Juju

I was listening to a BBC phone-in program and washing dishes. The program’s discussion had to do with cultural change in Africa, and one of the comments—the speaker angrily wrote off Africans as superstitious and uneducated—stunned me, almost made me drop my precious Nescafe coffee mug. Why the malice, yo? The comment was bitter. It lacked substance. It perpetuated the Africans-are-superstitious stereotype. It also came close to striking a nugget of truth. (But the caller is still pretty lame.)

CASE STUDY 1: I was going to buy eggs and bread to make French toast on Saturday morning, when I ran into a familiar face. He was a retired army officer. Curious about the Malawian military, I struck up a conversation on the subject. He listed qualifications, described their training, and finally mentioned combat. Apparently he had seen peace-keeping action in Somalia or Rwanda—I don’t remember.—and worked with Americans. He said, “I know you westerners don’t believe in witchcraft, but tfighting somehow disturbs you. That’s witchcraft disturbing you.”

Westerners would get the man a therapist. PTSD, much? For Malawians, though, PTSD, insanity, depression, even anxiety is witchcraft.

CASE STUDY 2: I was drinking beers with teachers. They were rattling away a mile a minute in Chitumbuka, so I just sat and sipped, sat and sipped. A teacher eventually turned to me to explain: “We were just saying how wives bewitch their husbands. They make them stay at home, help sweeping, cleaning, or what what.” Not wanting to be disagreeable, I sat and sipped.

To put this in context, men do not help around the house in Malawi. That is women’s work. Things that disrupt the flow of life, daily expectations, things that go against the grain are often pinned on witchcraft. Of course, westerners wouldn’t describe a helpful husband as bewitched.

CASE STUDY 3: A friend walked me to my home at night. I looked up to admire the Milky Way soupily laid out across the sky when an enormous meteorite whizzed into the atmosphere. “Wow! Did you see that?” I asked. “That was a witch’s plane,” said a friend. (WTF, right?)

Malawians updated the witch on a broom. They fly invisible airplanes nowadays.

I could give you more examples. The guy who told me to spit on my urine so witches couldn't use it to hex me. Another who told me I have nightmares because I’m bewitched.

The reality of witchcraft here runs deep. As the Puritans did, people here die when an angry mob confronts their sacrificial lamb, their explanation for the unexplained, their witch. Crying witchcraft is easy, very comfortable. No need to analyze the intricacies of battle, the personalities involved, the movement of matter through space, the concept of heat and friction, but then again my students have asked where Brazil is in the United States. They didn’t believe me when I told them man had walked on the moon. They didn’t not know about whales. How do you explain PTSD when “whale” is a new concept? How should I begin? How presume?

My question for the BBC caller: what do you expect? Witchcraft is the traditional cozy way to make sense of the new--and it wasn't all that long ago that hairy Europeans introduced their God and their science. I wonder if one day our Big Bang and atoms and behavioral psych will be just amusing.