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

[Toyin Falola]

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

 

From: dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Kissi, Edward" <eki...@usf.edu>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday, August 3, 2020 at 10:36 AM
To: dialogue <usaafric...@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: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Toyin Falola
Sent: Sunday, August 2, 2020 9:51 AM
To: dialogue <USAAfric...@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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[Michael Afolayan]

Schools and palaces are among the agencies perpetrating this horrendous crime against humanity. It's the foundation on which our warped understanding of aging is. The woman simply suffered dementia (I am 95% sure). My Nigerian friend in America takes care of folks like that for a living. He and I often talk about the fact that if those folks were to be in Africa, especially the women, they would be accused of witchcraft and stoned to death; the men in thee group would most likely go scot-free!

Edward Kissi: I think a more feasible and immediate action could be proposed here. Why not find some human rights group in Canada, United States, England or anywhere in Europe that would drag the Ghanaian government to court for human rights abuses based purely on this case, doing so through the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights? The first step may be  getting in touch with the members of the family of this woman (and who knows, they too may even be accessories to the crime and among those stoning her).  It might even lead to joint actions of other Ghanaian families whose grandmas and great-grandmas have been subjected to similar humiliations and extra-judicial executions! And, you never could tell, it might be the beginning of a cultural revolution across Africa.

What a glowing tribute that would be to the unfair treatment and blood-sacrifice of an innocent nonagenarian!

Michael O. Afoláyan

(In sackcloth and ashes)

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

I have commented on an earlier thread on this subject in this group but would like to add something relatively brief.

I might be biased, being heavily invested in identification with beliefs in spirituality, to which witchcraft beliefs belong, but I wonder if the approach of trying to eradicate witchcraft beliefs is realistic.

Can this vision be approached more critically-

''attacking the foundations of our community and national beliefs in witchcraft, and comparing our society steeped in witchcraft to others that are not.'' 

As socially, economically and technologically developed as Europe and North America are, witchcraft beliefs have been developed there into a fast growing religion with its own metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and praxis.

The imaginative worlds of those societies are also deeply shaped by magical/spiritual ideas, ranging from the enduring persistence  of  echoes from Grimms and Anderson's fairy tales, as in the very successful Shrek film  series to various epochal books and their films of the 20th to 21st centuries.

The world's first billionaire author, J.K. Rowling, is an English woman writing a fictional novel about a wizard attending a school of witchcraft and wizardry.

One of the most successful Hollywood films in recent times is the Lord of the Rings series, based on Oxford prof.J.R.R. Tokien's novels  blending a realistic and a magical universe, defined by wizards, demonic and sublime creatures.

The Matrix series, one of the most successful films ever, may be seen as a rethinking of magical and spiritual cultures in terms of a futuristic science.

Same goes for Inception, an exploration of intersections between dreams and other forms of reality, among other very successful films.

These are demonstrations of various forms of magical fantasy, at times blended with science fiction, ,magical fantasy being a powerful genre in Western literature, perennially strong in both adult and children's writing, with the famous Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll being an older classic in that field.

It is also powerful in African literature although I am yet to see, in my general reading, references to such works as Yoruba author D.O. Fagunwa's Forest of a Thousand Daemons, as translated by Wole Soyinka or Ben Okri's Famished Road as magical fantasy, which they are, talk less going back to myths and other written literature across continents, including Homer, Goethe's Faust, Dante's Divine Comedy etc.

They are all built on the idea of magic or the spiritual.

Witchcraft beliefs, fascination with witchcraft, the magical and the spiritual are very strong in the West, but have been shifted to the realm of imagination and fantasy and private, often carefully ethically refined belief systems, although among the various varieties of Western magic are some who are convinced they can harm others through their magic.

Can such beliefs be eradicated anywhere?

If we are not going to eradicate belief in spirituality, in God etc, can we eradicate belief in witchcraft?

Is a more realistic approach not to work towards the development of a critical approach to spirituality of all kinds,  along with using the weight of the law in dealing with inhuman acts associated with spiritual beliefs?

thanks

tioyin

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[Biko Agozino]

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

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

imaginative fiction and occultism in movies are not the same as real beliefs in real witches. oluwatoyin, you need to make a stronger distinction. apples and oranges. even in ancient greece i do not think the audience thought medea flew at the end.

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, August 3, 2020 1:14 PM
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - IN MEMORY OF AKUA DENTEH

 

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Thanks, Ken.

I get your point. 

The situation is perhaps more complex than you are putting it, though. 

True, many of the millions reading J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter are not believers in witchcraft even though it's a story of witches and wizards. Enjoying the film Shrek does not mean one believes in the Grimm and Anderson's fairy tales its based on.

I'm arguing that the human preoccupation with the supernatural is perennial, subsisting in various forms, both literal and non-literal, all significantly imaginative, all means of expanding the borders of human engagement with reality, either in full entertainment, when the stories are not literally believed, or in the blend of entertainment  and literal belief, as in the enjoyment of the artistic beauty of scripture by believers, or in the harmony of entertainment and  imaginative belief, in which the literature is seen as metaphorical, as in the stories of consultations of Yoruba origin Ifa diviners by squirrels and other animals.

Imaginative literature,  represented by the spectrum from oral folklore to written literature,  is one of the strongest foundations of spirituality everywhere, from Africa to the West, from early times to the present, across such mainstream spiritualities as the Bible and such magical cultures as witchcraft beliefs.  

