain strict secrecy about her doings, unless she can be induced to confess, the innocence of children, especially while they are young and, if being taught witchcra perhaps not yet fully commied to the infernal “trade,” could make them more likely to blurt out the raw truth, undigested. But if the stories of children must be taken seriously by those who live in the world with witches, the problem still remains: who has the authority to determine whether a particular story is true, and how do they do it? In the case of Mrs. K., this authority ultimately took the form of Magistrate First Grade Damson Banda in the Balaka Magistrate Court.

11 Truth and Consequences: The Work of Witchcraft Stories Mrs. K.’s fate was sealed long before she entered the courtroom of Magistrate Banda. When she was found guilty in the court of public opinion, her trials were decided by rumors drawing sustenance from the reported testimony of children, reports of her being apprehended following the crash of her witchcra “aeroplane” and her general unpopularity among the hospital staff. But what were people doing when they told each other stories of her crimes? Why were these rumors shared so avidly? What were the consequences, intended and unintended, of the stories being so shared? In the previous chapter, we examined the question of how stories of witches are believable—why they work. Now we must examine the work these stories do. Stories about children being taught the “evil trade” of witchcra , such as those recounted in the chapters 158

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above, reinforce a sense of widespread danger among parents— reminding them that their children are not safe. ey also express an awareness among parents, and most adults in Malawi are parents, that they are not safe from their children. e currency of the “trade” that is “witchcra ,” remember, is death. And at the time of Mrs. K.’s trials, in 2009, death was everywhere. In the 1990s and 2000s, Malawi was experiencing a traumatic epidemic of HIV/AIDS. HIV prevalence peaked at around 17% of adults around the turn of the century. In the first decade of this century, between 50,000 and 80,000 people were dying of AIDS-related illness in this country of about 14 million people (UNAIDS). People were aending funerals every week. Death was an all-too-common experience in virtually every family. Our journal writer Diston’s aunt, as we saw, lost all six of her children to the disease. And the people dying were young, in the prime of life. Almost always, unless they were children themselves, they le behind young children of their own, many of whom were also infected with the virus. is tide of death le everyone facing a single question: Who is to blame? From individual responsibility for particular deaths to global responsibility for collective tragedy, the question of blame always arose, and arises still, even though the death rate is declining since the advent of antiretroviral therapies.1 By framing stories of older people teaching children witchcra , as in the case of Mrs. K. and the others discussed in this book, the people telling and retelling the stories are both indicting and exonerating children, while casting a generalized suspicion on older generations. All of these stories began within families. In the case of Mrs. K., it was the report of children while on vacation at their maternal grandmother’s house that started all the trouble. e children were orphans; their mother was dead, the father, if still alive, not in the picture. In such circumstances, 1. For a discussion of the ways in which narratives of death are predicated on the question of blame and the ways aributions of blame play out in the micropolitics of families and communities, see (Ashforth and Watkins 2015).

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even if AIDS was known or suspected as the cause of death, the grandmother could still be suspected of being responsible for her daughter’s death—either directly by killing her with witchcra (with the murder either being perpetrated in the form of AIDS or through illnesses imitating the afflictions of AIDS), or indirectly by luring the children into witchcra and inducing them to kill their mother in order to satisfy the witches’ greed for meat. Once the children had told of their tutelage, remember, no one raised doubts about the story. But if it could be established that someone else other than their grandmother had taught the children witchcra , she would no longer be a suspect. is is not to say the grandmother deliberately planted the story of being taught witchcra in the imaginations of suggestible youngsters, but she certainly would have had a strong interest in amplifying any hints of such a suggestion emerging from their talk. And the children would have been immersed in stories of witches to such an extent that it would have been surprising if they had not dreamed of and chaed about such events at some point, if not every night. e fact that they did not name the witch when the children first told their story, other than to say it was someone at the hospital, was crucial from the point of view of the grandmother and her family. Despite being alarmed at the children’s stories, they would have been relieved to know that their teacher was someone outside the house. As we saw in the case of Diston’s aunt, Abiti Ganzani, the Kasitos, and others, when blame for deaths is cast within the family, the potential for discord is intense. If Mrs. K. is to be believed, the children’s guardians supplied the name later, a er they had returned to the hospital. Like others in the hospital, the junior nurses bore resentments against their senior into which the children’s story fied seamlessly. Mrs. K.’s unpopularity meant that people were happy to see her blamed. But while aributing responsibility for past deaths by naming the witch is a central part of the work that witchcra stories do, preventing future injury is the most pressing concern. In the case of Mrs. K., it appears that the junior nurse Promise was suf-

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fering from some unspecified, but serious, illness that seemed to her as if someone was pressing on her head with a heavy weight. By naming Mrs. K. as a witch, the children’s story provided Promise with an account of the cause of her troubles and opened the correct course of action: remove Mrs. K. from the hospital community so as to prevent her from launching any more aacks. Promise might have sought medical treatment for her headaches, but they were persistent and she had associated them with the stray cats she had seen around her home. e children’s story convinced her that Mrs. K. was transforming herself into a cat in order to torment her. In the case of the Kasitos, similarly, the context for the troubling stories about children in the family being taught witchcra was the death of the uncle Fabiano at the hands of witches wielding a magic hammer. A er his death, it seems, a consensus emerged within the family that Fabiano’s sister, father, and nephew were to blame. Various aempts were made to both punish and rehabilitate the offenders. Fabiano’s sons beat Annie until she couldn’t walk. Her house was burned down. e suspected witches were also taken to healers to be cleansed of witchcra and, a er either confessing or surviving an ordeal (depending on who you listen to), were given the chance to be reintegrated into the family and community. But when Masautso learned from a diviner that he was next in line for a beating with the magic hammer, he felt he had to take steps to prevent his own imminent death. e children’s stories, sprouting from a fragrant mix of suspicion and suggestion, proved to Masautso that action was imperative. He took the case to the village headman, the group village headman, and then, working up the chain of command, the sub-traditional authority’s court. e failure of local chiefs’ courts to provide Masautso with a sense of security in the face of imminent danger led him to take the case to the police and thence the magistrate. As a result of the trial, and the magistrate’s adjudication of the truth of the stories, the old man was banished from the community. I doubt Masautso’s troubles ceased at that

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point, but if the family followed the magistrate’s “advice” and removed the old man to his hometown, the suspected witch could perhaps have been spared further harassment and possible violence, while those in his family and community who saw themselves in danger would have been able to feel more secure. Again, in the case of our journal writer Diston’s aunt, Abiti Ganzani, everyone knew she was a witch, responsible at that stage, or so the gossip went, for the deaths of five out of her six children. e urgency of the child’s testimony about being taught witchcra evidently arose from the fact that he was seriously ill. His story allowed his grandparents to explain his illness as the consequence of his refusing to follow the witches’ orders to kill his younger brother. Saving his life required listening to this story and taking action against the persons he named as responsible, namely, Abiti Ganzani and her colleagues. e boy’s story was convenient, moreover, in deflecting blame from inside the compound of his guardians. e young boy whom we met in Alice’s story in chapter 7, similarly, was diagnosed by the traditional healer his mother consulted—worried sick as any mother would be a er her child went missing for a whole night—as having been beaten for failing to carry through on fellow witches’ orders to supply the meat of kin. In the way this narrative was constructed and the story shared among neighbors, blame for the child’s illness could be aributed to the child’s grandmother rather than his mother. In each instance, then, stories of children being taught witchcra serve in aributing blame for previous illnesses and deaths and preventing future injuries. But, as we can see in all these cases—with Mrs. K. in her place of work; with the Kasitos in their family; with Abiti Ganzani in the whole village—accusations can set off chains of consequences that upend the normal politics of everyday life, particularly in relation to the authority and respect ordinarily accorded elders. Mrs. K., proclaiming her innocence to the end, was effectively fired from her position in the hospital. Chief Matemia’s authority was thoroughly undermined by the

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accusations against his sister. Old Mr. Kasito was exiled from Balaka Town, back to his roots in Zomba. e particulars of each of these events are unique, but the paerns are similar. Blame is deflected onto elders. Indeed, in all the accounts of children being taught witchcra to be found in the Malawi Journals Project archive, the children are cast as victims. Even when it is suspected that a child witch has been responsible for a death, the imperative is always to cleanse the child of witchcra and hold the adult teacher responsible. But let us return to the trials of Mrs. K. and follow the workings of these stories through broader terrains. Within the hospital, stories about a senior official teaching witchcra put the management in a difficult position. On the one hand, nurses with Mrs. K.’s qualifications and experience are scarce in Malawi. She ran the HIV/AIDS program and, as such, was a crucial officer in the organization. Management needed her services and could ill afford to alienate her. However, were they to side with their senior colleague Mrs. K. and discount the stories reported by the junior nurses, they would risk alienating the rest of the staff, with equally, if not more, dire consequences. e staff, meanwhile, was animated by genuine fears for their own lives (and their families), as well as the lives of their patients. As the unnamed nurse in the opening vignee remarked to our journal writer Alice: “We are lucky that she is not working at the maternity ward. She would have been shouting at the patients and she would have been leaving patients to bear children in her absence and even killing them.” Spreading the story about the witch, for the staff, was a way of securing themselves and the hospital from danger by warning people about Mrs. K. Unfortunately for her, Mrs. K. had few friends among the hospital staff. Most were like the nurse quoted above, eager to spread the word in harmful rumors. She had a reputation for being arrogant and “cruel.” Many, exulting at the opportunity to take the senior nurse down, embraced the rumors of witchcra . is is not to say the stories were deliberately fabricated to cause her harm, but without the preexisting

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enmity, they would not have been so readily believable or gained such traction in the hospital or the town. As the hospital manager pointed out during the initial meeting where the allegations were first raised, the hospital lacked procedures for dealing with witchcra accusations. Management knew they had to take the stories seriously, but the rules of the Ministry of Health offered no guidance—leaving the manager with no option but to ask all parties to say a prayer and “love each other.” Facing this conundrum, management did what management does best: defer to a higher power. e hospital passed the problem on to the Ministry of Health. e ministry, being good bureaucrats, deflected it to another office in the name of proper procedure. Had Mrs. K. not let her associates in the hospital management off the hook by suing her junior colleagues and seeking “a fair forum” where the issue of her being a witch could be decided, the Ministry of Health and the hospital management would have been stuck in an intractable situation with a powerful story making the rounds and no institutionally sanctioned means of adjudicating its truth. Not surprisingly, management wanted the story to just go away. Indeed, a week or so a er we first heard the tale, the clinical officers drinking at a local tavern, who had gossiped so freely when we first met them and been told the story of the witch at the hospital, seemed to be under a gag order and refused to discuss the issue at all. Mrs. K., understandably, felt it imperative to deny the story that she was a witch teaching the trade to children while also attempting to murder the children’s guardians. She sought a “fair forum” where the truth would prevail. But in the forum that was the magistrate court, Mrs. K. faced a complicated task. On the surface, she had to prove that the two junior colleagues who spread the story of her teaching children witchcra had deliberately defamed her. More importantly, however, she had to somehow counter the narrative that she was in fact a witch actively practicing witchcra . As we saw in the cases tried before village chiefs, denials and disavowals of witchcra are almost never

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believed. Many accused witches ultimately confess and seek mercy. Mrs. K., however, was having none of that strategy. She was defiant. She tried to clear her name by presenting a counternarrative to the prevailing story, asserting that someone else had taught the children and that she was a victim of witchcra herself, resulting in these accusations. In this, she failed. Opinion was too firmly entrenched regarding her guilt. e only way such a counter-narrative could have worked for Mrs. K. would have been if the children were called to testify and confirmed her story as opposed to that of their guardians. But the children were not called to testify, and their guardians’ accounts of their stories did not change. From the public’s perspective, the children’s stories were true, and the true witch had been revealed. Presiding over the trial in Mrs. K.’s defamation suit, Magistrate Banda’s task was to assess both the truth of the accusation of witchcra and its consequences. He had to balance the requirements of the law, under which the plaintiff must show that false statements had been made causing material damage, with the perceived demands of justice on the part of the community, requiring confirmation of the identity of the witch as part of the process of neutralizing her power. Here again, the absence of the children’s voices proved crucial. e magistrate ruled that since the children were the original authors of the defamatory statements, they were the ones who should have been sued. eir absence meant that Mrs. K. had not proved that she was not a witch. Since the children were not sued, Mrs. K.’s suit was judged to have failed. By deflecting responsibility from the defendants—who, by promulgating the children’s story, were clearly contributing to the defamation in their own right—Magistrate Banda was able avoid the impression that his court was defending a witch while at the same time subtly passing judgment on the plaintiff that she was indeed a witch. Stories of Mrs. K.’s witchcra served to destroy her reputation, forcing her to leave her position at the District Hospital. ey also served to remove what was widely perceived as a

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source of danger to lives within the hospital and the community at large. But was justice done? When interviewed by my assistant, Denview, a er the trial, Mrs. K. emphatically denied that justice had been served in her case. A er the trial in the magistrate court, she felt doubly victimized: first by the witches who caused her original downfall by engineering the false rumors against her; and second by the court that denied her claim. But while she had certainly been harassed, even threatened with violence, in the end she was not assaulted. She was not killed. By providing a forum wherein the issues could be discussed, where Mrs. K.’s story could be put up against that of her detractors, Magistrate Banda succeeded in both protecting her from bodily harm and protecting the community from a perceived source of danger. As the political philosopher John Rawls argued, “An injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice” (Rawls 1971, 4). Under the circumstances, I would argue, Magistrate Banda’s jurisprudence was no small achievement, and one that ought to be celebrated.

