Spellbound

Inside West Africa's Witch Camps

Karen Palmer

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781439143124
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Customs & Traditions
• Index: Social Sciences

As I attempted to digest stories of spiritual cannibalism, of curses that could cost a student her eyesight or ignite the pages of the books she read, I knew I was not alone in my skepticism. And yet, when I caught sight of the waving arms of an industrious scarecrow, the hair on the back of my neck would stand on end. It was most palpable at night, this creepy feeling, when the moon stayed low to the horizon and the dust kicked up in the breeze, reaching out and pulling back with ghostly fingers. There was something to this place that could be felt but not seen. With these words, Karen Palmer takes us inside one of West Africa's witch camps, where hundreds of banished women struggle to survive under the watchful eye of a powerful wizard. Palmer arrived at the Gambaga witch camp with an outsider's sense of outrage, believing it was little more than a dumping ground for difficult women. Soon, however, she encountered stories she could not explain: a woman who confessed she'd attacked a girl given to her as a sacrifice; another one desperately trying to rid herself of the witchcraft she believed helped her kill dozens of people. In Spellbound, Palmer brilliantly recounts the kaleidoscope of experiences that greeted her in the remote witch camps of northern Ghana, where more than 3, 000 exiled women and men live in extreme poverty, many sentenced in a ceremony hinging on the death throes of a sacrificed chicken. As she ventured deeper into Ghana's grasslands, Palmer found herself swinging between belief and disbelief. She was shown books that caught on fire for no reason and met diviners who accurately predicted the future. From the schoolteacher who believed Africa should use the power of its witches to gain wealth and prestige to the social worker who championed the rights of accused witches but also took his wife to a witch doctor, Palmer takes readers deep inside a shadowy layer of rural African society. As the sheen of the exotic wore off, Palmer saw the camp for what it was: a hidden colony of women forced to rely on food scraps from the weekly market. She witnessed the way witchcraft preyed on people's fears and resentments. Witchcraft could be a comfort in times of distress, a way of explaining a crippling drought or the inexplicable loss of a child. It was a means of predicting the unpredictable and controlling the uncontrollable. But witchcraft was also a tool for social control. In this vivid, startling work of first-person reportage, Palmer sheds light on the plight of women in a rarely seen corner of the world.

CHAPTER ONE

AYISHETU BUGRE SANK TO THE RED GROUND IN A DEFERENTIAL squat, her dark eyes avoiding the jeering men and women around her. The heat pressed down like an open palm as she focused instead on the packed red dirt that led to a ragged grouping of whitewashed mud huts. Men with wiry white whiskers and puffy hats slapped their right hands together, then touched the center of their chests in greeting as they gathered around her, pulled by the gossip that whizzed through the ramshackle town.

From a distance the village looked as though it had been built from toadstools. Pumpkin-colored mud huts domed with dried grass blended almost perfectly with the red laterite soil. Fierce dry heat usually kept their movements slow and deliberate, but the men carried a kind of buzzing energy as they circled the kneeling woman. Their faces were trenched like worn tires, severe and unsmiling. They waited for their village chief to emerge from inside a painted mud hut, where he was pulling off a dusty outfit not unlike silk pajamas and replacing it with more regal and voluminous robes.

The woman before them was uncommonly beautiful, with deep brown eyes and thick, full lips. Ayishetu guessed she was forty-two, but it was impossible to know for certain. She had raised eight children through the usual cycles of hunger and illness and was now helping raise three grandchildren. A renowned maker of shea butter soaps and lotions, who had once organized her neighbors into money-making cooperatives, her unlined, heart-shaped face was the perfect advertisement for the benefits of her buttery smooth creams.

If she burned with rage and indignation, it was difficult to tell. She sat ducking her head so her face would reveal nothing. In her hands she cradled a small white chicken barely a few months old. The pullet’s beady eyes shifted with fear, much like Ayishetu’s darted from the ground to the crowd and quickly back again. Its heart raced, pulsing in her hands. Her own heart thumped nervously in her chest.

Perhaps three thousand people live in this maze of cramped mud compounds, built on a swath of dry, rocky West African land that only begrudgingly offers up yam or maize. On most days men wait out the hottest part of the day, lounging beneath shade trees in swirling, dress-like boubous and faded Muslim caps. Their many wives move with quiet grace, bowls of water balanced on their heads and silent babies strapped to their backs. The village was a place of stereotypes brought to life, where the word primitive bubbled to the lips. Life could be unspeakably hard and cruel in northern Ghana, full of hardship and loss. Survival and devastation were separated by a hair’s breadth. Misfortune fell without reason or warning, a mosquito’s bite robbing one family of a cherished child while mysteriously sparing another.

