The Trials of Mrs. K.

Seeking Justice in a World with Witches

Adam Ashforth

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780226322360, 9780226322223
• eBook ISBN: 9780226322537
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Social Sciences

In March 2009, in a small town in Malawi, a nurse at the local hospital was accused of teaching witchcraft to children. Amid swirling rumors, "Mrs. K." tried to defend her reputation, but the community nevertheless grew increasingly hostile. The legal, social, and psychological trials that she endured in the struggle to clear her name left her life in shambles, and she died a few years later.
 
In The Trials of Mrs. K., Adam Ashforth studies this and similar stories of witchcraft that continue to circulate in Malawi. At the heart of the book is Ashforth's desire to understand how claims to truth, the pursuit of justice, and demands for security work in contemporary Africa, where stories of witchcraft can be terrifying. Guiding us through the history of legal customs and their interactions with the court of public opinion, Ashforth asks challenging questions about responsibility, occult forces, and the imperfect but vital mechanisms of law. A beautifully written and provocative book, The Trials of Mrs. K. will be an essential text for understanding what justice means in a fragile and dangerous world.  
 

1

The Most Abhorrent Crime

In the weeks after Easter 2009, the story of Mrs. K., the witch-nurse at the District Hospital teaching witchcraft, spread quickly through the town, all over the district, and soon the country. One morning, shortly after she was confronted by a mob after collapsing outside a neighbor’s house, some community members arrived at her hospital lodging with a vehicle in an attempt to forcibly return her to her original home in a rural village. But they didn’t find her. Some said she had left 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 fifth of June 2009, Malawi’s premier newspaper, The Nation, published a front-page article under the banner headline “Witchcraft Terrorises Balaka Hospital”:

Witchcraft 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.

The two children revealed that the nurse had taught them witchcraft 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 witchcraft 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 matter.

The 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 witchcraft and that she wanted to kill her.

Secretary for Health Chris Kang’ombe was not available for comment.

Accounts of witchcraft 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 around the country. These reports confirmed the general fear that the nurse at District Hospital was in fact teaching children witchcraft. So began the trials of Mrs. K.

Rumors of adults teaching witchcraft 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 attacked. Several have been killed.

There are no good estimates of how many accusations have been made or how many people punished for this “crime.” The 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 witchcraft in their area (Chilimampunga and Thindwa 2012, table 8). Moreover, the same study reported that “when asked if any children in their own household had been taught witchcraft, 18% of the household heads responded affirmatively” (Chilimampunga and Thindwa 2012, 51). These percentages, the authors suggest, may in fact underestimate the numbers of people who worry about their children being taught witchcraft, “since family members tend to keep the matter to themselves.” Considering the horrors associated with the notion of children being taught witchcraft (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 witchcraft, 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 would. But how do I actually know that the realities of the story I’m being told are not really real? After 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 Potter and the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft 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 witchcraft 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 witchcraft. People schooled in traditions of modernism tend to consider talk of “witchcraft” a curious anachronism, a form of foolishness the enlightened world left 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 seriousness in contemporary Malawi, as elsewhere in Africa: matters 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. “Witchcraft,” 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. This analogy is apt in many ways, for the parent who discovers a child being taught witchcraft 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 witchcraft often 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 witchcraft. 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 witchcraft is treated as child abuse of the most serious kind.

Indeed, witchcraft as “child abuse” is a common theme in contemporary discourse on witchcraft in Africa. In recent debates over the reform of witchcraft legislation in Malawi, for example, some have insisted on the imperative of reforming witchcraft laws in order to meet international treaty obligations upholding the rights of the child. The current law prohibits the identification and punishment of witches. Lamenting this fact, the Centre for Youth and Children Affairs in Lilongwe emphasized in its newsletter in 2009:

Recent media reports show that there is an increase in the involvement of children in witchcraft, 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 witchcraft 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. The 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 witchcraft” is far, far worse. For the ultimate purpose of the pedagogy of witchcraft is to form the child into a secret killer. In a sense, the teaching of witchcraft 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 left 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 witchcraft are yet worse. Once taught witchcraft, children are said to be able to perform amazing acts, like flying across continents by night in a witchcraft airplane while leaving their mortal body asleep at home in bed. Witchcraft 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 witchcraft, 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 witchcraft in Africa engage a distinction between the witch as a distinct kind of being, the epitome of evil, and witchcraft as a particular form of action—a form of violence perpetrated in secrecy using invisible means. The distinction is analogous to one commonly found in murder stories everywhere (of which witchcraft 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 witchcraft (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 witchcraft and sorcery, with “witchcraft” referring to an innate capacity and “sorcery” involving the manipulation of material substances (Evans-Pritchard 1937). The 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. The particular nature of the abominations in witchcraft 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 witchcraft in an attempt to murder her accusers. She was, thus, accused both of being a witch and doing witchcraft.

Witches, as they feature in stories such as those recounted here, can be either male or female. The term mfiti has no gender. Most of the people accused of such practices turn out to be older women. This 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 witchcraft. Nor should the fact that accusations predominantly target elderly women be taken as either a sign, or a function, of their “vulnerability”—as is often 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 young and impressionable, are easier to entice into the world of evil than most adults would be. Most stories of children being taught witchcraft 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 attention 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. The fact that weary little bodies were sleeping peacefully on their mats all night in no way contradicts the possibility that the children were engaged in nighttime 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. They inhale the anxieties of those around them as if with the air. They 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 witchcraft in the night, parents do not ordinarily scoff or try merely to allay unfounded fears. They 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 witchcraft usually featured a witch who was part of the pupil’s family. In contemporary Malawi, however, although much indoctrination is still said to take place within families, stories abound of witches imparting their secrets to other people’s children. This 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 witchcraft 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 witchcraft in such circumstances, then, is not merely a private matter of ordinary familial acrimony, but a matter 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 witchcraft? 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! After 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 “craft”—or as Malawians prefer to describe it: an “evil trade”—deploying nonexistent powers? But, after 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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prelude
• Introduction
• 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 the “President of Witches”
• 10  “Material Dreaming” and the Ways Witchcraft Stories Work
• 11  Truth and Consequences: The Work of Witchcraft Stories
• 12  In Defense of Witch Trials
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix 1: The Malawi Journals Project
• Appendix 2: Alice_090312
• Appendix 3: Bibliographic Essay
• Works Cited
• Index
• Footnotes