12 In Defense of Witch Trials

In recent years, African and international human rights advocates have taken up the cause of persons accused of witchcra . Under the rubrics “witchcra violence,” “witchcra abuse,” or “witchcra accusation and persecution,” activists have decried the mistreatment of accused witches as a form of human rights abuse. As we saw above when we met George indwa of the Association for Secular Humanism, the new human rights advocates insist that since witchcra does not exist, any such accusation must by definition be false. Any aempt to test the truth of such accusations in a witch trial, therefore, must be wrong. But what if, however deluded they might be, some people actually were trying to teach children what they imagined to be witchcra ? And even if such a possibility was remote, how could a community’s fears that it is happening best be assuaged? 167

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While there might be sound reasons for denying the reality of witchcra , and for denying the existence of gods or spirits for that maer, doing so forecloses on the possibility of a discursive resolution of conflicts such as we have seen in the cases above. None of the accused witches in the trials described here could be said to have been happy about the outcome of their trial, but none of them were assaulted or physically harmed in the process. All of the trials were conducted with a sense of decorum and concern for fairness; the persons accused were treated with respect. Is there wisdom, then, in the approach of Magistrate Banda and the chiefs whose jurisprudence is described above? Might advocates for human rights be counseled to consider the possibilities of fair trials for witches? Violence is an ever-present possibility when people deal with witches and their cra . Since witchcra is seen as a form of violence in itself, most people who fear witches have lile compunction about endorsing violence against a witch as a well-deserved punishment for criminal acts. Although, as I’ve argued above, violent abuse of witches is the exception rather than the rule, sometimes accused witches are indeed aacked, and occasionally they are killed. is typically takes place in the heat of the moment following a death that is interpreted as a murder caused by witchcra , such as when Fabiano Kasito died and his sons beat their aunt Annie, whom they considered responsible. Violence relating to witchcra is also more likely to emerge in communities that lack institutions and authorities capable of resolving conflicts involving accusations of witchcra . As Magistrate Banda put it, the worst harm is done when people take the law into their own hands. So, what counts as “law” regarding witchcra as actually instantiated in his and the chiefs’ courts? How is justice secured? In the cases recounted in the previous chapters, we have seen communities pursuing justice in a variety of different forums. In all of these proceedings, we see a concern for the welfare and wellbeing of children, a desire to protect the community as a whole, a

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quest for justice for the victims, and an insistence on fairness for the putative perpetrators. In each case, certain common features can be observed, suggesting broad agreement that justice in cases of witchcra , as always, must be premised on truth. So, how is truth determined? First, in the words of Mrs. K., there must be a “fair forum”—or, in the language of international human rights agreements, a “competent, independent, and impartial tribunal.” Despite the fact that witch trials are technically illegal—and despite the efforts of George indwa and the Association for Secular Humanism, not to mention the Norwegians who funded the campaign to spread awareness of this illegality—most people concur that the practice of witchcra is a serious offense that should be dealt with by judicial tribunals. ey also agree that these tribunals should be impartial. e commitment to impartiality can be seen in the case of Abiti Ganzani, when the chief, her brother, recused himself from the case, leaving proceedings in the hands of his associates from neighboring villages. Yet these tribunals must also be responsive to the needs of communities. In the chiefs’ courts, the aim is community consensus, but even the formal courts need to be sensitive to public opinion. As we saw with Magistrate Banda’s court, were he to have applied a skeptical “Western” eye such as mine to the case of Mrs. K., the results would have been different for the plaintiff, but he and his court would have lost authority by siding with a person virtually everyone considered to be a witch. Second, in both the magistrate court and the chiefs’ courts, the accused witch had the right to know the specific crimes they were being charged with, to speak freely in defense of the charges, to present witnesses in defense, and to cross-examine prosecution witnesses. In both formal and informal seings, proceedings were governed by seled procedure. Although it is probably the case that no one’s mind was changed as a result of the hearings described here, the fact that the hearings proceeded peacefully, with everyone involved able to plead their case, is an achievement that should be celebrated.

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ird, and most important, all the trials we have examined have been characterized by a strong commitment of the presiding authorities to the presentation and assessment of evidence. While the chiefs, unlike the magistrate, do not operate their courts with an explicit presumption of innocence, nor do they operate with an explicit doctrine of proof such as informs the magistrate’s deliberations, they are equally concerned with evidence. What, then, counts as evidence? Acts of witchcra in this part of the world are essentially understood as forms of violence. In cases of teaching witchcra , this involves the inducement of others, typically children, to perpetrate violence by the killing of kin. e first requirement of proof, then, is evidence of a complaint from, or on behalf of, a putative victim. A general imputation of evil to a purported witch will not suffice. Underpinning all judicial action on the subject of witchcra is the distinction between witchcra as a mode of action and the witch as a distinct type of being. Merely being a witch, as these cases make clear, is not, in and of itself, sufficient for prosecution and conviction. Malicious acts must have been performed and then proven to have been performed. e complaint of a putative victim requires supporting evidence if it is to rise from the level of mere quarrel to that of actionable crime. In the cases examined above, the actions of the witches involved teaching children the “trade” of witchcra , which would have resulted in them becoming serial-killing cannibals. In each case, the children involved testified they had been taught witchcra . In the chiefs’ courts, this testimony was accepted at face value. Magistrate Banda, while accepting the veracity of the children’s testimony, insisted on corroborating evidence from others, evidence that was not forthcoming. In other cases I have examined from the same court, when complaints of victimhood were not accepted by the magistrate, the cases were thrown out. Although witchcra , as everyone knows, is practiced in secret, discussions of proof in the above cases recognize several possible types of circumstantial evidence of the witch’s cra . For

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example, when Abiti Makeba’s son was tired in the mornings, waking with no appetite, his mother inferred, and testified to the same at the chief ’s court, that the cause must have been his flying at night with witches and feasting on human flesh. No one, openly, doubted the inference. When Mrs. K. was found ill and fainting outside a neighbor’s house one morning, onlookers were convinced the cause must have been a witchcra airplane crash. e witch’s threat—“you will see!”—when uered in the presence of witnesses prior to evident misfortune afflicting its target is taken as proof positive. Further, as we saw in the case of the Kasitos, these cases hinge on a history of conflict within families and communities such that a careful analysis of evidence concerning the motives of the parties involved can result in an obvious inference: witchcra . In all such cases, the search for evidence pits story against story. And the way that people “read” such stories determines guilt. A satisfying trial is one that brings conflicts to light and finds a way of resolving them into a coherent narrative, framed by the judge, that allows people to tell stories making sense of the misfortunes suffered by the putative victims, while also providing a sense of security against future aggressive actions. In addition to secrecy, a central problem of evidence in witchcra cases arises from the presumption that the forces engaged by the witch are invisible. Indeed, in stories of witchcra , the actions of witches themselves are said to be invisible, taking place in unseen realms. e visible bodies of the witches, for example, might be asleep on the mat while their invisible essences are flying in a magical airplane or performing abominations many miles away. But while witches are said to operate in invisible domains, ritual specialists abound who claim the ability to perceive their actions. In principle, these experts could be called as witnesses in trials to testify. When Mrs. K. was first confronted, in the hospital manager’s office, with the children’s stories, she urged the manager to bring a herbalist in to clear her name, but the manager declined because of civil service regulations. In the case of

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the Kasitos, Magistrate Banda lamented that none of the several herbalists whom the family had consulted was called to give evidence, though it’s unlikely he would have admied the testimony. Chiefs suffer no such restrictions but know that relying on healers’ evidence can be problematic. For while most people accept the general possibility of healers perceiving the actions of witches in unseen domains, the particular stories of actual healers are usually treated with skepticism. Findings by one healer, as we saw with the Kasitos, can be undermined by the diagnoses of others. Moreover, many people, like the women accusing Mrs. K., denounce the work of traditional healers as satanic. In the magistrate court, the veracity of witness testimony is supposed to be underwrien by an oath, sworn on a Bible. Such an oath invokes a potentially dangerous interaction with a powerful invisible being, God, capable both of discerning the truth of statements and punishing falsity. As we saw when two of the young Kasito children were not sworn in, the magistrate takes the oath seriously. I have not been able to find evidence of oath taking in Malawian chiefs’ courts, though hearings in those forums typically begin with prayers, reminding participants of the proximity of supernatural power. e English anthropologist Max Gluckman (1955), studying Barotse chiefs’ courts in neighboring Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) in the 1940s, remarked on the absence of oaths or other supernatural sanctions underpinning testimony. An ethnography of Zululand from the same period, on the other hand, reported a widespread practice of invoking the sanction of ancestors as a way of vouching for the truth of an uerance (Bryant 1949). In many other parts of Africa, the swearing of ritual oaths in which a person invites punishment of themselves, their family, or their clan if they fail to speak the truth has been well documented (Kirk-Greene 1955). And the use of oaths in binding people to common causes, most famously in the case of the Mau Mau uprising in colonial Kenya, is also well documented (Blunt 2013). When it comes to evidence of secret action with invisible

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means or in unseen realms, perhaps the most persuasive independent proof of innocence is to be obtained by the accused surviving an ordeal such as the grandfather Kasito claimed to have endured. Working through the material medium of poison, the ordeal calls upon invisible beings such as ancestors, spirits, or deities to reveal the guilt or innocence of the persons accused. Similar procedures were deployed in twel h-century Europe, before being outlawed by the aptly named Pope Innocent III a er the Lateran Council of 1215. Ordeals were banned in Malawi in 1911, with the Witchcra Ordinance, though if Mr. Kasito is to be believed, they have not disappeared. Papal authorities were worried about bothering God for trivial quarrels among men; colonial authorities were concerned about curbing the power of anyone other than the governor to kill in the name of the law. Both were aware that mortals running ordeals could cheat on the heat of the red-hot poker, manipulating signs of decision by supernatural powers, or adjust the strength of the poison ingested to allow favored ones to survive. Mr. Kasito insisted he had survived an ordeal in the twenty-first century. Maybe he did. In contemporary Africa, ordeals are risky for judicial authorities as a death resulting from poisoning could bring charges of murder. Finally, conclusive proof of guilt in cases of witchcra —as the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, the medieval handbook on witch trials, insisted and as Magistrate Banda makes clear in his court today—can only be found in the confession of the witch (Kramer and Sprenger 1928 [1486]). But, as recent research has shown, confessions can be forthcoming for reasons other than the compulsion to speak truth. Even without torture, people often confess to crimes they did not commit. As the people accused in the chiefs’ courts clearly realized, once a consensus has formed that the accused is guilty, the only escape is through confession. When conditions are conducive, and I would argue that conditions are most likely to be conducive a er a lengthy hearing of the stories of all concerned, confession can result in forgiveness for the purported witch and reintegration into the community.

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In sum, while the authorities responsible for the witch trials we have described were all commied to the presentation of evidence to support charges of witchcra , the evidence available was inherently contestable. is is a good thing. It means that while it might be possible to reach a consensus that a particular person is a witch, in the absence of confession, proving the commission of an actual act of witchcra , beyond a reasonable doubt, is impossible. By their very nature, then, witch trials promote discourse on the nature of evidence, which is why they had such a foundational influence on the history of the law of evidence in common law traditions. And the more such discourse is promoted, the likelihood of violence diminishes. When a witch is found guilty of perpetrating acts of witchcra , what is to be done? In all the cases discussed above, consensus was reached on the identity of the witch, though only the chiefs’ courts found their defendants guilty of perpetrating witchcra acts. In each case, the primary punishment was a form of reputation damage: being publicly named as a witch. In the chiefs’ courts, the witches were also required to pay fines and undergo cleansing rituals to remove their witchcra and safeguard the community in the future. In the magistrate court, what might be called “informal” punishments resulted from Mrs. K. being identified as a probable witch, precluding her return to work at the hospital, while Mr. Kasito’s family was advised to remove him from town. In all these cases, however, the courts merely confirmed widespread opinion about the identity of the witches. Can these witch trials, then, be said to have been fair? Can they be defended? In practice, when the magistrate or the chiefs hear a witchcra case, they are allowing all concerned to tell their stories in ways that facilitate the airing of grievances and dissipation of anger without causing serious harm to the accused. In this way they are enacting a version of the restorative justice for which African jurisprudence is celebrated. Contrary to the blanket appli-

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cation of the universal principle of “human rights” under which any accusation of witchcra must always be presumed false, they are applying a form of judicial reasoning—technically known as “casuistry” (Jonsen and Toulmin 1988)—in which each case is considered on its particular merits rather than subjected to universal rules, evidence is weighed, and precedents are observed. Like the chiefs in customary justice forums, the magistrate is less concerned in witchcra cases with imposing punishment than with achieving a sense of security and justice, restoring harmony in the community. e central term that Magistrate Banda uses to describe this work is “advice”: he speaks of a duty to “advise” people from his position on the bench. In African contexts, the concept of advice generally has a much greater weight than it has in contemporary Western usage. It is more akin to the obligatory “advise and consent” clauses of various national constitutions than, say, the casual take-it-orleave-it character of the “advice” columnist. Parents, relatives, siblings, and friends all have obligations to give advice in particular contexts, o en with quite formal rules establishing who can speak on what topics, how they can do so, and when they ought to. For example, in the Malawian context, marriage counselors known as Ankhoswe—in this region, usually maternal uncles of the husband and wife—are called upon to advise a couple on the suitability of the union prior to marriage and later are charged with giving advice in the event of marital discord. Failure to heed advice, similarly, is considered an infraction of societal norms rather than merely the choice of one option among several. It is usually construed not only as the deliberate choosing of the wrong path and a road to immorality, but also as a souring, if not a rejection, of the proper form of relationship that ought to exist between the advisor and advisee, and thus their larger community. It is in this context that the magistrate, by patiently listening to the details of complex conflicts and weighing the evidence of culpability and blame, gives advice and promotes justice. e

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advice Magistrate Banda dispenses from the bench is not mere obiter dicta, or superfluous words, but an essential part of the substantive judgment. Rather than preventing the hearing of cases and the airing of grievances, then, such as would result from enforcing the current Witchcra Act, the key to protecting the rights of the accused witch, it seems to me, is to enforce laws precluding violence against the person, such as might occur in a chief ’s court, to prevent magistrates from incarcerating witches even if they confess and thus violate section 6 of the Witchcra Act, and to prevent chiefs from imposing penalties of exile or involuntary removal. e imposition of a compulsory cleansing ritual, such as required by the chiefs in the cases discussed above, could be considered to be a violation of the right to “integrity of the person” as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Assuming the herbs administered during the cleansing are not toxic, however, it could also be argued that the cleansing serves the purposes of restorative justice, bringing the putative offender back into the life of the community and assuring the community that dangers are past.

Acknowledgments

is book is dedicated to my wife, Vivienne, and our son, Terence. I can’t thank them enough for their patience and forbearance (but I’ll try, later). I must begin by celebrating the work of the anonymous journal writers whose work comprises the Malawi Journals Project. As authors, they have produced an extraordinary archive of texts that offer otherwise unavailable insights into life in rural Africa during the era of AIDS. ank you. Susan Cos Watkins, who started the Malawi Journals Project, introduced me to Malawi and later entrusted the journals to my care. Her friendship and scholarship has been inspirational. With Ann Swidler, we have shared many hours of great conversation in not-so-great motels in rural Malawi. Jenny Trinitapoli and her family brightened life at the Catholic women’s hostel in Balaka at the time of Mrs. K.’s trials. ank you. 177

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My friends and assistants in Malawi made it possible for me to read the journals by introducing me to, and guiding me through, their worlds. I must particularly thank McDaphton Bellos, Violet Boillo, the late Fanizo George, and Esnat Sanudi. Denview Magalasi managed the journals project for many years and assisted me with research, o en at long distance. e people at Invest in Knowledge in Zomba, particularly Davie Chitenje, made the project possible and continue to manage production of the journals. Parts of this book have been presented at seminars and in lectures at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and the University of Western Australia. I am grateful to the organizers of these events and the audiences for inspiring comments and difficult questions. An early version of some of the material was published in an article in the African Studies Review. Colleagues and students at the University of Michigan, particularly in the African Studies Center (ASC) and the African History and Anthropology group, have been fabulously supportive over the years. e Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan provided a much-needed year to get started on the writing. e Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS) and the College of Literature Science and the Arts at Michigan have provided funding for the Malawi Journals Project. I, along with the journal writers, am most grateful. Funding for my research trips to Malawi has been provided by DAAS and the ASC. ank you. Lastly, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my editor and friend, David Brent. I had hoped to present this book to him before he retired at the end of 2016, culminating an extraordinary publishing career for which scholars of Africa will be eternally grateful, but, alas, that was not to be. His support and confidence over many years has been a treasure. Fortunately, he has been succeeded at the Press by another exceptional editor, Priya Nelson, whose insights and support have been invaluable in seeing this book into existence. ank you both.

