Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - IN MEMORY OF AKUA DENTEH

We read Francis Salome, The Narrow Path, for WAEC and I was impressed by his account that Ghanaians poured libations with cornflour and water for the ancestors lest they got drunk on the gin that was offered to the evil spirits so that they might fight and destroy themselves. In that book, there was a story of the burial of a dead person with rituals that involved the spirit possession of the coffin to lead the mourners to the home of the witch who may have caused the death. The witch was usually exiled from the community but not lynched.

Professor Uchendu taught us a different perspective at the University of Calabar. Among the Igbo, unlike many of their neighbors, there is no history of witch hunting unlike the Europeans who killed 9 millionj people, mostly women, during the dark ages under the suspicion that they were witches. This is because the Igbo believe in Godness or Chi as the guide of the destiny of every individual. If your Chi does not agree to any plan, it would not work. Thus, if you are amosu (probably a Yoruba word) or a witch, the Igbo will leave you alone with the belief that once our hands are clean, no witchcraft can affect us, IJN Amen.

Azikiwe as the Editor of Accra Morning Post, collected his editorials into a book, Renascent Africa, published in 1937. In the book, he called on the new Africa to shun the superstition of old Africa about witchcraft and adopt scientific methods in order to prevent more infant and maternal mortalities. He cursed the old Africa and blessed the new Africa. Zik told people who believed that he must have got powers from the Mami Wata in order to have the courage to challenge the white man that he only relied on the social science methodologies of mass communication and mass mobilization but they did not believe him.

Nkrumah stated in his biography that there was a slave ship that sank off the coast from his village and everybody believed that there was a Mami Wata living on the sunken ship. So, when Azikiwe won his appeal against conviction for sedition and emerged from the court shouting, 'I am a living spirit', Nkrumah went to him to ask where an African got the juju to beat the British lion. Zik gave him a letter of recommendation to Lincoln University and the rest is history. Yet, when the Ebola epidemic struck, even medical doctors believed that they survived by the Blood of Jesus and not through their scientific knowledge of medicine, according to Biodun Jeyifo.

Two years after the publication of Renascent Africa, Awolowo published a rejoinder in a Liverpool magazine arguing that juju is an African super science through which Africans kills their enemies by calling their names three times at a road junction. Azikiwe challenged the doubting ones to prove science wrong by proving the superstition that Obasanjo later invoked as a juju method for fighting apartheid. 

Zimbabwe had proved that belief in the guidance of the ancestors through Chiumurenga could embolden the freedom fighters and South African anti-apartheid activists may have sought the blessings of Sangoma priests. It was in Europe that I first learned that there are good witches who shun black magic. Oh, I said, they must be the ones that invented the internet. They laughed at me.

Biko

On Monday, 3 August 2020, 11:42:27 GMT-4, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

Passionate, excellent suggestion, doable through all agencies, including the schools, palaces, etc.

 

From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Kissi, Edward" <ekissi@usf.edu>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday, August 3, 2020 at 10:36 AM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - IN MEMORY OF AKUA DENTEH

 

 

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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