Why witchcraft will not help with the big questions of the day

A friend of mine working in Owino market tells me that witchcraft is quite widespread inside that market.

That competition for space and customers oftentimes takes the supernatural realm and vendors are not only procuring good-luck charms, but are also bewitching and killing each other. For all its worth, witchcraft is a question of power.

I have heard these stories in several other downtown places. As she sombrely told the story, I interrupted her, asking whether these vendors were never bothered with questions of governance and general politics.

Because there could be answers to their woes: “Don’t they want fortunes in the country to change; end corruption, end abduction, et cetera? Maybe then, they could make more profits,” I asked. “Why don’t they take loans and bewitch the bank?” I prodded further.

In response, she said, “politicians and those big bankers own the biggest witches and shrines in the country. You cannot beat them.” It was not necessary to ask her about procuring witches from abroad because this would have been met with the same response.

Quickly, I recalled that creepy picture of former speaker Rebecca Kadaga emerging from a shrine somewhere in the countryside. Then one even creepier story came to the fore: that at Entebbe International airport. The easiest way aviation people know Mr Museveni is flying out of the country is when they see an elderly woman—they think she is Museveni’s witchdoctor—walking the runway in the wee hours of the morning, sprinkling it with water using a broom or something like
a broom, and some feathers.

She does a little more wizardry before disappearing from wherever she would have come. Often with state security (wonder why she needs more security), she is never interrupted by aviation police as she goes about her business.

As anthropologists and filmmakers, we have been studying witchcraft for a long time. In Europe, especially in southern France, witchcraft is well-known among the Bocage, and other parts of France. And as Chinua Achebe would tell us, “New York is full of odd customs and superstition.” (Witchcraft isn’t limited to African contexts as our colonisers had made us believe).

These beliefs and practices are often used to explain causation of things, explain strange events and, sometimes, predict the future. African folklore is replete with magicians and fortune tellers, who also have supernatural powers to exorcise, kill or curse.

Again, access to power. Kings and queens, and princes and princesses often kept a witch in their backyard. Dear reader, my education as an anthropologist and cultural studies major, and my religious affiliation—as a Muslim—tell me evil spirits actually exist and can be summoned by humans towards different ends. And sometimes, there are good spirits, too! But the rate at which these evil spirits are mobilised in Kampala’s social and political interaction is mindboggling.

That Ugandans— politicians and local market vendors— have lost all appeals for reason and logic and have settled for the services of evil spirits actually bothers me, especially that we are still operating in a colonised context. See, the peasants who smeared themselves with some magic concoctions to stop the bullets from entering their bodies, having been convinced by the king to face off the coloniser, all perished.

And Chinua Achebe also reminds us with the story of Evil Forest in his novel, Things Fall Apart. When the white man came to Umuofia and asked for land to build a church, the locals decided to give him a part of the Evil Forest. The calculation was, the spirits of Evil Forest would be offended and would simply wipe the white man off the face of the earth.

The villagers looked on in anticipation as days became weeks, and weeks became months, and the white man’s church stood its ground, attracting more and more converts. It had to take the intervention of able-bodied men in Umuofia to do something on behalf of the Evil Forest.

In sum, these narratives (doesn’t matter to be true or false) and actual practices of witchcraft—which are frighteningly enormous—reveal a disturbing world at three related levels: (a) If our politicians have made good use of their witchcraft and Uganda is as it is today—a broke, indebted, Third World country—then witchcraft is terribly handicapped in the sense that it cannot imagine a better country.

It loves the ghettos and the potholes of Kampala, and cannot be used in transforming Uganda into a New York or South Africa.

(b) It also speaks to the small dreams of our politicians. Because their obsession with witchcraft is to only enable them secure their small positions, and perhaps enable them some monies, which might look big against the rest of their compatriots, but are small in the general view of things.

Perhaps I am appealing to men and women with big shrines, to use them for even bigger things, such as ending autocracy. Let the big shrines compete, and we see which hut is the strongest.

(c) Thirdly, it seems clear to me that witchcraft will not answer the big questions of the day such as a peaceful transition, ending corruption, ending kidnaps, or ending our tight control by the white man.

yusufkajura@gmail.com

The author is a political theorist based at Makerere University.