Appendix 1: The Malawi Journals Project

Initiated in 1999 by Professor Susan Cos Watkins at the University of Pennsylvania, and now under my direction at the University of Michigan, the Malawi Journals Project has commissioned, and continues to support, a group of young Malawians to keep journals recording accounts of conversations broadly pertaining to HIV and AIDS encountered in the course of their everyday lives. e journals are handwrien, in English translation, in common school notebooks—o en with the original Chichewa or Chiyao passages noted in parentheses. Because of the sensitive nature of some of the material, the journals have been anonymized and de-identified before being made available for public use. Sadly, this also means that the journal writers must remain anonymous despite having created a body of work for which they deserve praise as authors. 179

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Some thirty-eight writers have participated in the project over the years, with a core group of four, introduced above, writing continuously from the start. ey are all high school graduates, which puts them in the educational elite in Malawi, where few are afforded the opportunity for tertiary education. Most were recruited from the ranks of research assistants employed on the University of Pennsylvania’s Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project (MDICP) of which Professor Watkins was a coprincipal investigator. To date, the Malawi Journals Project has amassed an archive in excess of 1,300 journals, each consisting of about ten to fi een typed pages (single-spaced), with an average of three to four conversational events described. Journal writers were paid US$30 per notebook, in consideration of which they assigned copyright to the project. Journal writers typically produce one journal each per month, though in the early years some produced several each month. Local management of the project is handled by the Invest in Knowledge Initiative (IKI), a research capacity-building organization based in Zomba, Malawi, founded and administered by young Malawians who learned their trade managing logistics for the MDICP. e archive of anonymized journals is publicly available through the Deep Blue repository in the University of Michigan Library, accessible at hps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/ 2027.42/113269. e archive is organized chronologically by year. In the file name, the first two digits following the author’s name signify the year. us, Alice_090312 was wrien in March 2009 and can be found in the archive with the other journals from that year. Use of the journals by researchers and writers is welcomed, and material is governed by a Creative Commons Open Access license. Where I have drawn on material from the journals, footnotes and in-text citations direct the reader to originals in this archive.

Appendix 2: Alice_090312

[e following is the passage from the Malawi Journals Project journal writer “Alice,” wrien in March 2009, that forms the basis for the opening of this book. e full text of this journal, and all others cited here, is to be found at hps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/113269.] ### 22-03-09 It was at lunch hour when I went to Balaka district hospital to see a certain neighbor at my house Mtetemera. She was an expectant woman and she was told to come to the hospital since her days to deliver were drawing closer. She was told that she was going to deliver twins therefore she was supposed to be at the hospital. I met with her guardian on 20-03-09 [March 20, 2009] who explained about 181

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them being at Balaka hospital during that time. It was then that I told her that I shall come a day a er tomorrow to see her. I went there and I found her chaing with her friends outside the hospital room but still inside the gate. I went there and began to chat with them about their life and how they le the kids at home. At the same time I saw one of the nurses who was one of our facilitators at the HTC Training course which was done in Balaka passing by where we sat down chaing. I greeted her since I knew her. How are you madam? I am fine and you? Fine. Are you ill? No. I have come to see my relative here. Is she ill? Yes. Sorry. Ok I am going for lunch. See you. Ok thank you. She was going and one of the women there asked. She was puing on a green suit and a blue chitenje. Is she your relative or friend? No. [S]he is not my friend and she is not my relative. I know her because she was one of the facilitators during our HTC Training course. Ok. I thought that she is your friend. No. [D]o you need help from her? No; not at all. We are a lile bit lucky that she does not work at the maternity ward. She would have been killing women including children deliberately. Why? Is she cruel? Of course she is a cruel woman as you have seen her face. If she chats with other people, then they are not many. I don’t think that she can chat with one person for two years without causing confusions. She is not a good woman. She is very rude and cruel. ose who choose her not to be working at the maternity ward

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did well. We would have died because of her. She would have been shouting at the patients always and she would have been leaving patients to bear children in her absence and even killing them. In the first days, I was just not feeling comfortable to see her. I thought that she was just born like that. She was born a cruel woman. But know I have seen the reason why and why she is an HIV AIDS coordinator here. at position is not for her but she just put herself there on her own. Nobody chose her to be the AIDS coordinator here but since her fellow work mates are always afraid of her. at is why nobody said anything about that position but she is a nurse and not the AIDS coordinator. But people are afraid to apply for that position here because they fear that they will die in the soonest time if they come here to work as an AIDS coordinator. Her work mates always complain that she is not doing well because she as a coordinator was not supposed to be in the lab room or counseling room each and every time especially if the clients are present. She always say that it is her office therefore she cannot go out though counseling is confidential and she is a coordinator. I was just hearing that from other people complaining about her but now I have seen her and I have heard her bad stories. She is really not a good woman. She is a rude, cruel and a witch woman. She is teaching children witchcra and the children have revealed that she is the one teaching them and she forcing them to kill their mothers and sisters. Aaaa! Are you sure? Yes. She is like that and that story has gone to the church first because they all aend the same church. She refused saying that she knows nothing about that but still the children said no she is lying. She is the one who always take them going to South Africa and sometimes to Lilongwe. One of the children said that she forces her (child) to sit down on her sister’s abdomen when she was pregnant. She did that and the sister miscarried. Another one said that she was forcing him to kill his mother but he refused. Now that he refused, she told him that he will see

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and she beat him. e child was very sick for a week suffering from headache a er being beaten by her—a thing that I did not know but I was just knew. She must be a difficult woman in appearance because I never saw her happy with her friends. She is always quiet shows a cruel face. I thought that it was how she was born but she is a good woman. We le the story and I went home. A er two days I heard my neighbor speaking. Have you heard that the nurse from Kasito, Mrs. Msewa [“Mrs. K.”] is a witch? She went to a house which witches are not supposed to go to and she has fallen down. Other people found her in the morning. She was failing to walk properly. Other people asked her, where are you coming from? I went to see my friend. You are showing that you are ill; does your friend know that you are ill? No. Where is your friend? We should to go and ask her. No I am going home. What are you suffering from? I am sick. She was walking very slowly showing that she is not feeling well. Should we take you on a bicycle? No I will walk. At that moment people started singing a song following her, escorting her to her house. e nurse a witch! e nurse a witch! She has fallen down she went to bewitch people in their rooms and today she went to a house which she was not supposed to go to. e owners cannot be bewitched. She has bewitched herself. You have seen now. God would like to punish you. You shall see the world now.

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She was sick for a week and then she began to come out from her house but she was failing to aend her duties in the office. No more days passed. We heard that people went to her house with a vehicle to pick her back to her home but they did not find her. She le her home early in the morning running away from her home. Other people said that she did not run away. She was there in her house but she hid herself through magic. Now the news spread all over Balaka Township that the nurse of Balaka hospital is teaching people witchcra . ere was also another woman called Miss Chilenga at Balaka District Hospital. She was a ward aendant there and she was transferred to Mtetemera Health Centre. She met with her friends which are witches as well there and began to communicate. With their communication, they began to teach other people’s children to become witches. All the teachers of Mtetemera 2 Primary School especially the young children were taught to be witches. Other people who are near the hospital and those who are near the primary school were taught by Mai Chilenga and Nasiluti Eliasi[,] a villager whose home is near the hospital. She is young about 25–27 years old but she is a witch. ose two women have been caught teaching children to become witches. Many children are revealing themselves that they were told to kill their parents. Mai Chilenga and Nasiluti were telling them that they will look a er them when their parents die. ere is nothing bad and nothing harmful to them. Everything in them will be going smoothly. Only one week passed when I heard that it is wrien in the news that a nurse at Balaka is teaching children to become witches. People began to gossip about her that she is not a good woman. She should just go elsewhere than staying in Balaka. Others are saying that she will die very soon. She is tired of the world. Once she kills one person here in Balaka and people know that the person was bewitched by her, she will die on the same day. It is very shameful and she is now feeling shy. She is failing to go to her office to do her job. She is feeling shy and she is afraid

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that people will beat her to death if she comes out. Many people are geing worried because their children are now witches. ey were taught to be witches of-which they automatically know that they will be killing people in future and they will be teaching their friends or other children in future. In that way, witchcra will not come to an end until the world goes. In these days, many old people are teaching young children to become witches. I asked my friends, I had been hearing that such and such a person [is] teaching witchcra to children but I have never heard that an elder person is teaching an elder person to become a witch why? Many friends told me that it is difficult to teach witchcra to an already grown up person. at person is intelligent when compared to a child. He can reveal it on the following day that such and such a person came to my house to take me. He was teaching me to become a witch and he has told me to kill my mum or dad. Do you think that an elder person can accept to kill his/her mother [or] father? Can he accept to kill any of his relatives yet he is intelligent? He knows the goodness of living with parents and relatives. He knows the badness of living alone in this world. He knows that being a witch is not good. You shall be killing people so that many of them will hate you. You shall always feel loneliness. You cannot enjoy the world very well. It is not possible to teach elder people to become witches. ey will be teaching the ones always because they are young. ey don’t know what is good or what is bad. ey just think that the world is like that. At Mtetemera many people kept on praying for many days. ey were day and night prayers so that those people should be punished by God. Other people were saying that they are Satanic. ey are not real witches but the Satanic. ey would like to teach children in order to be asking them to be collecting (drawing) blood from their parents and relatives for them to be drinking as what their religion tells them to be doing. We are just watching and hearing on what is happening in our country. e end.

Appendix 3: Bibliographic Essay

Malawi is blessed with an extraordinarily rich body of scholarship, by locals and foreigners alike, without which a book like this would not be possible. A great many historical, philosophical, psychological, and sociological issues are also touched on in this book, each of which is the subject of substantial scholarship. In the following pages, as a bibliographic counterpoint to the stories told in the text, I shall introduce some of the main bodies of literature upon which I have drawn in writing this book and the questions that have led me into them. A er decades of thinking about this stuff, I still feel I have few answers. My hope is that new avenues of research might emerge from these efforts, particularly for those interested in protecting persons accused of witchcra .

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Malawi Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world. Of the 16 million people who live there, in a country the size of Pennsylvania of which the waters of Lake Malawi cover a third, 85% depend primarily on subsistence agriculture. According to the World Bank (2013), the gross national income per capita in 2011 was US$360, with 50.7% of the population living below the national poverty line. e economy has not improved since that time, with an almost fivefold decline in the exchange rate and massive corruption scandals forcing donors, on whom the government relies for a large part of its revenues, to reconsider support. Balaka District, the seing for this book, is in the southern region of Malawi. Balaka Town, the district headquarters, is about 200 kilometers south of the capital, Lilongwe.1 e population of the district at the turn of the century was about a quarter million, growing rapidly. In the 1998 census, 44% of the population was under the age of fi een. Two “local authorities” govern the district; the Town Assembly and the District Assembly, with rural areas divided into two “traditional authorities” (TAs), subdivided into four subdistricts, ruled by two traditional authorities (the term TA refers to both the person and the jurisdiction), both of the Yao “tribe.” Most ministries of the national government are represented in the district, with administration “coordinated,” in theory, by the Executive Commiee of the District Assembly. In practice, however, most administrative functions are in the hands of the district commissioner, a career bureaucrat. As in most of Malawi, international NGOs are thick on the ground. Civil and criminal law is represented in the form of the Malawi Police Service and the magistrate court; village headmen, group village headmen, sub-T/As, and TAs preside over an informal hierarchy of “traditional” courts. e starting point for anyone interested in the history of Ma1. Information on Balaka in this section is drawn from Balaka District Assembly (2000).

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lawi is John McCracken’s magisterial A History of Malawi, 1859– 1966 (2012). Kings M. Phiri’s Chewa History in Central Malawi (1975) is also foundational, as is George Shepperson’s magisterial history of John Chilembwe and the 1915 “Nyasaland Native Uprising” in Independent African (Shepperson and Price 1969). Malawi is the seing for one of the finest works in the social history of Africa, Landeg White’s Magomero: Portrait of an African Village (1987). In this book, White tells the story, among other things, of the young English missionaries of the University Christian Mission who, inspired by David Livingstone’s accounts of his travels in the region, came here to spread the gospel and eradicate the slave trade, which was rampant at the time. However, they found themselves embroiled in constant warfare, and when they put the women and children they liberated from slave raiders to work growing essential food, they were viewed by their African neighbors as slavers themselves. Magomero remains a salutary lesson for anyone inspired by the spirit of altruism to do good in places they do not understand. Livingstone’s own accounts of his travels in the region, which he was credited once as having “discovered,” also remain worth reading (Livingstone 1857, 1872, 1960). Edward A. Alpers’s e East African Slave Trade (1967) is the definitive history of the violence that wracked this part of the world in the nineteenth century, long a er international slave trading was purportedly eradicated. For analysis of more recent altruists on missions to aid Malawians facing the HIV/AIDS epidemic and their complicated relations with local brokers, Ann Swidler and Susan Cos Watkins’s A Fraught Embrace (2017) is essential reading. e people of the region from which Mrs. K. hailed in southern Malawi have been described in classic ethnographic works, including J. Clyde Mitchell’s e Yao Village (1966) and M. G. Marwick’s Sorcery in Its Social Seing (1965) in the neighboring Chewa-speaking region that is now Zambia. A more recent ethnography of Yao-speaking Malawians, who predominate in the region wherein this book is set, can be found in the Australian

