kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
517 803-8839
harrow@msu.edu
Sent: Tuesday, August 4, 2020 12:13 PM
To: 'Ayotunde Bewaji' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - IN MEMORY OF AKUA DENTEH
Does anyone think it is happenstance that most people accused of malevolent witchcraft in African societies--in both the secular and Pentecostal contexts--are the most vulnerable members of these societies: children, the elderly, and women?" Moses Ebe Ochonu.
Good question, Moses.
Many, many years ago, when I was a student of Catholic theology, I attended a seminar given by the French literary theorist René Girard. It was based on his theory of Scapegoat (Greek-pharmakós). He basically claims that every (primitive) society has the natural desire to deflect any impending danger by sacrificing one of their own. A victim. In every society, people are always at each other's throats and when that competition reaches a boiling point to the degree that there is a palpable fear of the whole society being consumed in violence, the fever is usually calmed down by a ritual sacrifice, one that dramatizes the collective violence for everyone to see. The Hebrew have numerous examples in the book of Leviticus. In ancient Greece, a certain ugly person was usually chosen and sacrificed at the festival for Apollo. (The idea is that ugly, poor and powerless people are usually guilty!!!) The pharmakós, probably the origin of pharmacy, is a cleanser; he (usually a he, in ancient Greece) cleanses the sins of the community.
For Girard, the need to justify that violence, the pointless sacrifice of otherwise innocent people, is what gives birth to myth. In other words, myths are just human effort to justify violence or weakness, or a given ideology. The truth is that this is not restricted to primitive society. Or rather, humanity has never rid itself of that primitive instinct to blame the weaker ones for its own flaws.
Witchcraft is a universal phenomenon that manifests itself in different formats, depending on the people's technologies of power. Victims do not have to be burned, lynched, or stoned. It is enough that society finds them guilty of its disorder. Society invents narratives that seek to permanently fix the victims in their condition.
Chielozona
https://neiu.academia.edu/ChielozonaEze
I do not have time now to digest and properly reflect on the barbaric lynching of Akua Denteh and the commentaries on it on this forum, but let me drop a question. Does anyone think it is happenstance that most people accused of malevolent witchcraft in African societies--in both the secular and Pentecostal contexts--are the most vulnerable members of these societies: children, the elderly, and women? I have posed this question in Pentecostal circles and have yet to get a satisfactory answer. In my years of attending pentecostal events, I have not seen a man being identified as a carrier of evil spirits or a practitioner of witchcraft and being subjected to what pentecostal clerics call deliverance, which sometimes includes violent assault on the accused. It is almost always young women, children, and old women that are targeted.There is clearly a gender/patriarchy/power dimension here. I truly want answers because I don't believe that it is a coincidence that the anti-witchcraft people, in religious and secular spaces, target the most vulnerable demographics.
--On Mon, Aug 3, 2020 at 10:36 AM Kissi, Edward <ekissi@usf.edu> wrote:
--
I acknowledge the first report in this forum on the public "immolation" of Akua Denteh by her own community, and the many rejoinders to that report that have since appeared here that have illuminated our reflections on a dangerous culture in Ghana, and Africa. I add here a tribute to a woman I never knew, but whose painful death reminds me of a lingering superstitious logic that I know too well as a Ghanaian, and to which I offer some solutions, for what they may be worth.
The lynching of Akua Denteh is, undoubtedly, a grotesque expression of a certain morbidity of mind in the perpetrator society. Any community that is invested in a cultural logic that leads to the public burning of a 90 year old woman is trapped in a dead culture and in need of a trans-community, counter-cultural redemption.
