Ghana's witches of Gambaga
Sainata Nabu stands before the chief of the Gambaga witches camp. He slaughters her fowl and waits for it to fall. If it falls backwards, she is innocent and can return to her village. But Sainata’s fowl falls face down- she is guilty of witchcraft.
One week later I meet Sainata. With leathery hands tightly clenching a faded skirt and shoulders curling into her body, Sainata turns her head away and speaks softly to the ground.
“The boy said he saw me in his dream stealing the soul of another boy, then he had another dream where I stood over him, wanting to kill him. If I didn’t come to Gambaga I would have been killed,” she says.
Sainata is one of 3000 women seeking refuge in one of six main witches’ camps in Northern Ghana, an arid region steeped in pagan traditions.
In Gambaga, cauldrons boil and brush brooms scratch against the dirt. Women from as far as Burkina Faso and Togo sit coated in their crackled skin, talking quietly and gazing up when you pass. But warts do not bubble on their noses and there are no stares filled with spells. Sitting with the women and their translator on small wooden stools, I realize that these boiling pots and broomsticks aren’t the evidence of witchcraft but simply tools of life for vulnerable women suffering the consequence of lack of education.
Ghanaians fear witches and blame them for all sorts of misery – from a flooded farm to an infertile woman, a barren cocoa tree to a cheating husband. Education about illness and disease rarely reaches these small rural villages. There are no autopsies to explain a sudden death, no labels to put on a child’s crooked legs or an old woman’s strange behaviour. ‘Witchcraft’ gives meaning to the mysterious.
Cirato Tindola arrived in the camp thirty-one years ago after she was blamed for her niece’s violent and sporadic shaking. Instead of epilepsy; her family saw witchcraft. By the time the girl became healthy again, Cirato’s husband had divorced her and she had been pushed out of the village by death threats.
Like Sainata Nabu, Tachilla Mortara’s witchcraft materialized in a child’s imagination. Her fingers clicking the beads on her wrist, Tachilla tells how her husband died and she refused her family’s attempts to remarry her. The beads crescendo in their click, clicking with her words. “The man who wanted to marry me became chief. One day, because I had been getting good yield and feeding my children on my own, he said he’d show me a lesson.”
Tachilla was called to the chief’s palace where there was a small girl covered in a cloth to hide her identity. The girl said she had a dream that Tachilla was a witch. The chief insisted she leave and her village was ‘wicked’ to her. Tachilla’s tale, hard and factual, becomes broken by small sighs. Her daughter leans across her knees, eyes big and brown, snot dribbling onto her red ripped shirt.
Like Ghana itself, nothing is simple here. Amongst a choir of innocent proclamations, comes a voice like Zenabu Surge, who announces through a crooked grin ‘I am a witch.’
Zanabu tells about a quarrel between her sick nephew and her son. Zanubu separated them and punches turned to insults between her and the displeased nephew. Three days later her nephew died. ‘He was like this colour’ she says and points to the faded yellow watering can. “People in the community said it was a fever and I had wished it upon him. I accepted and came to Gambaga.”
“Whatever I say comes true. Perhaps it is because of god, I don’t know,” she says and slips inside her hut amongst the scattered seeds, bowls and bags, and a small rolled up mattress.
Whilst women in some camps are exploited as servants to a chief who is thought to control their powers; Gambaga is more co-operative. The strong ones help the weak and their children attend the local school, away from the prejudice of their village.
They have clean water and earn money for food by helping farmers with seeding and harvest, carrying firewood and selling groundnuts. A woman sings as she sits cracking nuts, children chase each other with a cardboard box and a man rides past on his bike, carrying a goat. The air in Gambaga is surprisingly clear of spook and gloom.
“I prefer to call it a home, not a camp,” says Gladys Cabiba Mohamma, the kind eyed ‘Presbyterian outcast-home-attendant’ who drives in on her motorbike each day. Despite her optimistic words, she is determined to help these women return to their communities.
A group of NGOs banded together in 1994, she tells me, organizing workshops in villages, trying to punch holes in the myth of witchcraft. Allegations could be mere dreams. A woman’s strange behaviour could be due to malaria, or menopause or Alzheimers. They put up posters that exclaimed ‘it is illegal to allege a woman is a witch'. It worked, the numbers of women arriving at the camps fell - then the program was halted and the accusations began to flow again - around the baobab trees and past the wizards – because men only use their powers for good, of course. Gladys knows that whatever they do, many of these women will spend the rest of their lives in Gambaga, cut off from their relatives and their past.
The sun gets sleepy and the translator yawns. Ignoring a sandpaper mouth, dirt-lined eyes and stomach tight with hunger, I try to untangle the bundle of contradicting tales – hope and hopelessness, contentment and resentment, guilt and innocence – and wonder, which witch is which?
*First published in Frankie magazine