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anthropologist Ian D. Dicks’s An African Worldview (2012). e seminal history of the Yao people was wrien by Yohanna B. Abdallah, a Yao who converted to Christianity and became an Anglican priest and whose book Chiikala cha Wayao was translated into English and published in 1919, then reissued in 1973 as e Yaos (Abdallah 1973). Among the many anthropologists of Malawi whose work I have drawn upon are Deborah Bryceson (Bryceson 2006; Bryceson and Fonseca 2006), Harri Englund (1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2004a, 2004b, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2011a, 2011b), Peter Glover Forster (1998, 2000), Deborah Kaspin (1996), Brian Morris (1984, 1985, 1986), Pauline E. Peters (Peters 2009; Peters, Kambewa, and Walker 2008, 2010; Peters, Walker, and Kambewa 2008), Peter Probst (1999), Audrey I. Richards (1935), Mahew Schoffeleers (J. M. Schoffeleers 2000; M. Schoffeleers 1989, 1991, 1999), and Rijk A. van Dijk (1992, 1995). Malawi is a good place to examine issues of justice and witchcra . It is a peaceful and relatively stable, if very poor, democracy since the founding president, the old-school African dictator Hastings Kamuzu Banda, was ousted in 1994 in a surge of democratic sentiment catalyzed by an encyclical leer from Catholic bishops (see McCracken 1998). It has a court system that is reasonably functional, at least in urban areas, and, unlike in South Africa, where the courts are still dominated by the descendants of white selers, its courts are thoroughly Africanized. According to the National Victimization Survey of 2004, the justice system also enjoys a relatively high degree of legitimacy in the public’s eyes (Kanyongolo 2006). A er independence, President Banda retained the colonial legal system founded on English Common and Statute Law. e law continues today to be shaped by English procedures, practices, and precedents, albeit in an African context where the socalled traditional authorities (TAs) also hold sway in local affairs and exercise considerable juridical authority (see Cammack, Kanyongolo, and O’Neil 2009; Kapindu 2009). As we have seen, elements of customary law occasionally intrude into the formal

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courtrooms, particularly at the lowest levels. Despite recent efforts at restructuring the court system to formalize the relationship between customary jurisdictions and the formal system, a great deal of confusion remains (Kaunda 2011). During the reign of Kamuzu Banda , a system of traditional courts with jurisdiction over both customary and criminal cases was established in parallel with the formal courts. ese courts, which were notorious for being used by the regime to punish political dissidents, were disbanded in 1994, leaving customary cases in the hands of informal chiefs’ courts. Chiefs’ courts mostly handle family disputes and land issues, along with most of the other disturbances of peaceful life in the roughly twentyfour thousand villages in the country (Schärf et al. 2002). Land disputes, it should be mentioned, are becoming more intense and more common in this densely populated country, o en exacerbating claims of witchcra in the process (Peters 2002). Our journal writer Alice, for example, whose vignee about Mrs. K. opens this book, has abandoned the ten acres of land and the house she built in her village to her estranged brother for fear of him killing her by means of witchcra . In 2011, in an effort to better coordinate relations between the domains of customary and formal law, the government introduced legislation to establish local courts, once again with criminal as well as customary jurisdiction (Kaunda 2011). Implementation of this legislation, however, has been slow, and the two main domains of law remain the chief ’s court under the tree and the magistrate court in the town. Malawi has been the subject of some classic writings on issues of law and custom in Africa (e.g., Chanock 1985), which provide the historical perspective to the cases discussed here.

The AIDS Epidemic In the background of all the events described and stories told in this book is, of course, the AIDS epidemic, which hit Malawi in the early 1980s. For details of the epidemiology of AIDS in Ma-

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lawi, I have relied on the UNAIDS website’s data tools, which contain a wealth of information, current and historical, about the epidemic (www.unaids.org). Students of AIDS in Africa now have two superb books on which to rely for the general history of the epidemic in Africa: John Illife’s e African AIDS Epidemic (2006) and Jacques Pepin’s e Origins of AIDS (2011). e laer is particularly noteworthy in showing how the HIV virus, having crossed species from chimpanzees to humans in the forests of southern Cameroon, became epidemic as a result both of the colonial enterprise in Africa, opening up trade routes and urban centers, as well as colonial medical interventions to control sleeping sickness in southern Cameroon, where the HIV virus emerged. When Africans contemplate the origin of their suffering under this appalling burden, they typically invoke either the wrath of God punishing people for their sins or the depredations of whites. Regarding the laer, at least, they are not entirely mistaken (see Timberg and Halperin 2012). In Malawi, the epidemic peaked around the turn of the century with prevalence among sexually active adults peaking at about 11.5%. Vast amounts of time, money, and effort were poured into promoting public health messages of “behavior change” in Africa. Lile evidence exists, however, that the efforts of policy makers and planners to halt the epidemic by promoting behavior change have been effective (Oster 2012; Padian et al. 2010; Pos et al. 2008). Nonetheless, the incidence of HIV infection has declined in Malawi as in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa since the turn of the century, indicating that changes in sexual behavior have in fact occurred (UNAIDS 2013b, 5). Ordinary people, it seems, given a modicum of basic information about the disease— such as, crucially, that it is sexually transmied—seem to have figured maers out for themselves and have acted to turn the tide of infection (Watkins 2004). ey are doing so, I would argue, not simply by acceding to public health messages but through the stories they tell each other in ordinary encounters in everyday contexts, stories that o en combine biomedical elements into

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older narrative structures, o en invoking witchcra . e most important of these, since the consequences are so grave, are stories of death (Ashforth and Watkins 2015).

Contemporary Africa and the History of Witchcraft in Europe In the 1970s, historians of witchcra in Europe, particularly England—drawing inspiration from the work of anthropologists of Africa, notably Evans-Pritchard—began reexamining the history of the early modern “witch craze” of the fi eenth to eighteenth centuries. Scholars such as Alan McFarlane (1970), himself a noted anthropologist, and Keith omas (1973) focused more on the dynamics and logic of accusations, rather than dismissing the whole affair as a form of benighted superstition that, mercifully, had been le behind by the triumph of reason and the Enlightenment—a viewpoint that had been the norm from William E. H. Lecky in the 1890s (1891) to Hugh R. Trevor-Roper in the 1960s (1969). ese historians, however, along with anthropologists of Africa, were disinclined to examine the psychological underpinnings of either the fear of witches or the zeal of their accusers. is is changing. More recent scholarship has begun to focus more on psychological issues, particularly dreams and the theological underpinnings of and political implications of their interpretation (see, for example, Amelang 2012; Davies 2003; Henningsen 2009). e result of these inquiries, I would suggest, is to massively complicate the question of why “Westerners” (for want of a beer word) no longer believe in witches—to the extent that this is, in fact, true.2 Scholars of witch trials and the law in Europe have also made great advances since the 1970s in showing how many jurists in the early modern “craze” period were reluctant to prosecute witches and how their efforts to do so frequently ran up against problems 2. An excellent recent introduction to the history of witchcra in Europe is Malcom Gaskill’s Witchcra: A Very Short Introduction (2010). For a more extensive review, see Behringer (2004).

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of evidence, leading to good results for the accused witches. From my reading of this literature, I draw two main conclusions, which have informed my reading of witch trials in Malawi and which I think should have implications for thinking about the future of fears of witchcra in contemporary Africa, namely: witch trials are not necessarily a bad thing; and a commitment to rigorous evidence on the part of participants, however this may be construed in a particular context, can not only protect accused witches, but potentially undermine the fear of witchcra in general. Recent historiography has also advanced our understanding of witchcra and the law in European history. Owen Davies has published extensively on the English Witchcra Act of 1736, revealing the process by which English jurists grew tired of prosecuting witches, due to problems of evidence, long before courts were prohibited by law from dealing with witches (Davies 1999, 2008). He also shows that at the time the injunction against prosecuting witches was introduced, the fear of witchcra remained potent in England, even among elites, dissipating slowly in the following decades. His analysis tells us that English authorities in the eighteenth century were far more concerned with controlling vagrants and fortune-tellers than in punishing putative witches. Barbara Shapiro (1991) has shown how the history of the law of evidence in common law traditions is intimately connected with the experience of courts with witch trials, with profound implications for the systems of justice that people in so-called “advanced” countries have today. And Orna Alyagon Darr (2011, 2014) has shown how elemental conceptions of proof emerged first in witch trials, including the social form of the “experiment” (involving practices similar in form, but with a radically different rationale, to the ordeals outlawed by Pope Innocent), shaping the history of epistemology in rationalist thought. Witch trials, it seems, were not simply a sign of superstition that the forces of enlightenment and reason put behind us, but were a critical part of the emergence, or reemergence, of rationalism in Western thought.

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Witchcraft and British Colonial Law in Africa When the British imposed themselves on this part of Africa, they brought with them a body of laws, the Common Law, that included the Witchcra Act of 1736, which was subsequently incorporated into local ordinances. By the late nineteenth century, the British were not particularly worried about witches. ey found, however, that the by then long-neglected law on witchcra could serve new purposes in colonies where their new subjects, and the indigenous leaders who governed them, were very much concerned with these issues. e Witchcra Act of 1736, and the local ordinances enshrining it in the colonies, could serve in curtailing both the authority of chiefs and the religious leaders whose campaigns to protect communities against evil forces occasionally resulted in mass movements that authorities worried might challenge the new order. e first experience of the colonists with this issue was probably in the eastern regions of what is now South Africa, then “British Kaffraria,” where a version of the law was gazeed in 1879 (Redding 2006). By the early twentieth century, virtually all the British colonies had similar enactments on their books. Before long, however, some British administrators were beginning to understand the folly of this part of the imperial project. My favorite of these is Frank Melland, who worked for decades as a district commissioner in the north of what was then denominated Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia. Melland was an astute observer of African life. In 1935, having retired from the colonial service, he wrote a blistering aack on British colonial witchcra laws: To help these millions of people we have done nothing and less than nothing, for, denying them help, we have made the only help they know a crime. In their eyes we are on the side of the witches, from whose machinations as white men we may be immune, such witches being intensely real to them, and a great personal and anti-social danger. e masses

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believe that they can be bewitched, that other persons can work spells over them, some wilfully, some involuntarily. More than this an appreciable number of persons believe that they are witches, and that they do practise witchcra , having charms to work evil, and even believing that they own familiars to work evil on their behalf when they send them out on their nefarious errands. Also there is a larger class—it may include any one—who believe that they may be unwiingly possessed, and these are particularly important because it is largely for these “innocent” men and women that our withers have been wrung, while we have, officially, given no pity to the ordinary man and woman living in constant dread of, and actually suffering from, the machinations of both classes. It cannot be too strongly stressed that at a native witch trial by ordeal (a most ceremonious affair, formally conducted) the belief in witchcra and the faith in the ordeal are so complete, that not only the accusers—the sufferers—believe in the righteousness and efficacy of the trial, but the convicted witch (even of the unconscious or involuntary type) believes in it just as implicitly, and so do the witch’s nearest and dearest relatives. Here is no injustice in native eyes, here no crime except under our alien code. We, however, with our superior knowledge arrogantly say that they are all wrong—but no one believes us. We then punish them for seeking, and for obtaining (for faith can do much), the only relief from terror that they know. (Melland 1935, 496; see also Browne 1935).

In 1923 Melland published a book-length study of witchcra among the Kaonde people, with whom he lived and worked for more than two decades, predating Evans-Pritchard’s study by a decade (Melland 1923). In a classic essay on witchcra law and the colonial state, Karen Fields noted the irony of British officials hearing cases under Witchcra Ordinances coming to inhabit the logic of witchcra , while reaching very different conclusions

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about culpability, since “to prove crime under the Witchcra Ordinance . . . British officials had no choice but to reason like the African judges they superseded and the villagers these judges served” (Fields 1982, 578). In cases of witch killing, colonial-era officials and legal scholars were primarily concerned with the problem of mens rea, the guilty mind, when the perpetrators considered themselves acting on behalf of their community in the interests of justice and security. As Robert B. Seidman pointed out in his 1965 review of such cases, when the killers of witches appeared before colonial courts, they were invariably convicted of murder, usually sentenced to hang, with the judge appending a plea to the governor for executive clemency (Seidman 1965). Kate Luongo (2011) has wrien extensively of an incident in Kenya in 1932 in which some sixty Kamba men were convicted and sentenced to death for killing a woman they knew as a witch. e case sent the precarious project of colonial “law” in Kenya into a tailspin. Were the authorities to have convicted the witch-killers—sixty of them, not including the ten juveniles who could be spared the gallows by virtue of their youth—they would have bathed themselves in blood to an extent that even those who think witch-killing is barbaric would have found hard to stomach. Moreover, the people whom they sought to govern, who saw witches as a real and present danger in their communities, would have viewed the ensuing judicial massacre as yet more evidence that the colonialists were on the side of evil. Were the court to have acquied the killers, however, the “White Man’s” law would have seemed more malleable than the local colonists would have preferred, rendering their claim to rule somewhat more precarious than they would have liked. So the court convicted, and the governor granted the killers clemency. e implementation of Witchcra Acts, like much else in the colonial experience, was capricious. Everyday anti-witchcra activities were mostly le alone, so long as they remained out of sight of the authorities—although these, too, were outlawed in principal along with the business of healing practiced by special-

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ists in maers of repelling and curing witchcra . Indeed, as the Kenyan legal scholar and jurist Onesimus Mutungi pointed out, the law heaped irony upon irony. If a person possessed “charms” or “medicines” to protect from witchcra , he could be charged with an offense. Claiming it was for protection from witchcra in general would have been no defense in a court of law; invoking the right of self-defense by claiming a fear of a witchcra assault by a particular person, however, might have sufficed but for the fact that it infringes the prohibition on naming witches, thereby making the defendant liable to a second offense (Mutungi 1971, 539). If a chief or community were suspected of puing a witch to death, however, the authorities would act swi ly, punishing as common criminals those whom their communities saw as protectors. In short, the export of the 1736 Witchcra Act to the British colonies in Africa, where it served less in the suppression of witchcra than in the suppression of African efforts to secure themselves from a perceived danger, probably did more than any single act to undermine African trust in colonial and, later, postcolonial law and legal institutions (Chanock 1985; Luongo 2011).