Ghana had seen troubled times since winning independence from the British more than fifty years ago, including two decades lost to corruption and coups, but it was considered one of the most stable, productive countries of West Africa. Once called the Gold Coast for the rivers of precious metals that ran beneath its red soil, it was a darling of foreign donors, attracting more than one billion dollars each year in foreign aid. Its capital city had a shopping mall and a movie theater; Internet cafés abounded, crowded with boys playing online video games and lanky teenagers penning love notes to girlfriends overseas. The country had one of the fastest-performing stock exchanges, a handful of Hummers cruising its highways, and a bevy of megachurches, but its remote rural villages were still held in thrall by dark magic and the accompanying vise grip of superstition and paranoia.

It seems too fantastical to believe, but in the country’s more remote villages people say women like Ayishetu rise on dark and ominous nights with a ravenous appetite, toss a magical blanket over the sleeping forms of their husbands, and leave the physical realm to go hunting for souls. They turn themselves into fireballs and streak across the night sky, perching with their hungry covens atop the tallest trees and feasting on the flesh of their latest victims. They could spirit away a cowife’s womb, shrink a man’s genitals, cock and aim their mystical guns. Their black magic is intangible, invisible, mysterious: a woman’s spiritual fingerprints can be seen only by the clear eyes of a powerful diviner, a mystic man sifting through cowrie shells, buttons, nuts, bolts, and coins, looking for answers sent from the ancestors, who sat at the right hand of God, manipulating the fortunes of those who dishonored them.

Spiritual exploits have physical consequences. By morning exhaustion is etched on the faces of the victims, who cannot sleep for the torment. It is said that what happens in the spiritual realm spills over to the physical one; what happens under their victim’s skin is what kills them: the blood turning to water, a missing uterus, a stone planted in the bladder, a chain of subconscious decisions that leads to a deadly car crash.

The effects of Ayishetu’s suspected nighttime antics could be clearly seen by anyone.

Her niece, barely sixteen and already a mother, had begun to swell and bloat. She was burning with fever, hardly able to stand. Although a white doctor at the nearby hospital said she shouldn’t eat salt, her family continued to cook as usual, filling soups and stews with cubes of flavored monosodium glutamate. They were convinced their daughter’s illness had murkier origins: they were certain Ayishetu had captured the girl’s soul, trapped it in the body of an insect, and was using it to torture her. Among themselves they whispered, tallying reasons for the attack.

Their suspicions were made public on a day Ayishetu had spent quietly walking the rows of her husband’s fields in the grinding equatorial heat, planting soybeans by hand from a chipped tin bowl. When she was called to his home, her brother-in-law announced that his daughter had been calling Ayishetu’s name. She’d been identified, he hissed. He was convinced Ayishetu was spiritually poisoning his daughter’s soul, sneaking in the dead of night to the girl’s side and harassing her to death. He demanded that she release his sick daughter. Ayishetu told him she didn’t know what he was saying.

His breath carried the ripe funk of grain alcohol as he called for Ayishetu’s blood, threatening her with a long knife known locally as a cutlass. Neighbors and relatives grabbed him, convinced him to calm his temper and instead send her away, up the crumbling red road to a nearby village called Gambaga. In the courtyard outside the palace of the old chief, the matter could be settled for once and forever.

Gambaga’s chief, the gambarana, was thought to be descended from a long line of women and men born with the power to effortlessly cross between the physical and spiritual realms. He was renowned for his ability to communicate with the ancestors and to use their guidance to determine whether a woman was wicked or innocent, all through the sacrifice of a chicken. The ancestors were like guardians, omniscient and wise. It was paramount to offer sacrifices that would honor them, and in some communities they were consulted on issues both large and small. Because they guided his decisions, the chief’s word was final; there was no avenue of appeal, no other soothsayer who would dispute his verdict. To be declared guilty by him was to face banishment, to be forced to leave the safety of one’s family and to start again under the permanent stain of the chief’s ruling.

And so, in the narrow courtyard where Ayishetu knelt, where hens scratched for food and dogs shook off their fleas, not far from where hundreds of exiled old women husked bags of corn and shelled endless bowls of peanuts, an ancient, otherworldly court convened.

Children danced with excitement, half-dazzled by Ayishetu and her supposed powers. They raced from schoolyards, finding courage in the growing crowd, to see the kind of woman their mothers and fathers had warned them about since they were infants. Ayishetu kept her covered head bowed, but she could feel the crowd growing around her. A cacophony came from onlookers debating the relative merits of the case: her husband’s wealth, their prosperous farm, and their plentiful sons were offered up as evidence of her dark powers. How else could she have garnered such things?