I stated that in contemporary Western societies, the magical culture represented by such  imaginative creations represents the transposition of such mentalities into the realm of imagination and fantasy. It also goes beyond that into assimilation into belief systems and strategies of practical action.

The relationship between these imaginative forms and the perception  of reality in Western cultures represents a spectrum. This spectrum runs from immersion in ideas that fascinate even though they might not be understood as reflecting reality in its specifics. It continues  into relating to such fictive forms as a kind of  mythology, not interpreted literally, but feeding the beliefs and practices  of spiritual practitioners.

A striking example of such assimilation is the use to which the fiction of US writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft has been put, as represented by adaptations by such magical practitioners as Sean Woodward of perspectives and even characters from Lovecraft's fictional universe into the mythology used by the practitioner.

Another is Marion Zimmer Bradley's magnificent novel The Mists of Avalon, a retelling of Athurian legend from the perspective of the female magical character Morgaine Le Fay, weaving a very rich story grounded in the intersection of landscape, the human mind and the human community, thereby drawing powerfully upon the mystique of Glastonbury, perhaps the best known ancient English monument site after Stonehenge, thereby further fueling the Glastonbury mystique as a primary pilgrimage centre and culture and empowering Goddess/human female and landscape centred spiritualities, that intersection being one approach to modern Western witchcraft as a Pagan-nature centred, pre-Christain spirituality and folklore inspired-religion.

Avalon and its sequels áre themselves  the crown of Bradley's long novelistic career of exploring themes of intersection of human emotional, intellectual, social and   psychic identity  as represented by  her Darkover series, centred in equally strong female and male characters, a series  again described as employed by enthusiasts as guides to spiritual praxis.

Within the Arthurian context is the figure of Merlin, who now exists both as the fictional character emerging in European literature centuries ago and persisting as such in various retellings but now also adapted as a contemporary representative of spiritual wisdom, as in the work of John Mathews.

English magic luminary Alesteir  Crowley describes Lewis Caroll's fantasy Alice in Wonderland as illuminated by the Kabbalah, a central Western esoteric cosmographic.

Some of the best writers in Western magic are Western fictional novelists. Their grasp and projection of magical philosophy is superb, as in Ursula Le Guin on cosmic balance and of balance between human aspiration and cosmic possibility in her Earsthsea series, of complementary polarities of chaos and order  in Loiuse Cooper's Time Master trilogy, of relationships between mind and spirit  in Rowling's development of themes of relationships between fear and hope, despair and joy, in her characterisation  of the Dementors, feeders on pain and fear and generators of  despair, and the idea of the patronus, an imaginative projection of what fulfills one.

All this is richly demonstrative of actual magical/spiritual philosophies  as long as one reads their works as imaginative, not literal expressions or even projections of the beliefs of the writer. Lovecraft is described as agnostic, if I recall correctly, but he is magnificent  in his depiction of the numinous and of the fascination with the occult reaches of the edges of the unknown.

thanks

toyin

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

nice job, toyin. excellent summaries. i studied, and taught genres in cinema a few years back, and much of what you are identifying becomes the basis for genres. what a genre is is, in a way, a way of organizing a world, right? so your examples of imaginative fiction, sci fi, occultism, etc., are of "worlds" organized over time, modified with each new version, etc.

all knowledge, regardless of its imaginative or experimentally scientific structure, is like this: a "world" in the heideggerian sense; a horizon of expectations, a way of organizing what appears to make sense, le "sensible," as ranciere puts it.

we have to put together a world to function in it.

i like how this becomes visible with genre in cinema; but when scientists thought ether explained how photons moved through space, it was still a "world." when einstein disproved it an alternative model had to be created, and he did so, brilliantly, and special relativity was born.

and so it went....

your summary of all the imaginative fiction really speaks to our times. i don't know  why, but now we have sooo much of zombies etc. even mati diop's latest movie, Atlantics, is based on it. and she won a major award for her film. in the past african film was totally realistic in genre. no more.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com>

Sent: Tuesday, August 4, 2020 12:41 PM

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[Okey Iheduru]

Prof. Michael O. Ofolayin makes a very interesting and feasible suggestion. The suit could filed at the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice, Abuja. The court already has a precedent in Hadijatou Mani Karaou v. Republic of Niger (2008). Anti-Slavery International (an NGO) worked with Ms. Karaou in this case. See below. 

Hadijatou Mani Koraou v. Republic of Niger

Hadijatou Mani, who was born to a mother in slavery, was sold to a local chief at age 12. For the next nine years she was subjected to rape, violence, and forced labor without remuneration. When Niger’s Supreme Court failed to convict her master under Article 270.1-5 of the Nigerien Criminal Code, which made slavery illegal in 2003, Hadijatou brought her case before the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice under Article 9(4) of the Supplementary Protocol A/SP.1/01/05. The court ruled that Hadijatou had been a slave under the definition in Article 1 (I) of the Slavery Convention of 1926 and that in failing to convict Hadijatou’s former master, Niger had not upheld its legal responsibility to protect her from slavery under international law. This case was the first ECOWAS ruling on slavery and only the second conviction made under Niger’s 2003 anti-slavery law. The case gained a high level of publicity, setting the precedent for women to fight back against the traditional slavery practices common to Niger and other ECOWAS nations. As of 2009, there had been approximately 30 more cases upholding the prohibition of slavery in Niger.

Also, see Helen Duffy,  "Hadijatou Mani Koroua v Niger: Slavery Unveiled by the ECOWAS Court," Human Rights Law Review vol. 9, no.1 (2009), pp. 153-170.

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Okey C. Iheduru

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