Post-Colonial African States and Witchcraft Post-colonial African states have grappled with the issue of witchcra since independence. Most have le colonial-era laws intact, though several, notably Zambia and Zimbabwe, have reformed their laws to recognize what lawmakers and citizens consider the reality of witchcra . HelpAge International—an NGO committed to assisting the elderly, who have been disproportionately targeted in witchcra accusations—has a useful survey of witchcra laws across the continent (HelpAge International 2011). In 2006 the Malawi Law Commission began a “Review Programme” investigating the Witchcra Act, but at the time of writing had made no progress other than issuing a position paper (Malawi Law Commission 2009). e South African Law Reform Commission has also recently taken up the question of reforming their

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Suppression of Witchcra Act a er prompting from the Pagan Council, who see the present act as an infringement of their constitutionally guaranteed religious liberty to practice “witchcra ,” and the Traditional Healers Organization, who dislike being outlawed under the terms of the act (South African Law Reform Commission 2016). e central question for most African scholars, activists, and jurists who tackle this area of law reform, is how to empower the courts to punish true witches while protecting innocent people from false accusation. Resolving this tension has not proven easy (see, for examples, Chavunduka 1980; Diwan 2004; C. Fisiy 1998; Fisiy and Geschiere 1990; Fisiy and Rowlands 1990; C. F. Fisiy 1990; Geschiere 2006; Geschiere and Fisiy 1994; Mavhungu 2012; Petrus 2016; Tebbe 2006, 2007, 2011). Malawi will almost certainly revise its Witchcra Act, eventually. Studies of witchcra cases in chiefs’ courts have been scarce since colonial times, when a number of classic ethnographies touched on the subject, notably Max Gluckman’s (1955) study of Barotse law. Among the few extant recent studies, a 2009 study of “witchcra crime” in the Mpondoland region of South Africa found that traditional leaders were deeply commied to considering evidence when cases of purported witchcra were brought to them, which happens on a fairly regular basis, despite the law prohibiting them from hearing such cases. Moreover, the same study found that most such cases were brought by the person accused of being a witch and were usually resolved in favor of the accused, mainly because of problems of proof (Petrus 2009). A brief account of three witchcra trials in Yao villages in Malawi, by the anthropologist Ian Dicks, concluded: “Although the trials that I aended appeared to be run in a fair manner, in which the Group Village Headman weighed the arguments of the plaintiff and the accused, they mostly lacked resolution and did not restore the accused to their communities” (Dicks 2013, 123). e literature on “restorative justice” and “Ubuntu” in relation to law in Africa, as with the literature on legal pluralism in African states, does not dwell on issues of witchcra and witch

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trials (see, for example, Cornell 2009; Elechi, Morris, and Schauer 2010; Kamwangamalu 1999; Tshoose 2009). is is surprising, for, as I have argued elsewhere, witchcra constitutes what might be termed a “negative corollary” of Ubuntu in that the vulnerability of every person to harm caused by witchcra underscores the necessity of harmony in relations among persons and between persons and the myriad other entities they imagine themselves in relation with (Ashforth 2005).

Human Rights Activism and African Witchcraft Spurred in large part by concerns about violence against women, international human rights activists have recently become interested in violence perpetrated against accused witches in Africa and elsewhere. e issue has received aention from, among others, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women (2002), the UN Special Rapporteur on Extra-Judicial Killings (Alston 2009), the UN High Commission of Refugees (Schnoebelen 2009; UNHCR 2004; Bussien 2011), Cimpric (2010) and the European Parliament (Hanson and Ruggiero 2013), as well as NGOs such as Save the Children (Aguilar Molina 2005), HelpAge International (2011), and Stepping Stones (Foxcro 2009). e laer NGO was founded by Gary Foxcro , a young Englishman, specifically to address the plight of Nigerian children accused of witchcra . Foxcro has also been active in founding the Witchcra and Human Rights Information Network (www.whrin.org). International conferences have been held to address violence against witches. Christian clergy have convened commiees.3 Campaigns have been launched.4 Money is being raised.5 A novel 3. For example, the Stop Child Witch Accusations commiee: hp://stop-cwa.org. 4. For example, the South African Pagan Rights Alliance’s “30 Days of Advocacy Against Witch-Hunts in Africa” campaigns: hp://www.paganrightsalliance.org/ advocacy/. 5. In 2013, as discussed in chapter 9, the Norwegian government granted the Association for Secular Humanism of Malawi a sum of about US$500,000 to educate people on the provisions of the colonial-era Witchcra Act (Massina 2013).

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has been published (Ormsby 2013). Law review papers proliferate (Ludsin 2003; Mgbako and Glenn 2011; Quarmyne 2011; Tebbe 2007). And documentaries have been made to raise awareness of the issue, such as Saving Africa’s Witch Children about Foxcro ’s work in Nigeria (Gavan and Van der Valk 2009) and e Witches of Gambaga about a “witch camp” refuge for accused witches in northern Ghana (Badoe 2010). Lurid tales of grotesque violence serve as a rallying cry for the well-intentioned in their efforts to curb what they call “witchcra violence” or “witchcra abuse” (see Foxcro 2009), or, more recently, with a view to a catchy acronym “witchcra accusation and persecution,” or WAP (WHIRN 2013), as in this brochure advertising a two-day course in Oxford for lawyers working on asylum cases relating to witchcra : Accusations of witchcra are occurring today in communities around the globe. Startling accounts of torture, starvation, abandonment and death have been documented. Accused witches have been executed by hanging, burying alive, drowning and burning, with paraffin or petrol thrown at them to ignite the fire. Victims are o en from vulnerable groups: the elderly, the disabled and, increasingly over the past two decades, children. (UNHCR and Fahamu Trust 2012)

A video of a group of accused witches being burned to death, purportedly in Kenya, has been circulating on the Internet in recent years, having been viewed more than a half million times at the time of writing.6 Refugee rights groups and asylum lawyers are also dealing with people, not only Africans, fleeing persecution as “witches” and seeking asylum in countries where witchcra is not high on the list of public concerns and generally not well understood (Luongo 2016). In all these discussions, issues of justice are presumed to be 6. See www.liveleak.com/view?i=dae_1236854361.

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self-evident: innocent people are being accused of imaginary crimes and being persecuted with “torture, starvation, abandonment and death.” Worse still, the most affected are members of “vulnerable groups,” particularly women, children, and the elderly (Adinkrah 2004, 2011, 2015; Federici 2008; Mgbako and Glenn 2011; Quarmyne 2011; Secker 2013). e fact that witches are understood by those who fear them to be among the most powerful and dangerous of human persons, posing serious dangers to their communities, is rarely considered. I have explored the similarities between recent humanitarian interventions on witchcra and colonial-era aitudes in an article for the African Studies Review, from which the above is drawn (Ashforth 2015).

Of Dreams and Dreaming, and Witchcraft In this book, I have posited the foundation of believability of witchcra stories as having something to do with a “porousness of boundaries” between sleeping and waking worlds. But what is it about the stories told by children of being taught witchcra in the night that enables me to treat them as if they are the product of dreams? As a child, I’m prey sure my mother was unaware of the physiology of childhood parasomnias, since the literature on the subject at the time was not even in its infancy (Kotagal 2009), but when I awoke from a nightmare as a child, I’m certain I would have been told it was only a dream, as I, in turn, told my child. If I awoke in a night terror, the story would have been similar. Enuresis was treated as an ordinary event, with the sheets washed and the maress put out in the sun to dry. A sleepwalk, which is common in young children, would have landed me in the warmth of the parental bed, unless too many other siblings were there already. Malawian children, and many others around the world today, are not always so told. Hence arose the central question motivating my inquiry into the general plausibility of witchcra narratives: Why am I so con-

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fident that dreams are a mere internal, endogenous product of the individual brain? is turned out to be an exceptionally difficult question, and I shall not belabor here all the literature I researched in quest of an answer. Having never studied psychology, neuroscience, or biology in general for that maer, I could not point to any specific item of knowledge having been learned such as would suffice to generate my taken-for-granted confidence in the endogeneity of dreams. Indeed, until a few years ago, like most who have wrien on the subject of witchcra in Africa, I’d not even reflected much on the question of dreams and dreaming. e presumption, therefore, must have been something I inhaled unconsciously, as my parents before me, from the culture within which I have been immersed since birth. But where did this presumption come from? For two and a half millennia or so, Western philosophers, among others, were convinced that dreams, at least some of them, could, and o en did, originate from external sources. Christopher Dreisbach has an excellent essay describing the treatment of dreams in the history of Western philosophy. e ancients, he tells us, were concerned with four central questions: What is the nature and origin of dreams? How can dreams be distinguished from waking experience? Can dreams be truly prophetic, foretelling events yet to come? And what is the moral content of dreams? (Dreisbach 2000, 31–32). Until the nineteenth century, none of the great philosophers were willing to foreclose on the possibility of dreams having external origins and material significance. For many people, including those portrayed in this book, such questions remain relevant today. I would venture to assert that those of us who cleave to a purely endogenous account of dreams are in a minority of the species, even today. e Bible also teaches that dreams can be a medium of communication from God, though Aquinas warned that it was difficult to distinguish between those that came from God and those that Satan might send, so it is wise not to place too much faith in their meaning (McCarthy-Jones 2011). St. Augustine, who seems

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to have been prone to sex dreams, figured God probably had something to do with their origin, since he, Augustine, could do lile to prevent them (Wei 2012). Many Christians today, among others, worry greatly about the immorality of their nocturnal emissions, prompting widespread speculation, and fear, about the phenomenon of the “spirit spouse” (see, for example, Van de Kamp 2011). A recent study of dream interpretation among Christian students at a South African university asked: “Does God still speak to His followers through dreams?” and found that He does, though more so to “Africans” than to “Whites” (Nell 2012). e medieval church generally considered talk of witchcra as a form of pagan superstition and discouraged speculation about demonic activity in dreams (Deane 2011). Around the turn of the fi eenth century in Europe, however, Christians became very worried about demonic influences operating on, in, and through dreams, seing off what became in parts of the continent three centuries of witch hunts. At that time, as Gustav Henningsen has argued, “for reasons that are still not very clear, the Church changed its mind and came to accept witchcra as a diabolic reality” (Henningsen 2009, 57). However, as Henningsen also points out, some European elites, including those behind the notorious Spanish Inquisition, were skeptical about claims that human persons could interact with demons in their sleep, empowering them as witches, and remained so throughout the period of persecution. Sigmund Freud, of course, with his assertion that the analysis of dreams offers a unique path into the examination of the unconscious mind, looms large over Westerners’ talk of dreams (Freud 1954 [1899]). Freud’s account of the history of dream theories in his classic work on the subject, e Interpretation of Dreams, has been shown to be sorely lacking, steering scholars away from earlier physiological theories into a more purely psychological domain, at least until the discovery of REM sleep in 1953 by Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman. Nonetheless, Freud’s influence on Western culture has had profound effects,

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doubtless playing a major part in ensconcing the presumption that dreams are an endogenous product of the individual mind. Peretz Lavie and Allan Hobson, however, have argued that the emergence of the modern theory of the endogeneity of dreams occurred long before Freud, from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, stimulated in large part by the work of Gofried Wilhelm Leibniz (Lavie and Hobson 1986). e ethnographic record is replete with examples of people telling stories about experiences during sleep, such as shamanic dream travel (Lohmann 2003), that range far beyond what are now commonplace orthodoxies regarding dreams as products of a sleeping brain. But while there is now a substantial literature in anthropology about dreams and dreaming, for most anthropologists, the part of the day when people are sleeping has been treated as something of a hiatus in their study of culture (see Galinier et al. 2010). And, as many have pointed out, while dream narratives might be susceptible to cultural and sociological analysis, the experience of dreaming as such is beyond the reach of the outside observer, limiting thereby their usefulness (see Hollan 2004). Anthropologists reporting informants’ talk of things such as the Australian aboriginal “dreamtime,” with some notable exceptions (Jedrej and Shaw 1992; Tedlock 1987), have tended to treat the “dream” as a metaphor rather than as an object for study in itself (Glaskin 2011). Yet while the scientific study of dreaming and consciousness now takes for granted the presumption that dreams are endogenous to brains in humans and other mammals, what are we to make of the fact that a great many people, such as those in this book, do not always or uniformly make that assumption? We now have excellent studies of the intellectual history of ideas about dreams and dreaming, but I have not been able to find convincing accounts of how these ideas diffused through the wider populations of the “West,” if, indeed, that is what happened. All this is hidden, I suspect, under the dead weight of the idea of “modernity” on European historiography. If my hunch that

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transformations in understandings of the nature and origins of dreams undermined the plausibility of witchcra stories in the world we like to think of as Western, as recent historiography suggests was the case, knowing how this happened might be valuable to those of us who believe that freedom from the fear of witches for those currently suffering would be a good thing. But the question remains: What is a “dream” for purposes of social inquiry? Is any flickering of consciousness during sleep a “dream”? With the discovery of REM sleep, it became a commonplace in Western thought to presume that REM sleep equaled dreaming (Oudiee et al. 2012). But more recent studies have shown that dreaming, or at least “mentation,” takes place in NREM (non-rapid eye movement) sleep as well (Nielsen 2000). REM dreams, however, seem more intense and emotion laden (Desseilles, Dang-Vu, Sterpenich, and Schwartz 2011). ese are the dreams that tend to be narrated upon awakening. Bulkeley (2016), in his excellent book reviewing the neuroscience of sleep and theories of the origins of religion, focuses on what he calls “big dreams,” those that the dreamer, on awakening, feels impelled to interpret as having special significance, as opposed to the more mundane forgeable varieties. “Dreams,” as the term is commonly used in scientific as well as social analysis, generally applies to sleeping-state mentation possessing narrative form, with the dynamic form of narrative a feature of the experience and not just a product of the wakeful retelling. Which raises the question: Are all “experiences” during sleep dreams? Perhaps the word “dream” is too capacious and culture-bound a concept to describe not only what is going on in the brain during sleep, but how vast tracts of humankind throughout history have made sense of their experiences of such. If people, in different “peoples” and at different times, have different categories into which they classify sleeping-state experiences, are we justified in subsuming them all under the rubric of “dreams” for purposes of the interpretation of cultures, since “we” tend to come from places where the ontology of dreaming

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is not only seled in terms of an endogenous product of brain functioning but, as I can aest from my own experience, relatively unexamined? If some people distinguish between different forms of sleeping-state mentation as, for example, media of communication, forms of representation, modes of perception or of action, are we not commiing a form of ontological imperialism by rendering them all as mere “dreams”? Can we now conclude, on the basis of recent neurophysiology, that all humans are subject to similar paerns of sleeping-state mentation and that those who still interpret them as something other than endogenous paerns of brain functioning are simply mistaken? If my hunch that modes of interpreting the nature of dreams and dreaming are key to the plausibility of witchcra narratives— with the decline of such plausibility in Europe related to the emergence of skepticism about what Montaigne called “material dreaming” and a gradual acceptance of the presumption that dreaming is an endogenous condition of the mind—then we might expect that changes in understandings of dreaming in contemporary Africa would impact on the plausibility of witchcra narratives. Given the ubiquity, though not universality, of the endogeneity presumption and the extent of the spread of “global” cultural paerns, it would be reasonable to assume that a great many Africans, as others, are finding their taken-for-granted assumptions about dreams as means of communication with invisible beings, modes of prediction of future events, and forms of action in unseen worlds to be challenged. I have not been able to find many studies of the new forms of understanding of dreams and dreaming that might be emerging in contemporary Africa or the dynamics that might be driving change. A small study by the South African sociologist Werner Nell, while noting the lack of research on this subject, reported that “older African participants were more likely to take actions on the basis of their dreams than white participants or younger African respondents (who have probably been exposed to a greater degree of Westernizing influences than older African

