Among the peoples of Botswana, witchcraft is classified into four categories. These four categories are heart, mouth, night, and day witchcraft. Heart witchcraft is when a witch is offended; he or she will remove the protection of the ancestors from their victim. This results in misfortune happening to the victim who is no longer protected from it. Mouth witchcraft is very similar to heart as in both cases the protection of the ancestors is taken from the victims, but in Mouth witchcraft the curse is spoken aloud.
Night witchcraft among the people of the Botswana is something entirely different. Night witches are usually women who come out at night and perform mischief. This includes creating zombies, making people oversleep, and sucking the milk from cows. According to Kuswani, night witchcraft is generally associated with elderly women. It seems that these night witches are in their physical bodies, unlike the witches of Ghana and the witches among the Azande. Day witches practice their witchcraft during the day and are surprisingly the most dangerous, for they are said to poison and kill their victims usually through food poisoning. It is believed that Day Witches cause alcoholics to become alcoholics.
Now that one has learned what a witch is capable of one has to ask how it can be stopped. What is the anecdote for witchcraft? Is there one? One form of eliminating witchcraft is banishment. In Ghana at least, women accused of witchcraft are banished from their homes and sent to “witch villages.” Banishment seems even more humane than the apparent cold-blooded murder of accused witches today. Akrong writes:
This has often resulted in instant cold-blood murder of the accused, usually women. Stories about witchcrafts in our newspapers abound in such types of cold-blooded murder of women accused of witchcraft. Once a witch has been identified, there is a demand for confessions. People beat and torture the accused, which sometimes results in the death of the suspected witch, with the complicity of the bystanders.
What Akrong is saying may shock and appall an outsider, especially one from a western background, but in the worldview of the African peoples, witches are very real, very evil beings that are not to be taken lightly. The logic of their worldview would allow for such a violent treatment of an accused witch.
According to Evans-Pritchard, action against witchcraft is usually not taken if the harm caused was very minor. This is best explained in the following example:
If a man is bitten by a poisonous snake he either gets well or he dies. Should he recover, no good can come of asking the oracles for the name of the witch responsible for the bite. But if a man falls and his sickness is likely to be serious and of some duration, then relatives approach the witch responsible in order to turn the scales between recovery and death.
This means that small problems are not worth asking the oracle about, but if there will be serious consequences of the witchcraft, especially when it comes to death, the identity of a witch needs to be found. Evans-Pritchard writes also that, “Most people have told me that murder alone could be punished and I have recorded no cases of witches being punished for other losses.”
What is done to eliminate witchcraft among the Azande then? Evans-Pritchard writes about a few options. The first option is a public oration where the victim declares to the village that the oracle has disclosed the name of a witch and it is asked that the witch stop what he or she is doing. The name of the witch is not told to the public. In this way, the witch is given a chance to stop performing witchcraft and not be found out about. If the witchcraft continues, the witch knows that the name will be told to the public and no witch wants to be found out.
Another option is to send a deputy with a chicken wing to the door of the witch. This deputy will inform the witch what he or she is being accused of and asked to stop. Evans -Pritchard describes the action of the accused in this way, “Almost invariably the witch replies courteous that he is unconscious of injuring any one, that if it is true that he has injured the man in question he is very sorry.”
According to Omoyajowo, certain groups have made it their mission to combat witchcraft in Africa. A group called the Bamucapi traveled around and accused peoples of witchcraft and the accused houses would be searched. The accused were forced to drink a mixture that was supposed to cleanse them of witchcraft altogether. This group also sold protective charms and powders to combat witchcraft. A similar group existed among the Yoruba after World War 2, but they were banned by the government in 1951.
It seems that there is no concrete way to eliminate witchcraft among African peoples. Some prefer banishment, public humiliation, simply asking for it to stop, and magical drinks. It depends, much like everything in African Witchcraft, on which peoples one is studying.
To conclude, many questions have now been answered about African Witchcraft. Is Witchcraft a positive or negative phenomenon? Where does witchcraft come from? How does one become a witch? What exactly do witches do? How are witches stopped? The answers to these questions depend completely on which African peoples one is asking the questions of. It is almost impossible to generalize when it comes to Africans, as they are a diverse people with diverse beliefs. One thing they have in common though is that all African societies include some belief in witchcraft.