Condemnation of this dastard deed is deserved. But beyond that, a flight into causation, as warranted as it is, to chart some novel paths to a solution, can sometimes devolve into sophistry. But that is sometimes needed. Belief in witchcraft is terribly endemic in Ghanaian society. As the report indicates, it is not a cultural affliction of the uneducated. It paralyses the educated too. I did not cure my own mind of that superstitious thought until I began graduate studies in Canada in 1989. In that new Canadian campus environment, I never heard of any fellow student, or member of the University community, talk "religiously" about malevolent old women prancing in the dark and eating human beings turned into chicken in the canopy of trees as I heard throughout my youth in my Ghanaian village, and my undergraduate years at Legon. It did not take me long in Canada to realize that these are cultural stupidities that had long shaped my thoughts in my environment in Ghana about old wrinkled women who could potentially boil my brain for dinner, and make me a failure in life, without taking responsibility for the choices I make in my life. So environment seems to breed harmful mentalities.
Beliefs in witchcraft may have been worsened by the Pentecostal churches, today, as OAA aptly observes, but quack diviners and "witch-doctors" and "fetish-priests" have long dabbled in Ghana's cultural conversation about malevolent forces. Just take a look at Ghana's major roadways and you will see the many frightfully-dressed males and females on billboards festooned with white clay, with raffia palm skirts, and dyed whiskers, asking for consultation on witchcraft, and promising instant painful death of witches for the bewitched. That is a disturbing national story that bespeaks of a decadent community and national culture.
For many years the physical burdens of old age that scar the appearance of the elderly have often given room to harmful speculations about the supernatural abilities of the old and wrinkled.
What is disturbing in Akua Denteh's murder is her community's involvement in her lynching. There was no expression of gender solidarity as the perpetrators dispatched her. In fact women in her community took part in the lynching. And the male soothsayer instigator of her death, and the men in the community who made common cause with the maddening lynch-mob to burn her alive, speak of a community that is deeply invested in a belief system that may need a fundamental attack on its foundations to eradicate. Otherwise this may not be the last public lynching of a vulnerable old woman on the whims of the superstitious.
Educated people, priests, chiefs, politicians, and community leaders appear to be captives of this cultural thoughts about Witchcraft. Would these same people carry their beliefs in witchcraft with them, and the murders they commit to express them, beyond their communities when they migrate and become a diasporic group in an elsewhere community? If not, then might some carefully-organized inter-faith or inter-community cultural conversation help to make Akua Denteh's death the last? Can local communities, and human rights organizations bring in people from other parts of the country, the region, the continent, the world to talk about how they cured themselves of their own witchcraft superstitions and the benefits they secured?
Certainly, no state can legislate sane thoughts. But a community that suffers from the insane beliefs that got Akua Denteh murdered bears the bigger responsibility to rethink its moral values. Given previous outrages, it appears that incarceration of the murderers by the state may not be the needed response to deter future perpetrators of lynching. Might some form of public shaming in their own communities be the better deterrence? Could community leaders not tainted by their own witchcraft beliefs arrest the murderers, and that soothsayer, and make them stand at the public square, or community market, every day, for a month or more, with bells and large placards around their necks, with inscriptions in the local language broadcasting their murderous deeds to passers-by? There is nothing far more shameful in many Ghanaian cultures than such public humiliation.
Can Art and Performance help since Ghanaian music, films and drama (including Nigerian) have also perpetuated beliefs in witchcraft and justified death for the accused? Can the musicians, film-makers, and dramatists who have contributed to this cultural malaise help cleanse it of its lingering and deadly debris? Otherwise, Akua Denteh's death will not be the last in Ghana.
If I were not a poor college teacher, but had more legal tender to invest in one moral cause, I would establish a television station, as that has become a contemporary cultural artefact in Ghana, with all types of evangelical stations churning the type of cultural poison that killed Akua Denteh. Mine will be a counter-cultural television channel aimed at producing programs and drama attacking the foundations of our community and national beliefs in witchcraft, and comparing our society steeped in witchcraft to others that are not.
That, perhaps, may be the best cultural tribute to the memory of an old woman who perished in the name of a dangerous cultural thought.
Edward Kissi
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Toyin Falola
Sent: Sunday, August 2, 2020 9:51 AM
To: dialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Murder: Akua Denteh of Ghana
Akua Denteh: Last 'witch' to be murdered in Ghana?
https://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/features/Akua-Denteh-Last-witch-to-be-murdered-in-Ghana-1023577
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