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participants), suggesting that Westernization and its associated biomedical discourses might indeed have a corrosive effect on the dream-related action values emphasized in traditional African dream discourses” (Nell 2014, 129). A 1983 PhD thesis by Robert Schweitzer explored the phenomenology of dreams among urban and rural Xhosa-speaking South Africans, arguing that there was a “tension between the newer Christian-based cosmology and the traditional cultural-based cosmology” regarding the interpretation of dreams, with people viewing them either in conflict or Christians incorporating the “culture-based cosmology” into a Christian view (D. R. Schweitzer 1983; R. Schweitzer 1996). Clearly, a major influence on African understandings of dreams has been biblical Christianity, the enthusiasm for which among contemporary Africans is likely to long serve as a bulwark against adoption of rationalist perspectives on dreams. As John Mbiti pointed out: “African Christians have also discovered a dream culture in the Bible and this gives them authority to retain their own dream culture, modify it, expand it; and hold onto it in the changing religious and cultural situation” (Mbiti 1997, 513). A 2000 study about the perceptions of dreams by wala, Pillay, and Sargent (2000), researchers from the Natal School of Medicine, found significant differences between urban and rural, old and young, and male and female respondents in relations to dreams, with older rural men more likely to take their dreams to healers for interpretation than younger urban people, which the authors aributed to “deculturation.” e Nigerian psychologist Augustine Nwoye has aempted to augment “Euro-centric” notions of dreaming with an African perspective that, among other things, allows “triangulation” among persons and spirits through dreams: “In the African perspective, the notion of triangulation in dreaming refers to the situation where dreams are known to originate from another source to give messages to the individual for the benefit of others” (Nwoye 2015, 4). Although the methods vary, and some of the theoretical presumptions

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(such as “deculturation” and “triangulation”) are questionable, it is clear from these studies that at least in South Africa there is no single predominant “theory” of dreams and dreaming, and neither are presumptions of dream endogeneity universal. For people interested in the persistence of witchcra narratives, their sometimes-direful consequences, and the benefits of securing freedom from fear of witches, research into this topic might prove valuable. It is questions such as these that spurred my decision to frame my understanding of the general plausibility of witchcra narratives as founded in a “porousness of boundaries” between waking and sleeping worlds, rather than a specific quality or function of “dreams.” Framing the question this way is important, I would argue, because Malawians, or any particular subset of them, cannot be simply said to have a “system of beliefs” that teaches specific theories of “dreams,” or of “witchcra ” for that maer, that exists independently of other, “scientific” or “Western,” notions of the nature of dreams, sleep, or anything else. My preferred locution thus aims to represent the indeterminacy of understandings of these issues.

On Dreams and Witchcraft in the Anthropology of Africa While there is a substantial literature on dreams and dreaming in African religious practice (Charsley 1973; Curley 1983; Jedrej and Shaw 1992; Kiernan 1985; Mbiti 1997; Nell 2012; Sundkler 1961), there is lile addressing the specific issue of dreaming and witchcra . Most of the classic ethnographies of “native tribes” also touched on issues of the interpretation of dreams, though without exploring in detail their significance in relation to witchcra .7 Most treatments of witchcra view stories of material

7. To cite a sample from the southern African region, see Berglund (1976); HammondTooke (1962); and Hunter (1936).

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action in dreams, such as those that inform witchcra narratives, as if they were mere metaphors, which has been the strategy of sympathetic Western scholars for the beer part of a century. In a paper published in 1951, for example, endeavoring to demonstrate a connection between “witchcra beliefs” and “social structure” by comparing Nyakyusa and Pondo talk of witches with their respective forms of social organization, Monica Wilson famously concluded: “I see witch beliefs as the standardized nightmare of a group” (1951, 313). e term remains current in the literature on Africa (Blunt 2004; Comaroff 2007).8 Wilson was one of the greatest ethnographers and teachers of anthropology of the twentieth century. Ironically, however, when Wilson coined the phrase “standardized nightmare” at the end of her essay, and as it has been used since, though she clearly states in the body of the paper that the maers about which she is writing are said to occur in dreams, the word “nightmare” is treated as a metaphor. She clearly doesn’t mean the term literally, for since she had already documented some variety in witchcra stories within both groups, were she to have meant it literally, she would have used the plural: nightmares. Moreover, in the paragraph preceding the famous adage, Wilson draws an analogy between the witches of Africa and the red-baiters of 1950s America: “Are men with pythons in their bellies and those who ride baboons by night indeed a true parallel to the red agents of McCarthy’s fevered dreams?” Here, clearly, she is talking about metaphorical, not actual dreams. Nobody cared about McCarthy’s dreams, though they might have revealed much about his mania. It was his accusations that maered. And in the literature on witchcra in Africa, accusations have been the stuff of most analyses

8. In an apparently unrelated development—they don’t cite Wilson—two German psychiatrists have developed what they call “standardized nightmare therapy,” a treatment based on imagery rehearsal therapy (IRT), designed to rescript the nightmares of patients suffering from, among other things, post-traumatic stress disorders by having them recount the dream and substituting a new ending. See unker and Pietrowsky (2012).

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of witchcra . But accusations are only a small part of the story of witchcra , in Africa as elsewhere. e transformation of dreams into metaphors in Wilson’s classic paper is ironic because the material that forms the basis for her conjectures about “witchcra beliefs,” like that of EvansPritchard, were stories related to her by her informants about events, experiences, and actions occurring within dreams, “material dreams,” as Montaigne would have put it. Consider the following: e Nyakyusa believe that witches exist as pythons in the bellies of certain individuals. ey are something tangible, discoverable at an autopsy, and inherited. e incentive to witchcra is said to be the desire for good food. Witches lust for meat and milk—the prized foods of the group—and it is this which drives them to commit witchcra . ey delight in eating human flesh and gnaw men inside, causing death to their victims. e witches also steal milk, sucking the udders of cows, so that the cows dry up and later abort. All this happens in dreams. Nightmares of being throled, of being chased, of fighting, and of flying through the air are taken as evidence of an aack by witches; and, if a man wakes up suddenly at night in fear and sweating, he knows that “they”— the witches—have come to throle him. e witches are thought to fly by night on their pythons or “on the wind”; they aack either singly or in covins [sic]; and they feast on human flesh. (Wilson 1951, 308; emphasis added)

What is going on here? How do we get from stories told about real dreams to a set of reconstructed “beliefs,” a metaphorical “standardized nightmare” that can be interpreted as relating to features of a putative “social structure”? By the magic art of turning stories into propositions, that’s how. Wilson is performing a subtle, perhaps unconscious, and for most purposes unnotice-

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able sleight of hand. Stories about events occurring in dreams have been transformed into “beliefs,” that is to say, propositional statements that a collective entity named the Nyakyusa believe. Even such a seemingly innocuous statement as “e Nyakyusa believe . . .” conceals a tangle of potentially misleading assumptions. Quibbling like this over a septuagenarian paper would be pointless were it not for the fact that such sleight of hand turning stories into propositions remains routine, indeed the staple, in writing about “beliefs” regarding maers of witchcra in Africa. More important than the quibbling, however, is the question raised by Wilson’s work: What is the significance of the fact that the events related in stories of witchcra are said to take place in dreams? Might there, in fact, be standardized nightmares about witchcra that do not so much reflect “social structure” but embody the results of living immersed in the narratives that shape the experiences of dreams, and vice versa? Perhaps, since dreams are dreamed in the terms of the standard stories and images that shape our understandings of the waking world, it might also be the case that when one wakes from a frightening experience in the night, such as a nightmare, one narrates the experience in terms of the standard stories available, some of which might involve tales of witchcra .

Beliefs, Propositions, and Narrative One of the fundamental problems that has afflicted the study of witchcra in Africa for at least a century, thanks to EvansPritchard, is the presumption that talk of “witchcra ” refers to a definite set of propositions, otherwise known as “beliefs,” and that the task of the outside observer is to catalog these propositions into a putative “system of belief ”—something resembling, in Evans-Pritchard’s terms, a “natural philosophy”—that can then be described in its specific social context with its own distinct history particular to a geographically located social collectivity

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typically named as a “culture” or “society” (aka “tribe”). It is to the everlasting credit of Evans-Pritchard that he was able to provide a way of thinking about these issues that, unlike the way Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s notion of “primitive mentality” had been taken up, was not inherently racist (see Heinz 1997). In his endeavor to uncover an implicit system of beliefs, however, without which his Azande friends could hardly have been considered to have culture, he set anthropologists, and others, on a search for propositions when the more important quest, which—as his Witchcra, Oracles, and Magic admirably demonstrates in the main body of the book—is the search for and study of stories. For if you read beyond the opening chapters of that book—as, sadly, too few students do—you will find a treasure trove of stories about witches and their cra , along with sensitive and insightful analysis of the work these stories are doing in the lives of Evans-Pritchard’s Azande friends. He gives a taste of what is to come on page 34, when he says: “I have only once seen witchcra on its path . . .” To which the careful reader might be inclined to ask: WTF? Much of the historical ethnography of witchcra reads as if the author were on a quest to discover an implicit set of foundational propositions, equivalent perhaps to the Nicene Creed in Western Christendom, that could be interpreted as the central “system of belief ” of a particular “culture.” While it is indeed possible to extract propositional statements from the stories that people tell of witches and witchcra , doing so leads to a misunderstanding of how witchcra stories work, why such narratives are generally considered plausible, and what is required for a particular story to be deemed true, not to mention the consequences of its being told. Stories are accounts of a sequence of events, narrated by a narrator, in which characters, or agents of acts, effect transformation in the subject of the narration (Ricoeur 1985; Todorov 1971). Among other things, they are accounts of causation that aribute events to actors, assign responsibility to agents, provide lessons on avoiding harm, and serve as evidence in the quest for justice.

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When a story is plausible within a particular context, it invites its audience to insert themselves into the narrative as a putative subject. When a story is adjudged true, it can have serious consequences. e virtual experience of identifying with the subject of a story influences the ways in which a person responds in shaping his or her own life. How stories are created and shared, the conditions that establish the possibilities of plausibility, and the purposes to which they are put are thus of primary interest in understanding social life and especially social change (Frank 2010; Tilly 2002). In order to be believable, stories—as William James and Jerome Bruner, among others, have taught us—draw on different elements of human experience from those which are engaged in the validation of propositions (see Bruner 1986, 2002). When they work, when they are experienced as true (even when we know they are made up), stories draw upon the whole messy complexity of the personhood of the beings doing the telling and listening, or reading—engaging their individual characteristics as well as the cultures, languages, and collective experiences within which they live. Stories do not merely engage the reasoning capacities of the mind such as are at work in propositional knowing. Beliefs are another maer. Being propositions, beliefs exist, insofar as they exist at all, in relation to other propositions—even when passionately held or profoundly mistaken. ey can function as elements of systems of interrelated propositions such as theories, ideologies, doctrines, and creeds. For centuries, philosophers have devoted endless hours to arguing over the distinction between propositions that can be termed “knowledge” and those that are “beliefs,” but all agree both are different from stories (Armour-Garb and Woodbridge 2012; Briggs and Jago 2012).9

9. For an extended discussion of the term “belief ” and a primer on the problems with the concept, see Rodney Needham’s book Belief, Language, and Experience (1972). Supplement that with William Cantwell Smith’s (1977) work on the history of the notion of “belief ” in western Christianity. Byron Good, also, has a useful discussion in his book on Medicine, Rationality, and Experience (1994).

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Rules, of the most diverse sort, govern the modes of determining truth and error among propositions; emotions, sensations, experiences, and the vast terrains of the subconscious are not supposed to affect the maer (though, of course, they do). Stories, on the other hand, emerge from, and in turn shape, relations among entities, of the most diverse sort, that are felt and experienced in all the registers of emotion. e truth of stories is fundamentally visceral; that of propositions analytical. e domains from which stories emerge, moreover, encompass a universe of relations among entities whose nature extends far beyond the qualities of mere humans, subsisting as we do in our mundane lile worlds. In text, image, and performance, storytellers can give voice to, and make seem real, all manner of otherworldly entities: deities and demons, witches and werewolves. . . . And storytellers, as authors, need not only speak for themselves. Prophets, for example, along with shamans and other healers, channel the stories of spirits and other invisible beings. Stories, that is to say, breathe life into the agencies with whom we imagine we share our worlds. While the dynamics of believing are central to this book, then, and while I have spent a great deal of time inquiring into the general question of believability, I am concerned with the believing, and verification, of stories, not propositions.

Confession, Testimony, Children As noted in the main body of this book, until the 1980s, confessions, especially when freely volunteered—or, at least, when not resulting from torture—were considered irrefutable proof of a crime commied. In the 1980s, however, a widespread outbreak of purported cases of ritual child sexual abuse, resulting in the incarceration of dozens of putative perpetrators across the “Western” world, prompted psychologists to more rigorously investigate the conditions under which confessions could be elicited (Gudjonsson 2003). Researchers also investigated how “memo-

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ries” of false events, in both children and adults recalling events in their childhood, could be deliberately implanted in subjects to create what became known as “false memory” (Westco, Davies, and Bull 2002). e implications of this research for criminal investigations and trials is profound, though, unfortunately, the news has not filtered down to all (omas and Leo 2012). It also should transform the ways we think about confession in cases of witchcra . Making the issue of confession in cases of witchcra even more murky is the fact that the events recalled, and confessed to, occur in the contexts of dreams—or, at least, in what the more rationalist among us denominate as dreams. Forensic psychologists have not dwelt on witchcra issues, but four centuries before their pathbreaking work on false confession, an officer of the Spanish Inquisition, Alonso de Salazar Frias, began testing the confessions of confessed witches against the empirical evidence and concluded, in the main, that they must have been dreaming (Henningsen 1980, 2004). Such dreams, moreover, were probably stimulated by the perfervid preaching of priests preoccupied with demonic possession. For witchcra as demonic possession was almost completely unknown in the region until—inspired by their French counterparts, who were obsessed with the issue— the priests came with the idea. e craze, which caught up thousands of victims, quickly passed. anks to the efforts of Salazar, with his skepticism about dreams and insistence on empirical evidence of culpability, however, few witches were executed (Henningsen 1980). e Danish historian Gustav Henningsen, who rediscovered the archive of Salazar’s inquiries in the 1960s, has a terrific paper illustrating the similarities between the dynamics of witch crazes in the early seventeenth century and the satanic child abuse panics of the 1980s, parallels that are instructive for thinking about witchcra and children in contemporary Africa (Henningsen 1996). Peter Brooks, a scholar of literature as well as law, puts it well: “What the law, even at its most liberal and humane, fails to

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understand is that confession is an aberrant speech act that serves complex human functions. It can be a strange performance of shame, guilt, self-exposure, self-punishment whose reference to fact may be troubled, even delusional” (Brooks 2005, 69; see also Brooks 2000).