Ayishetu’s husband, skinny and small with long white bristles sprouting from his chin, stood and faced the assembled onlookers. He was timid, his ear-pleasing melody of Mampruli vowels barely intelligible above the din. Because he was the eldest of five sons, his father’s lands had passed into his hands, and though he had neither oxen nor machinery to make his farming easier, he and his wife had prospered. In no other context would they be considered rich, but in their tiny village they’d managed to build a large compound and fill it with sons. Ayishetu’s husband could see it was a lifetime of resentment that had prompted his four brothers to bring this trouble. They were jealous of his twenty acres of land, his plentiful harvests, his relative wealth, and his good fortune to father four strong boys.

He gestured at the chicken his wife held in her hands. If she was innocent, he declared, the spirits of the ancestors should show they believed her to be harmless by guiding the bird to die on its back.

If the accusation was true, he continued softly, the fowl should die with its beak in the soil.

“Have you all heard?” the gambarana, the old chief, asked impatiently. His grim face was its usual mask of ferocity. His throne was a rough pallet of goatskins, his palace a collection of mud-daubed rooms roofed with long grass. His cheeks had collapsed with age, the skin around his eyes withered and wrinkled. His teeth were gone, worn to yellow nubs by a combination of heavy drinking and dental care that consisted of occasionally chewing on a pencil-size bit of branch.

He was an illiterate farmer who had once found occasional work as a security guard and, years before, sometimes joined the paupers and debtors who made their money by sitting in the sun breaking apart rocks with homemade hammers. That was all left behind when he was chosen to rule from the chief’s goatskins in an age-old process guided by the ancestors. Now he had more than ten wives and a color TV.

His renowned powers commanded respect; his short temper ensured fear. He could channel centuries-old spiritual powers and call on the ancestors to determine Ayishetu’s guilt or innocence. A bird’s death at the hands of the gambarana could sentence a woman like Ayishetu to living in exile in the collection of mud huts behind his home. There, a woman who had spent her life under the care and command of her father, her uncles, her brothers, and then her husband and sons would be seen as belonging to the chief. She would eke out an existence alone, away from family and children, begging work from farmers for survival.

At the time of Ayishetu’s trial there were already nearly two hundred such women living on the edge of town. Rituals could cleanse them of their dark magic, ceremonies could make them wards of spiteful spirits that would hunt them down and kill them if they harmed another. Once purified they were theoretically free to go, but few women felt they could leave. Their families made it clear that they had nowhere to stay, and their communities promised brutal physical punishment should they return uninvited. One woman had had her left ear cut off; another had returned from her home village with an ugly scar where her skull had been cleaved with a sharp knife.

Now it was time to decide whether Ayishetu would join them.

The wizardly old gambarana reached for Ayishetu’s bird. He raised a long knife to its throat and slit it, tossing the bird onto the grimy ground near his predecessor’s grave while watching for signs that the ancestors were manipulating its movements. It struggled and flopped, squawked without sound, spraying trickles of blood from the wound at its neck. For a moment its black eyes blinked, seemingly in disbelief at this turn of events. The fowl landed on its back, a sign the ancestors believed in Ayishetu’s innocence. Then it gave a final heave and flipped onto its front.

A bird that landed on its back exonerated Ayishetu. Dying on its beak was a conviction.

Already Ayishetu’s niece had handed the chief a fowl of her own. Held upright by two men standing on either side of her, the pale girl’s physical state was damning testimony on its own. She could barely steady her head, barely open her eyes, barely croak out the words. I have seen this woman hunting me, she whispered, pointing to Ayishetu. She is hunting me and I know she is going to harm me. If this is not true, the girl breathed, let my fowl not accept.

The chief once again called on the spirits of the ancestors to direct the bird. If it landed on its back, they believed the girl’s accusation. If it landed on its breast, she was telling tales.

Her fowl also struggled in death, lying first on its back, then flipping onto its front.

Men who had squeezed into the few patches of shade strained to see how the birds landed. Children, chests heaving, eyes dancing with the thrill of running and hopping to escape the unpredictable trajectory of the dying birds and their jets of blood, now looked up at the men. They remained mostly silent and confused. Neither bird had died well. Both had flipped and flopped, landed on their backs, then nestled their beaks in the ground.

