My Cousin Was Lynched as an alleged Witch

 By Biko Agozino 

 During the time of goodwill towards all, bad news came during the Christmas holidays, on January 2 2022, saying that youths who returned for the holidays from distant cities, accused one of my cousins, Agatha Mgboebuba Nwaba, of being the witch who caused misfortune in their village. She was said to be the evil one who consumed the wealth of her husband who lived in London and who was said to have complained that it was his wife who used witchcraft to stop him from visiting home so that she would not be asked to account for the remittances he had been sending home to build a nonexistent house. He was reported to have told the lynch mob that he was not concerned and that they should do what they liked with her.

It was also alleged that she used witchcraft to kill one of their sons and that the same evil powers prevented her daughter's partner from going to pay the bride price for her daughter after she had four children with the Yoruba man. The daughter allegedly claimed that she found an exercise book in the house where her mother wrote a list of all the people she had killed and the dates that they died. That may be the kind of lists that every family keeps to remind them of those who brought them gifts during ceremonies and who deserve gifts in return when they have ceremonies of their own. The young people were obviously too biased against her and the list of names confirmed the bias. 

They were said to have paraded her around town with a tire hung around her neck to shame her but she showed no shame, perhaps because she was in shock. She was said to have begged one of her cousins who tried to intervene, not to let her in-laws beat her to death but her attackers threatened to attack her cousin too if he did not shut up. They were said to have tried to shame her extended family by asking them to take her back but they allegedly said that she was no longer in the shape she was as a young woman when they came to marry her and one of her uncles feared that she was the witch that killed his wife. Another cousin who believed the allegations like most people in Awgu (a local government headquarters) reported what happened in Awgu dialect as follows:

Mgboebuba lili amosu laegbuishi ndu ibe ayi. Ive ogbulu egbu kalikwalu. Shite la eka ada e nwayi ('Chikwado' la di e) o kelu igbuko ka eshilu chofuta ive o la eme. Ndu Awgu lo daide juwe ive oji egbushi ndu eka va du ucha, ya shi lo ndu ino e ive ya legbu. Eva ndu o kalaeke igbukwe kaligbukwelu. O gbuagakwalu madu, kalegbukwe tufu adaide. Eva mpam la mmam, okeke kele la nwae nwoke, onyebuchi adae nwayi la nwae dukota la ekwukwo ndu o gbugolu egbu. Oo ndu Awgu jikolu eka kpufute la orie Awgu, megbuo akaje, kpuluihia bia la uhumbele ezi nnae lo tigbuo ye, palu ozue ga gbavuo la ejo ovia du la nduegu ululor.

"Ovokwe ndu Uka gbulu e. Oo ndu ime obodo Awgu tigbuli e, maka la oshilu va la ya la ndu otu e la egbukota ote va ha tie ye ive, va lo tizie ye nke oji nwuhu. Onwevokwe onye kpolu ndu uwe ojii."

(Translation: "Mgboebuba ate witchcraft and was killing our people. The number she killed was a lot. Through the efforts of her daughter ('Chikwado' and her husband) whom she was preparing to kill too, that was how it was discovered what she was doing. Awgu people caught her and questioned why she was killing innocent people who have clean hands, she said that her enemies  were the ones that she killed. The names of the people she was preparing to kill were numerous. She had killed too many people and was going to kill more before she was caught. My father and mother, Okeke Kele and his son, Onyebuchi, his daughter and his grandchild were among the names found in the book of the people she had killed. The people of Awgu joined hands to drag her to Orie Awgu market place, mocked her, dragged her to her father's compound in Obugo village and beat her to death, then they carried her corpse and threw it away in the evil forest at the farm settlement of her husband's village, Ululor").

"It was not church people that killed her. It was the people of the inner village of Awgu who beat her to death, because she told them that she and her group will kill all those who beat her, then they beat her so much more that she was left dead. No one called the police."