Skepticism, Humanism, Marxism, Atheism . . . in Africa Not everyone in Africa fears witches and their cra . For more than a century, African modernizers, secularists, humanists, and atheists have advocated, like George indwa of the Malawian Association for Secular Humanism, for an understanding of the world that is free of the forces of spirits, demons, and witches.10 ough tireless, their numbers have always been small. Surveys of religiosity in Africa consistently show extremely low levels of “religious unaffiliation,” let alone atheism (Pew Forum 2010). While it is difficult to know what lack of affiliation means in different contexts, it seems reasonable to conclude that thoroughgoing secularism, let alone forthright atheism, is rare, if not virtually unknown in most parts. In my own experience over thirty years in Africa, indwa is the first convinced atheist I’ve encountered. For a period in the mid-twentieth century, Marxism provided African intellectuals with an appealing doctrine for resisting the pull of religion as well as colonialism, not to mention the combination of the two. In nationalist anti-colonial movements, many African intellectuals, particularly those educated in Europe, embraced varieties of Marxism and secularism. But even in the African socialist and Soviet client states, these were never more than a small minority. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the wave of “democratization” in the late 1980s, Marxism virtually disappeared from the African political lexicon. Even in the most 10. South Africa, being home to many whites, is also blessed with a movement of self-identified pagan “witches,” adherents of New Age “wiccan” religious movements (Leff 2014).

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pro-Soviet socialist states of Africa, such as post-independence Angola, the rationalist atheism of intellectual Marxism influenced only a tiny part of the population (Blanes and Paxe 2015). Marxists, today, are almost as rare in Africa as atheists. In recent years a new humanist movement has emerged in Africa, with groups forming in countries across the continent. In 2016 I was honored to address an international convention of young African humanists meeting in Nairobi, the First African Humanist Youth Days Conference (Jimlizer Hotel, Nairobi, Kenya, July 22, 2016). at the convocation filled a seminar room perhaps speaks to the current popularity of skepticism about religion on the continent. Nonetheless, the energy and commitment of these young activists inspire hope for the progress of rationalism everywhere. Perhaps the most energetic advocate of secular humanism in Africa is the Nigerian intellectual and activist Leo Igwe, a tireless blogger in the defense of accused witches and denouncer of the foolishness of talk of witchcra (Igwe 2004).

Conclusion Treating issues of witchcra simply as maers of belief inclines those of us who think such beliefs are mistaken to aempt correction. e history of rationalist outsiders meddling in African affairs, however, teaches us that merely telling people witches don’t, and cannot, exist is futile. e most recent incarnation of this inclination, in the name of human rights, is likely to be as ineffective as those of colonial-era missionaries in earlier centuries. Nor does exposure to education and science (which in Africa, for the most part, has occurred in sadly inadequate forms) lead to an inexorable decrease in fears of witchcra , as many colonials used to think and well-intentioned outsiders today still imagine. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, for many Africans, the idea of “science”—“African science”—has been deployed to reinterpret

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ideas about how witchcra works and reinforce the potency of fears (Ashforth 2005). Recent social science research has shown not only how difficult it is to “correct” myths, misconceptions, and misinformation, but that such efforts can actually strengthen the myths through what social scientists describe as a “backfire effect,” particularly among those most motivated to adhere to the mistaken belief (Nyhan, Brendan, Jason, and Peter 2013; Nyhan and Reifler 2010, 2015; see also Cook and Lewandowsky 2011). is research addresses questions such as why some affluent, highly educated parents in the West subscribe to myths about the dangers of vaccines despite highly persuasive scientific evidence to the contrary. Giving people correct information about vaccines, for example, does make them more likely to tell interviewers the correct answer about dangers, but makes those inclined to worry about vaccines less motivated to use them (Nyhan and Reifler 2015) is research should be borne in mind by anyone seeking to protect persons accused of witchcra in Africa. Denial of the reality of witchcra in Africa has long been taken as the mark of a protector of witches. roughout this book I have tried to show how a commitment to the consideration of evidence pervades the actions of both chiefs’ courts and magistrate courts in cases of witchcra . While the kinds of evidence considered, such as the testimony of children, may not always meet the highest standards of proof that we are used to in most Western legal systems today, the fact that evidence is considered essential in making cases is fundamentally important. And given that the experience of action that grounds most witchcra narratives is, as I would argue, experienced in dreams, evidence in any particular witchcra case must perforce remain open to question. e simple requirement that dream experiences be corroborated by empirical evidence—such as insisted upon by such diverse jurists as the Spanish Inquisitor Salazar and Magistrate Banda, and as I hope to have shown in

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the cases described in this book—goes a long way toward undermining the credibility of what Montaigne described as material dreams. My contention is that open consideration of evidence in witchcra cases can defuse potentially murderous passions for revenge. is is why I have chosen to celebrate the work of Magistrate Banda.

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Index

Abdallah, Yohanna B., 190 Africa: British colonial law in, 3–4, 131, 195–98; history of witchcra in Europe and, 193–94; human rights activism in (see human rights activism); post-colonial states and witchcra , 198–200 African AIDS Epidemic, e (Illife), 192 African Studies Review, 202 African Worldview, An (Dicks), 190 AIDS epidemic: content of the Journals Project, 6; course of in Malawi, 159, 191–93; influence on feelings of insecurity, 18; parents’ connection of fears to witchcra , 11–12, 18; people’s need to determine blame for, 59, 62; progress made in de-stigmatizing, 129–30; witchcra and, 52, 57–58, 59, 66, 147, 160 Alice, 9, 111–12, 152, 191 Alpers, Edward A., 189

237

Ankhoswe, 175 Anna, 149 Aserinsky, Eugene, 204 Association for Secular Humanism (ASH), 15, 130, 132, 167, 169, 217 atheism, 217 Balaka District, 44, 95, 188. See also Malawi Balaka Hospital, 13–15, 24. See also hospital proceedings about Mrs. K. Banda, Damson S., 34, 73; case of the Kasitos (see Kasitos case); duty to advise, 175; following of the rule of law, 3; intricacies of his legal judgment, 125–27; judgment in Mrs. K.’s case, 5, 127–28, 165, 220; legal dilemma faced by, 2, 41–42; proposal for a legal remedy regarding witchcra , 123–24; respect for the law, 168

238

Index

Banda, Hastings Kamuzu, 190 bawo, 9, 47 Bellos, McDaphton, 1 British colonial law: exporting of to Africa, 3–4, 195–98; history of witchcra in Europe and, 79, 193– 94; on witchcra , 3, 4, 131 Bruner, Jerome, 214 Bryceson, Deborah, 190 Bulkeley, K., 206 CCAP (Church of the Central Africa Presbyterian), 9 Central Park jogger, 107 Centre for Youth and Children Affairs, 18 Chanock, Martin, 85 Chewa History in Central Malawi (Phiri), 189 chiefs: absence of oath taking in hearings, 172; a chief ’s response to reports of witchcra in the village, 120–21; concern with evidence, 94, 170, 172, 199, 219; focus on the community, 168–69; hierarchy of courts, 72, 95, 119, 161, 191; human rights activists’ engagement with, 131, 133; legal authority in Malawi, 176; legal authority to try witches, 4, 43, 68, 80, 191; legal jeopardy regarding ordeals, 81; openness to ending witchcra cases, 134–35; position on violence against witches, 53; progression of a case when there is a confession (see Makeba case); punishment for witches, 174; restorative justice and, 174–75; a trial involving the chief ’s own family (see Ganzani case); a victim’s frustration with the village court, 69, 70, 161. See also witch trials Chiikala cha Wayao (Abdallah), 190 children: adults’ acceptance of witchcra stories, 15–16, 21, 25–27, 45–46, 49, 97, 99, 100, 118, 119,

157; adults’ fears about witchcra and, 11–12, 15, 16–19, 21–22, 62–63, 158–59, 160–62; adults’ use of the stories to explain illnesses and deaths, 160–62; dilemma if the children aren’t believed, 26; legal value of children’s testimony, 73, 91, 92; narrative retelling of child’s witchcra story (see child’s tale of witchcra , a); pressure on the children to corroborate charges, 64; reactions to children’s dreams, 16, 202–3; standard stories of children taught witchcra , 24–26, 46, 74– 76, 100–101, 112–13; testimonies of, 29, 44, 49–50, 51–52, 99–101; treatment of child witches, 52; vulnerability to suggestions of witchcra , 21 child sex abuse stories, 17, 18, 73, 105, 108, 157, 215, 216 child’s tale of witchcra , a: concern over the scope of the witch problem in the village, 120–21; confronting of the accused witch, 119–20; credence given to the children’s story, 118, 119; discovery of the missing child, 114; efforts to diagnose and treat the child, 114– 15; establishment of the innocence of the mother, 113–14; focus on the details as proof, 118–19; gossip and stories of witches, 112; legality of the judgment, 121; narrative retelling of the child’s story, 116– 18; the narrator’s claim to truth, 118; plausible explanation for the boy’s condition, 115–16; selective elements of the story retold in the narrative, 116; standard elements in the story, 112–13 Chilembwe, John, 189 Chilimampunga, Charles, 135 Church of Central Africa Presbyterian (CCAP), 9

Index cleansings: cleansing and its consequences, 55; completion of the cleansing in a case, 65–66; distinction between an ordeal and, 84; importance of clarification of the cleansing ritual, 90–91; problem with an accused’s cleansing plan, 58–59; reaction to a failure to cleanse, 60; restorative justice achieved through, 84 coerced-compliant false confessions, 106–8 coerced-internalized false confessions, 108–9 confessions: accused’s unintentional confession in the Makeba case, 101–2; coerced-compliant, 106–8; coerced-internalized, 108–9; dilemma of maintaining one’s own innocence, 83; false memories and, 216; false memories and confessions, 216; impact of, 173; necessity of a confession in witch trials, 94, 123; options available to an accused person, 50; persuasive power of, 107–8; plausibility that a confession is real, 109–10; psychology of confessions, 105–9, 215–17; reactions when a witch confesses (see Makeba case); reliance on the context of dreams, 216; social implications of a not-guilty plea, 65; veracity of an accused’s, 105, 108–9; voluntary false, 105–6 Critical Terms for the Study of Africa (Ashforth), 11 Darr, Orna Alyagon, 194 Davies, Owen, 194 Desai, Guarav, 11 Dicks, Ian D., 190, 199 Diston, 9, 44 Douglas, Mary, 82 dreams and witchcra stories: acceptance of the reality of dreamed

239

experiences, 145–46; anthropology of dreams and dreaming, 205; beliefs/propositions vs. stories, 7, 8, 141–42, 154, 211–15; communication in dreams between humans and invisible beings, 150; conviction that dreams can portend future events, 152; credence given to children’s stories, 15–16, 157; credence given to dreams by Christians, 203–4; diffusion of the presumption that dreams are endogenous, 205–6; dreams invoked as useful lies, 146–50, 162; Evans-Pritchard on witchcra and dreaming, 152–53; framing of witchcra stories as a system of beliefs in a culture, 212–13; Freud and modern theory about dreams, 204–5; general conditions of plausibility, 7, 12, 22–23, 39, 118, 140, 202–3, 209; indications of a universality of certain features of the dreaming state, 145; influences on Africans’ perceptions of dreams, 154–55, 207–9, 212; mens rea and dreams, 143, 197; Montaigne’s caution against conjecture, 139–40; Montaigne’s position on holding people accountable for their dreams, 142–43, 144; porousness between sleeping and waking realities in, 12, 16, 144, 156–57, 202, 209; question of whether or not dreams are real experiences, 145– 46, 153–54; question of why some people believe in witches, 140–41; receptivity to claims of expertise about dreams, 155–56; requirement for conscious intentionality to commit a crime, 143; scientific definition of dreams, 153n6, 206; significance of the confinement of witchcra acts to dreams, 212; social and cultural aspects of dreams, 206–7, 213–14; treatment

240

Index

dreams and witchcra stories (continued) of witchcra narratives as metaphors, 210–11; uncertainties surrounding dream-based claims to authority, 150–52; Western conception of dreams, 144–45, 202–3, 205–6; Wilson on “standardized nightmares,” 119, 210 Dreisbach, Christopher, 203 East African Slave Trade, e (Alpers), 189 Englund, Harri, 15, 190 Evans-Pritchard, Edward, 19, 109, 141, 152–54, 156, 193, 211, 212, 213 evidence in witchcra trials: central problem of, 171–72; chiefs’ concern with, 94, 170, 172, 199, 219; history of the law of evidence, 194; legal system in Malawi and, 78, 87–88, 89–90, 170, 219–20; participants’ commitment to the rules of evidence, 78, 170–72, 174 false confessions: coerced-compliant, 106–8; coerced-internalized, 108–9; false memories and, 216; voluntary, 105–6 Fields, Karen, 196 First African Humanist Youth Days Conference, 218 Forster, Peter Glover, 190 Foxcro , Gary, 200 Fraught Embrace, A (Swidler and Watkins), 189 Freud, Sigmund, 204 Ganzani, Abiti. See Ganzani case Ganzani case: the accused’s family’s reaction to the trial, 56–57; the accused’s initial plea, 49; the accused’s revised plea, 51; the adults’ support for the child, 49; the boy’s testimony against his grandmother, 44, 49–50; chief

headman’s distress over the case, 54; child’s testimony as a standard story, 46; cleansing plan, 55, 58– 60, 65–66; connections between the family and the village leadership, 44–45; the crowd’s reaction to the proceedings, 48, 51, 52, 60, 63, 64, 65; elevation of the case to the TA’s court, 61; gossip about the case, 56; gossip surrounding a woman’s funeral, 61–62; jurisdiction over witches, 43–44, 66; leveling of more accusations, 60–61, 66; a new accusation of witchcra , 66–67; options available to the accused, 50; a pastor’s stoking of witchcra fears, 62–63; pressure on the children to corroborate the charges, 64; social implications of a not-guilty plea, 65; socioeconomic aspects of the witchcra stories, 46–47, 57–58; TA’s verdict and punishment, 66; testimonies of the other children, 51–52; theme of inadvertent witchcra , 50; treatment of child witches, 52; treatment of the accused witch by her family, 59–60, 66–67; veracity of the boy’s claim, 45–46; visiting headmen’s stories and admonitions about witches, 52–54; when a witch confesses (see confessions); witchcra stories and the politics of family life, 57–58 Gauti (detective sub-inspector), 69. See also Kasitos case Gluckman, Max, 172, 199 HelpAge International (NGO), 198, 200 Henningsen, Gustav, 204, 216 herbalists, 29, 92, 103, 104, 124, 171–72. See also cleansings; sing’anga; traditional healers History of Malawi, A (McCraken), 189 HIV/AIDS. See AIDS epidemic