What was the ancestors’ message? Neither had convicted nor acquitted the woman, and throughout her trial Ayishetu had said nothing. She did not beg forgiveness, shout about the unfairness, trade insults with the family who dragged her to this place, nor offer explanations for the events that led to her brother-in-law’s allegation. She knew she could not speak in front of these men without risking further accusation, so she knelt, mute and blank. Culture had fit her with a muzzle and she wore it now.

With barely a word or gesture, the gambarana sided with her niece. He selected a man from among the group, one of the many men who basked in his power, shared his many bottles of hooch, and leached small bills from his savings. The gambarana ordered this man to take Ayishetu back to her village, with strict instructions to find and release the girl’s soul. It was likely hidden among her possessions, perhaps trapped in the body of a beetle or a cockroach.

And so, inside her cool, dark room, Ayishetu’s hands, heavy and thick like a man’s, scrabbled through a sack of millet grains the size of pushpin heads looking for the insect believed to be the vessel that held the girl’s soul. They were calloused, these hands, rough and dry with the scars of farmwork. She wore a loop of beads at her throat and a circle of glass beads at her wrist, but it was the dime store ring, mashed to a smaller size and worn around her wedding ring finger, that drew the eye. It was iridescent blue and flecked with gold sparkles; a gold dollar sign shone out from its face. It too dug deeper and deeper into the sack, desperately searching.

The frantic hunt turned to a tall clay pot of white corn kernels. Ayishetu’s hands slashed through the corn, lifting and spilling the kernels with a sound like gentle rain. Her search had a frenzied energy she did not feel. Her chaperone, a tall man in traditional dress, lifted his chin of white bristles at her in a gesture meant to renew her focus on the search. He stooped next to her, overturning pots, scattering plastic bowls, and hurling tin plates with the carelessness of a child.

Her food stores had given the room a faint, yeasty smell. The thick walls, shaped from mud and straw and baked in the intensity of the oppressive heat, muffled the shouts and arguments happening outside her door. Ayishetu didn’t want to hurry; she didn’t want to leave. The smooth floor of her dark room, barely ten paces wide and perfectly round, felt cool on her bare feet. The thick thatched roof was impenetrable by either the African sun or occasional torrents of rain. Sweat beaded at her neck; it was too stuffy to remain in the room in the middle of the day, but she would rather stay than face the consequences of the chief’s judgment.

She stood briefly, drew out her colorful fabric in both hands, and in a gesture repeated dozens of times each day rewrapped it around her dark dress and rolled its ends firmly in place. In one sudden, graceful motion she was back on her knees circling her arms behind the tall pots. A flurry of movement caught her eye. Yakubu, her chaperone, clamped his hands around the cockroach and bolted out the door. Ayishetu hung back, one thought clanging through her head in a numbing chorus: They are wrong, they are wrong, they are wrong.

She dipped her head through the low doorway and walked head down into the courtyard. The suddenness of the sun made everything seem bleached out and too white, but Ayishetu could see that while she had been searching among her cooking pots and bags of grain, girls with babies on their hips and boys with the seats of their pants worn to transparency had gathered at her family’s door.

Word spread quickly, invisibly, drawing farmers from their fields and women from their places at the hand-cranked water well with the revelation that Ayishetu had returned, convicted. There was tremendous noise as neighbor shouted at neighbor. Even the women, normally silent and unseen, hollered insults. The women Ayishetu had once warmly greeted, the women she had helped to get their soaps, lotions, and grains to market, now distanced themselves from her with every shout. Arms flailed wildly as men roared at one another, each besting the other’s bravery with loud threats of how they would handle the wicked woman in their midst.

Instinctively Ayishetu cowered behind Yakubu’s thin frame, unconsciously shrinking her own body in the hopes it could disappear. Yakubu was loyal to the chief and could hardly be considered her defender, but he was all she had. She couldn’t see her husband or any of her children.

Lured by the news that their accusations had proved correct, Ayishetu’s four brothers-in-law appeared at the family’s nine-room compound shouting for blood. They stank of akpateshie, a locally brewed gin that burned the back of the throat, warmed the belly, and had the potency of jet fuel. Another pack of maybe twenty teenage boys followed them, some carrying sticks, others with homemade, short-handled hoes slung over their shoulders.

Yakubu handed her brother-in-law the cockroach cupped in his hands without ceremony or explanation. It was the color of ear-wax, the size of a stick of chewing gum. It was understood that the roach contained his daughter’s soul. Although the angry man took it, he dropped it on the ground without glancing at it, shouting that it meant nothing, fixed nothing, saved nothing. Ayishetu snaked around Yakubu, using him as a sh...