They should have taken her to hospital to make sure that she was examined by experts if she admitted these things under torture and they should have reported the case to law-enforcement officers. The person narrating this to me emphasized that she was from my extended family. After parading her around the town all day, ‘the next day she was dead’, said the narrator.  Highly educated people strongly believe in witchcraft. But the surviving son of the woman is said to be demanding for his mother to be returned, I heard. There is an urgent need to run grassroots workshops to reeducate the people or else mutual distrust and suspicion will reign.

 They may have killed the poor woman, fearing her as a witch. Lethal witch hunting happened before in the same town a few years ago when some youth returned from the cities, burnt a native priest, Nwamme, to death and destroyed his shrine on allegations that he used his claimed powers to control thunder, Amadioha, to kill someone from the village who lived in a distant city. But our people carry on under thunderstorms with the belief that lightning only kills those whose hands are unclean. The frequent occurrence of misfortunes leads to suspicions that someone is behind everything. Fanon was right that Africans fear spirits more than they fear the police and the army of colonizers, at least they can bribe the police.

I spoke with the husband, Remi Nwankwo, in London by Whatsap and he told me that he suspects his uncle as the instigator because he had been threatening his wife. According to him, the uncle recently sent him a list of dead enemies allegedly compiled by his wife but it was typewritten and so no way to prove that his wife compiled such a list. The uncle then sent another list that was handwritten but it was not in his wife's handwriting. He asked the wife to leave the family home and go and stay in a hotel for a while but she told him that no one runs away from his father's compound. The uncle then phoned and threatened to send 'ndu ogba ozi' or messengers to force her out if she did not leave. He said that someone later sent him a video of how some people broke into his house and dragged his wife out and beat her to death. 

I asked him if he has reported the matter to the police and he said that I must know how the police work in Naija. I do not know what he means by that but I know that it is believed to be an abomination for a family member to invite the police in matters that involve other family members as suspects. He said that he had been ill since he returned from a visit home last year but that he is better now and is working to save for his airfare back home to see what he can do.

 Contrary to popular beliefs, Nnamdi Azikiwe (Zik) advised the new Africa of his Renascent Africa to move away from belief in witchcraft and develop the scientific methodology in everything they were doing. His aunt tried to scare him as a child by alleging that the reason why he once fell into a fire and why a dog once bit him was because his grandma was a witch trying to kill him. Zik stated in his autobiography, My Odyssey, that he did not believe the allegation because he said that his grandmother was a loving and caring kind women. According to him, the epidemics that kill lots of people are not caused by witches but by often preventable diseases. If witches kill people by poisoning the air, Zik reasoned, they too would breathe the same air and die for as the Igbo say, dibia la agwo otule, o dowelu ike ye la elu (the sorcerer who is concocting diarrhea, is he keeping his own buttocks in the sky)? Two years after Azikiwe published Renascent Africa in 1937, one of his future rivals, Obafemi Awolowo (Awo) published an academic journal article in 1939 arguing that Juju is an African scientific method that could kill enemies remotely by calling their names three times at crossroads. The colonizers must have been pissing their pants if Africans had such powers.

Awo believed that juju can be used by a detainee to vanish from prison even while chained to the walls. Zik was skeptical and asked for the proof of juju to be demonstrated through the scientific methodology by asking those who claim that they could change from one animal to another or fly on a broomstick to do so under systematic observation. Zik went on to test his own social scientific method of intellectual-activism by training journalists from scratch and appointing them to run his chain of newspapers to successfully campaign for the restoration of independence. 

Although his political party, National Council of Nigeria and Cameroons, allowed membership of Traditional Medicine Practitioners Association to join as a group member, the party did not use witchcraft beliefs to organize (unlike Awolowo’s Action Group that relied on the Ogboni Cult) at a time that people believed that Zik was what Phillip Emeagwali later reproduced from a newspaper report as ‘the Spirit-Man’ that supposedly made him bold enough to lead the fight against colonialism. Zik’s son, Chukwuma, said that his father had no magical powers. 

 Reports of witch hunting are on the rise across Africa at a time of social, security, economic and political crises facing Africans. If we do not end witch hunting in Africa, the disaster that faced medieval Europe may be looming in Africa. During the witch craze, Europeans murdered an estimated nine million people, mostly women, according to Stephen Pfohl. According to Mary Daly, alleged witches were killed by people who claimed to be Christians and they killed them while chanting: ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son’. 