Index Hobson, Allan, 205 hospital proceedings about Mrs. K.: accusations of involvement of a different witch, 26; adults’ acceptance of the child’s report, 27; the children’s story of being taught witchcra , 24–26; confrontation in the manager’s office, 27–28; continuation of the claims against Mrs. K., 30; dilemma if the children aren’t believed, 26; hospital management’s handling of the allegations, 164; Mrs. K.’s aempts to involve higher authorities, 29– 30; the parents’ reactions to the children’s stories, 25–26; response to the accusation, 31; revelation of Mrs. K. as the witch, 27; staffs’ willingness to believe the rumors about her, 163–64; testimony of the children, 29; testimony of the children’s mothers, 28–29 humanist movement, 218 human rights activism: advocacy against violence toward accused witches, 200–202; advocates’ stance on the trials, 167; campaign to free the witches, 132; chiefs’ aitudes toward witchcra trials, 135; efforts to raise awareness of the Witchcra Act, 131, 132, 134– 35; people’s opinions about the threat of witchcra , 137–38; popularity of NGO jobs, 134; popular rejection of de-stigmatizing witchcra , 130–31; progress made in de-stigmatizing AIDS, 129–30; question of justice for violence against witchcra , 135–36; risks in defending witches, 136–37; stand against witchcra charges by an NGO, 132 idliso, 149 Igwe, Leo, 218 Illife, John, 192

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imagery rehearsal therapy (IRT), 210n8 Independent African (Shepperson), 189 Ingram, Paul, 108 Innocence Project, 106–8 Interpretation of Dreams, e (Freud), 204 James, William, 214 Kalembo, 95 Kapachika, Mabel, 34 Kasitos case: adults’ acceptance of witchcra stories, 76–77, 78; applicability of the law to the case, 77–78; calling of the child witness, 73; cleansing ritual and, 75, 84, 90–91; complexity of the family’s relationships and situation, 86–87; criminal status of the practice of witchcra , 76; criteria established for justice to occur, 91–92; the defendant’s proof that he is not a wizard, 80; dilemma of asserting innocence, 83; final verdict on the charges, 92–93; formal charges brought against the family members, 70–72; history of the applicable legal principles, 79; involvement of the police, 68–69; legal challenge facing the magistrate, 79; legal irony in the Witchcra Act, 87–88; legal value of the children’s testimony, 91, 92; magistrate’s commitment to the rules of evidence, 78; magistrate’s deference to the community’s concerns, 77, 79, 81; magistrate’s legal decision regarding each charge, 88–89; magistrate’s rationale for hearing the case, 76–77; prosecutor’s choice of a witchcra charge, 72–73; questions of evidence and the law in the case, 87–88, 89–90; reliability of the testimony of children, 73; reliance

242

Index

Kasitos case (continued) on the poison ordeal to determine guilt or innocence, 81–83; story told by the alleged victim, 69–70; a successful ordeal’s failure to convince, 83–84; tale told by the children, 74–76; victim’s frustration with the village courts, 70, 85–86; ways guilt can be proven under the Witchcra Act, 90–91 Kaspin, Deborah, 190 Kassin, Saul, 105, 108 Kenya, 197 Kleitman, Nathaniel, 204 Kotagal, Suresh, 27 Lavie, Peretz, 205 Laws of Malawi, 3–4, 42 Lecky, William E. H., 193 legal system in Malawi: African jurisprudence and witchcra , 42; applicability of a defamation charge to a witchcra allegation, 124–25; British colonial law and, 3–4, 195–98; burden of proof required in a defamation case, 123; case of Mrs. K. (see Mrs. K.’s case); case of the Kasitos (see Kasitos case); cases heard in village trials (see child’s tale of witchcra , a; Ganzani case; Makeba case); commitment to the rules of evidence, 78, 87–88, 89–90, 170, 219–20; court system, 190–91; criteria established for justice to occur, 91–92; deference to the community’s concerns, 77, 79, 81, 168–69; documentation of trials, 2–3; legal value of children’s testimony, 91, 92; reliability of the testimony of children, 73; resentment over colonial intervention in, 85; societal contribution of witchcra trials (see witch trials); Witchcra Act and (see Witchcra Act, Malawi) Legislative Council of Nyasaland, 4

Leibniz, Gofried Wilhelm, 205 Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, 213 Livingstone, David, 189 Luongo, Kate, 197 Magalasi, Denview, 2, 166 magistrates’ courts. See Kasitos case; Mrs. K.’s case; witch trials Magomero: Portrait of an African Village (White), 189 Makeba, Abiti. See Makeba case Makeba case: accused’s claim of victimhood, 99; accused’s virtual confession, 101–2; accuser’s testimony, 96–98; children’s testimony, 99–101; coerced-compliant false confessions, 106–8; coercedinternalized false confessions, 108–9; common narrative of the children’s story, 100–101; court proceedings, 96; credence given to the children’s story, 97, 99, 100; the crowd’s participation in the proceedings, 96, 99, 101–2, 104–5; distinction between being a witch and practicing witchcra , 107; jurisdiction and status of the village chief, 95; necessity of a confession, 94, 123; objections raised about the sentencing, 104–5; objective of the hearing, 96, 102–3; persuasive power of a confession, 107–8; plausibility that a confession is real, 109–10; sentence delivered by the chief, 103–4; suggestion of a protective course of action, 103; veracity of the accused’s confession, 105, 108–9; voluntary false confessions, 105–6 Malawi: AIDS epidemic, 159, 191–93; court system, 190–91; demographics, 188; economy, 188; ethnographic works about, 189–90; government structure, 188; histories of, 189; land disputes in, 191. See also Africa

Index Malawi Journals Project, 1; content of, 6; storytelling in, 6–7; writers’ biographies, 9–10; writers’ continuation of the work, 8 Malawi Law Commission, 124, 198 Malleus Maleficarum, 173 Marwick, Max, 82, 189 Marxism, 217–18 Masquelier, Adeline, 11 Mbiti, John, 208 McCraken, John, 189 McFarlane, Alan, 193 Melland, Frank, 195–96 memories, false, 216 mens rea and dreams, 143, 197 mfiti, 19, 20 Miller vs. Ministry of Pensions, 78 Mitchell, J. Clyde, 189 Montaigne, Michel de, 12, 16, 139–40, 142–43, 144 Morris, Brian, 190 Mrs. K.’s case: accusations against her, 1–2, 20; applicability of a defamation charge to the witchcra allegation, 124–25; burden of proof required in the defamation case, 123; children’s failure to testify, 165; community’s efforts to remove her, 13; confrontation at the hospital (see hospital proceedings about Mrs. K.); criminal provisions of the Witchcra Act, 123; decision to fight in court, 32; defamation charge levied by Mrs. K., 2, 5, 39, 40; dual nature of the trial, 122; impact of the magistrate’s ruling on her, 166; magistrate’s dilemma, 41–42; magistrate’s judgment in, 5, 125–27, 165; magistrate’s proposal for a legal remedy, 123–24; media reports of a witch, 13–15; Mrs. K.’s challenge in proving herself not to be a witch, 40–41; Mrs. K.’s counter-accusation, 3, 26; Mrs. K.’s testimony, 35–36; Mrs. K.’s theory about the origin

243

of rumors against her, 37–38; narrative necessary to prove Mrs. K.’s innocence, 39–40; necessity of a confession, 123; the plaintiffs’ allegiance to their story, 41; problem with her chosen defense, 164–65; proceedings, 34–35; spectators, 33–34; underlying charges in the case, 38, 39; verdict and its consequences, 127–28, 165; witness testimony, 38–39 Msamala, 95 Mutharika, Bingu wa, 132 Mutungi, One’simus, 198 Mutwa, Credo, 155 Nation, e (Malawi), 13–14 Nell, Werner, 207 Ngaatume, 95 Nikhani Zam’maboma (News from the Districts), 14–15 Nkhoma, Symon, 14 Norwegian Embassy, 15, 134 NREM (non-rapid eye movement) sleep, 206 Nwoye, Augustine, 208 Nyasaland Protectorate, 3 Ofshe, Paul, 108 ordeals, judicial: in Africa, 69, 80, 81– 84, 89, 173; in Europe, 81, 173, 194 Origins of AIDS, e (Pepin), 192 Pagan Council, 199 parents: acceptance of children’s witchcra stories, 15–16, 21, 25–27, 45–46, 49, 97, 99, 100, 118, 119, 157; connection of witchcra fears to the AIDS epidemic, 11–12, 18, 162; fears about witchcra and children, 11–12, 15, 16–19, 21–22, 62–63, 158–59, 160–62; reactions to children’s dreams, 16; reactions to children’s stories of witchcra , 21, 25–26, 75; use of the stories to explain illnesses and deaths, 160–62

244

Index

Patuma, 10, 148, 150–52 Pepin, Jacques, 192 Peters, Pauline E., 190 Phiri, Kings M., 189 Pillay, A. L., 208 Probst, Peter, 190 Rawls, John, 166 REM sleep, 206 restorative justice, 174–75, 199–200 Richards, Audrey I., 190 Salazar Frias, Alonso de, 216 Sargent, C., 208 Save the Children (NGO), 200 Saving Africa’s Witch Children, 201 Scheler, Max, 22–23 Schoffeleers, Mahew, 190 Schweitzer, Robert, 208 Seidman, Robert B., 197 Shapiro, Barbara, 79, 194 Shepperson, George, 189 Simon, 9–10, 129, 146 sing’anga, 29, 92, 103, 104, 124. See also herbalists; traditional healers sleep terror, 27 sorcery, 19–20 Sorcery in Its Social Seing (Marwick), 189 South African Law Reform Commission, 198–99 Steliya, 95 Stepping Stones (NGO), 200 stories of witchcra . See witchcra stories Swidler, Ann, 189 indwa, George: atheism of, 217; background, 131–32; campaign to free the witches, 132; efforts to raise awareness of the Witchcra Act, 134–35; origin of his skepticism about witchcra , 136; on the question of justice for violence against witchcra , 135–36; stand

against witchcra accusations, 132, 167, 169. See also Association for Secular Humanism omas, Keith, 193 wala, J. D., 208 Traditional Authorities (TAs), 48, 50, 72, 95, 161, 188, 190 traditional healers: claiming of religious rights, 199; cleansings and, 55, 58–59, 60, 65–66, 84, 90–91; denouncing of by some people, 172; herbalists, 29, 92, 103, 104, 124, 171–72; a magistrate’s directions to, 124; people’s faith in their skills, 29, 36, 68, 86, 149, 162; potential for fraud by, 155; protection afforded by, 20, 69, 70; sing’anga, 29, 92, 103, 104, 124 Traditional Healers Organization, 199 Trevor-Roper, Hugh R., 193 Tylor, Edward, 154n7 Ubuntu, 199–200 UNAIDS, 192 UN Special Rapporteur, 200 vaccines, 219 village witch trials: chief ’s court with family ties (see Ganzani case); response to reports of a child’s tale (see child’s tale of witchcra , a); when a witch confesses (see Makeba case) voluntary false confessions, 105–6 Watkins, Susan Cos, 134, 159, 177, 179, 180, 189, 192, 193 White, Landeg, 189 Wilson, Monica, 47, 210, 211–12 witchcra : adults’ fears about, 11–12, 15, 16–17, 21–22, 62–63, 160–62; British law on, 3, 4, 131 (see also Witchcra Act, English, 1736); challenge in proving someone is not a witch, 40–41; community

Index fears about, 11–12, 18–19, 22, 159; criminal status of the practice of, 76; distinction between being a witch and practicing witchcra , 107; distinction from sorcery, 19– 20, 109; history in Europe, 193–94; human rights and (see human rights activism); imprisonment of witches, 85–86; involvement of children (see children); key factor making the stories believable, 12; likening to child abuse, 17–18; plausibility of the existence of witches, 22–23; post-colonial African states and, 198–200; powers and mission of a witch, 18, 19, 20; reaction when a witch confesses (see confessions); restorative justice and, 199–200; storytelling in the journal entries about, 6–7; targeting of elderly women as practitioners, 20, 37, 44, 45, 57, 116, 160; worry about idliso, 149 Witchcra Act, English, 1736: adoption in Malawi, 131; exportation to Africa, 195; history of in England, 79, 194; political effects of in Africa, 198; provisions of, 4 Witchcra Act, Malawi: ability to protect the accused, 176; applicability of a defamation charge to a witchcra allegation, 124–25; British colonial law in Africa and, 3–4, 195–98; central question for Africans about, 199; efforts to raise awareness of, 131, 132, 134– 35; history of the applicable legal principles, 79, 194; legal irony in, 87–88; legality of a judgment, 121; police involvement in witchcra cases and, 69; position on the poison ordeal, 81–83; provisions of, 4, 65, 70, 76, 123, 195–98; results of studies of witchcra cases, 199; trials in chiefs’ courts, 53; ways

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guilt can be proven under, 90–91. See also human rights activism Witchcra and Human Rights Information Network, 200 Witchcra, Magic, and Oracles among the Azande (Evans-Pritchard), 152, 213 witchcra stories: adults’ acceptance of, 15–16, 21, 25–27, 45–46, 49, 76–77, 78, 97, 99, 100, 118, 119, 157; consistency in holding adults responsible for witchcra , 162– 63; dreams and (see dreams and witchcra stories); family resentments and, 57–58; illness and death and, 160–62; societal fears reflected in, 159; socioeconomic insecurity and, 46–47, 57–58; tale of witchcra and violence told by children, 74–76; underlying themes of, 160–62; witchcra pedagogy standard story, 24–26, 46, 74–76, 100–101, 112–13 Witches of Gambaga, e, 201 witch trials: allowance for a defense, 169; central problem of evidence in, 171–72; in chief ’s courts (see child’s tale of witchcra , a; Ganzani case; Makeba case); circumstances surrounding violence when dealing with witches, 168; commitment to the rules of evidence, 78, 170–72, 174; communities’ desire to pursue justice, 77, 79, 81, 168–69; concept of advice in African contexts, 175–76; connection to rationalism in Western thought, 194; criteria established for justice to occur, 91–92; element of restorative justice in the proceedings, 84, 174– 75; future of contemporary, 194; human rights advocates’ stance on the trials, 167; impact of a confession, 173; impact on people’s

246

Index

witch trials (continued) willingness to believe rumors, 163–66; importance of taking an oath, 172; level of acceptability of a herbalist’s testimony, 171–72; in magistrates’ courts (see Kasitos case; Mrs. K.’s case); outcomes of previous trials, 168; primary punishments rendered, 174; proof of innocence, 173; underlying themes in witchcra accusations,

165–66; Witchcra Act and (see Witchcra Act, Malawi) Wrightsman, Lawrence, 105 Yaos, e (Abdallah), 190 Yao tribe, 188. See also Malawi Yao Village, e (Mitchell), 189 Zambezi Evangelical Church, 62 Zambia, 195, 198 Zimbabwe, 198