 Today, the Europeans have come out of their dark ages, thanks to millions of Africans that they kidnapped and enslaved without pay for four hundred years. Nothing to do with religion or Obeah, wrote Eric Williams in Capitalism & Slavery (just republished); despite the fact that his high school teacher, CLR James, wrote in the Black Jacobins that the enslaved used Voodoo as the medium to organize their revolution against slavery in Haiti. 

Similarly, the National Church of Nigeria and Cameroons was used by the banned Zikist Movement to support the independence struggle by making Zik and others, living saints of Africa as opposed to European Churches and their saints and the war heroes invoked ancestral spirits of Chimurenga in Zimbabwe while also chanting the Rastafarian songs of resistance. Obasanjo wanted to use juju to fight against apartheid, and the Boers must have been shaking and quaking in their boots.

Max Weber theorized that it was the Protestant Ethic of hard work that first produced the Spirit of Capitalism in England and in the US compared to China, India or Africa; supposedly proving Marx wrong that religion is the opium of the people. WEB Du Bois (the only American Sociologist that Weber invited to contribute to his academic journal)  in Black Reconstruction in America proved Marx right and Martin Luther King Jr. agreed that it was the forced labor of millions for hundreds of years that produced capitalism, not protestantism which people of African descent embrace in their millions but still remain underdeveloped.

Now Europeans celebrate Halloween Day every year by giving sweets to children who knock on their doors at night while dressed as witches. They even allow people who identify as witches to practice their own faith that they call Wicca. At the same time, Africans are killing ‘witches.’ What if a poor child tries to do Trick or Treats during Halloween in Africa?

 When lightning strikes and kills someone from the village in a distant city, it is likely because people go about openly even during a thunder storm and not because of the priest in the village who claimed that he had the power to make rain and invoke thunder and deserved to be burned alive. It is not witchcraft that causes unemployment, poverty, and other misfortunes. When one branch of the extended family is doing relatively better while others are struggling, it is not because the head of that family used juju to tie the hands of the other branches of the extended family. Those who sacrificed to provide education or business startup for their children have seen more success among those children than those who failed to educate their children or train them in a trade and it has nothing to do with witchcraft. 

 African countries are at the bottom of the league tables of the Human Development Index reports of UNDP annually because Africans are denied educational opportunities by African rulers but not because of witches and wizards. Those who believe in spiritual warfare should say prayers but desist from attacking and killing fellow human beings with the bias that they are witches. Those who kill people for money ritual should desist from that and work smarter. 

 Difficult times promote witchcraft beliefs and desperate measures in all societies, according to a controversial academic conference on witchcraft at the University of Nigeria that was opposed by Christians. What distinguished the Igbo among their neighbors in the past was that while the Ibibio, for example, believed in appeasing or eliminating the suspected witch, according to my professor, Daniel Offiong who however failed to compare them with their Igbo neighbors who did not have significant beliefs in witchcraft; nor did he compare the Ibibio with their Tiv neighbors who believed that all their chiefs were witches, according to a brief review of Offiong’s book by G. I. Jones. 

 The current state of insecurity may be contributing to the rise of witchcraft allegations among the Igbo as some news reports indicate, though many more may go unreported, as I analyzed in an article for the African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies. Let the youth be trained in scientific methods so that they can invent new technologies to improve life in Africa without blaming misfortunes on innocent people suspected of witchcraft to be lynched by misguided youths. Educate your children or sponsor them to learn a trade. No more witch hunting. 

 Africans must show more love for fellow Africans as the Igbo symbolized with Mbari sculptures where the living and even spirits cohabitate under one roof, according to Chinua Achebe. Stop trying to demonize fellow Africans to justify attacks against them. The fact that intoxicated drivers of vehicles that are not road-worthy but manage to ply on roads that are nor vehicle-worthy and cause many fatalities is not the fault of a poor woman in the village who should not be killed by people who claim to be Christians. If you see mobs attacking anyone as an alleged witch, oppose the attack and advocate for the person being targeted. You can also report it to the organization that is trying to end such violent crimes in Africa: Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW). Google it.

UPDATE:

https://www.premiumtimesng.com/regional/ssouth-east/762404-witch-killing-group-kicks-as-court-discharges-man-charged-with-murder-of-woman.html

 Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA.

Otherness in African Cosmology

By Biko Agozino

African’s have always seen the world as multicultural and interdependent. The other is not to be killed or eliminated without harming the self. Chinua Achebe captures this notion with his Igbo saying that when one thing stands, something else stands beside it. One tree does not make a forest. The Igbo take this saying beyond the plant kingdom to say that the eagle should perch and the kite should perch, if one does not want the other to perch, it should show the other where to perch because there are many branches and many trees in the forest. The Igbo also say that there should be life for the fish and life for the river. They also say that all heads are equal and that the Igbo know no king, Igbo ama eze. 

This democratic principle was relatively contradicted by discrimination against women in the inheritance of property and by the divisions of some Igbo communities into Amala or the free-born and those who descended from Ohu (slaves) or from Osu (dedicated to the worship of shrines) beginning with the slave raids. However, the Igbo have used cosmopolitanism to combat such discriminations through equal educational opportunities. Nobody refuses to go to school, hospital, court, church, bank, or to take public transportation, or to watch football matches and Nollywood movies or to listen to music simply because any of the officials came from the prejudicial backgrounds that Azikiwe outlawed in the 1950s. Poor Ghanaians still dedicate their daughters as shrine wives to pay off debts. Soyinka credited Africans with exemplary religious tolerance because Africans never wage war to promote their religions. He also observed that the Igbo are admirable because they have never tried to invade and conquer their neighbors in order to build kingdoms or empires.

The earliest awareness of otherness in African worldview was the emergence of gender differences which demonstrated that men and women are the others of one another to be cherished and protected rather than to be combated and eliminated. Children came along as beloved others, other families emerged, other communities, other languages, other religions, other people’s property, rich people and poor people, insane people and sane people, our people and foreigners, good people and evil ones, the living and the ancestors.

Albinism became a marker for otherness probably with the arrival of Europeans in Africa. Albinos are sometimes referred to jokingly as White people. Perhaps because power and wealth were associated with the colonizers, some ritualists believed that using the body parts of an Albino to make money medicine will bring wealth and fortune to individuals. As a result, many Albinos are killed in different parts of Africa for ritual. Whiteness seduced many others into skin-bleaching and Fela Kuti criticized that with the song, 'Yellow Fever'. Ngugi portrayed this sickness in The Wizard of the Crow with the story of how the elites desired whiteness and how this drove them insane enough to imagine that there is a dollar tree where money grows to be plucked but female freedom fighters campaigned for a better society.

Arab settlers in North and East Africa also developed concepts of light-skinned supremacy in Africa but with emphasis on religion as the marker of insiders and otherness, believers and infidels. Colorism is still dominant here because Black Africans who are Muslims continue to be discriminated against by their fellow lighter skinned Muslims who claim Arabic descent as far south as Somalia.

The introduction of whiteness as a mark of privilege by Europeans also dominated Arabs and Asians in Africa who were treated as if they were dark-skinned compared to Europeans. In South Africa, this evolved into the system of apartheid which unjustly deprived the African majority of rights and presumed that they belonged to other homelands that were separate from the white dominated state. The African majority and their allies insisted that the country belongs to all who live in it.

The concept of Ubuntu or the bundle of humanity is used by Desmond Tutu to capture the African philosophy that I am because we are human as opposed to the Cartesian, I think, therefore I am. According to Tutu, everyone has something for which they should ask to be forgiven and everyone deserves to be forgiven something because there is nothing that is unforgivable. 

Achebe captures this principle of Ubuntu with the Igbo celebratory art form of Mbari through which the entire community comes together to build a miniature mud hut and populate it with the representatives of the community and with the foreigners in their midst as a tolerant prayer for protection from the ancestors and the gods also represented under one roof, following the principle that the sun shines on all without discrimination. 

Martin Luther King Jr. used the metaphor of the World House repeatedly to emphasize that people of African descent regard everyone as the children of one God to the extent that we say that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere and so white-supremacy is a threat to all. Rasta refer to such as One Love for all, not just for some.

Other forms of otherness were introduced into Africa by the colonizers in the form of homophobia whereas Africans did not give a damn about who people loved or how they showed the love until European colonizers outlawed homosexuality. The first military coup in Nigeria in 1966 announced that, in addition to fighting corruption, 'homosexuals will be shot'. Major Gideon Orkar echoed this in his April 1990 abortive regional coup announcement when he said that he was out to overthrow a '... corrupt ... homo-sexuality-centered ... administration...' Of the estimated 3.1 million people killed in the genocidal aftermath of the coup, none has been identified as a homosexual, showing that homophobia promotes violence that affects the whole society. Most people did not even know that homosexuality may have been a problem in the military perhaps because the British officers used it to humiliate the African recruits in order to dominate them. Long after the Europeans who imposed both the death penalty and the homophobic laws on Africa abolished both in Europe, the Africans are hysterically retaining such barbaric laws in Africa contrary to the tolerant culture of our ancestors.

No African society banned homosexuality before the colonization of Africa because Africans were more interested in the abilities of individuals to serve their communities and not the ways that consenting adults loved one another in the privacy of their homes. No African military ever had a Don’t Ask Don’t Tell rule for joining the military and no African society ever made a law called the Defense of Marriage Act. Africans always knew that some men liked to dress like women to perform the spirits of female ancestors in Agbomma or Gelede masquerades, for instance. 

Today, dressing like a woman in parts of Nigeria could get a man stoned to death under Islamic law while same-sex couples could be sentenced to 10 years in prison if convicted under the Nigerian criminal code. Critics point out that this is ridiculous given that the military have yet to defeat the Boko Haram militants who kidnap school girls in the busloads in a country that ranks first with the proportion of children out of school and with low human development index.

Similarly, Africans believed that there were people who had the powers of witchcraft but Africans did not go hunting for them to kill them until Europeans came with their interpretation of Christianity to emphasize exorcism or the killing of the other. In medieval Europe, an estimated 9 million people were killed, and most of the victims were women, on the suspicion that they were witches. No such genocidal records existed in Africa in precolonial times but today poor unemployed youth in South Africa and Tanzania often attack and kill poor old grannies on suspicion that they are the ones who use witchcraft to make jobs disappear or they blame it on those Africans who are attacked because their languages are said to sound incomprehensibly like Makwerekwere. In Nigeria, some parents are encouraged by fake pastors to drive six inch nails into the heads of their children because they were suspected to be witches who prevented their parents from becoming wealthy.

In Renascent Africa, Nnamdi Azikiwe (1937) called on Africans to abandon superstitious beliefs and adopt the scientific methods in healthcare and in the struggle for the restoration of independence. Two years later, Obafemi Awolowo published a rebuttal in a Liverpool-based magazine to say that Africans can use Juju as a science with which to kill their enemies from a remote distance by simply saying their names three times. The colonizers must have been shaking in their boots except that the African Juju only killed fellow Africans. For this reason, Fanon stated that the African was more afraid of the powers of ghosts than the powers of the corrupt police that could be bribed. Today, even professors of physics side with Awolowo against Azikiwe in the debate over the efficacy of the scientific method versus Juju. A Nigerian military dictator, Obasanjo, once called for Africans to use Juju to fight against apartheid.

One of the most dangerous otherness promoted by the divide and conquer strategies of Europeans is ethnicity which the Europeans wrongly called tribalism. According to Rodney, to call the genocide against the Igbo in Nigeria a tribal war would be to call Shell BP, the Labour Party Government in the UK, and even the Soviet Union, African tribes because they orchestrated the killing of the Igbo who led the struggle for the restoration of independence in Nigeria. Rodney added that there was no record of the Christianized neighbors of the Christianized Igbo committing genocide against them prior to colonialism. 

The solution is Nkrumah's United Republic of African States with the right to travel, work, and run for office anywhere while relying on federal might to stop oppressive otherness and to empower Africans with the scientific methods advocated by Azikiwe.