The darkness behind the light

LINK

is a story of exorcism causing child abuse...

The abuse is to rid the child of an ancestral spirit, not to punish the child...

But what is important is that to understand much of what is going on in Africa, you need to understand that there is a deepseated belief in the supernatural...This comes out in the deep religious faith of the people, but it also comes out in the belief in witchcraft, and that ordinary people can be harmed by spells cast by witches.

Now, what I am writing may not be absolutely correct (I am a physician, not an anthropologist) and it may have some false generalizations...but nevertheless, unless one sees the deeper and darker parts of culture, one may not see the entire story...


In marginal societies, one is very close to famine, illness, sickness, and death (things we Westerners ignore)...so in rural areas, there are strict rules to behavior...alas, in cities, such rules disintegrate into a collapse of both traditions and morality...so you get anarchy, gangs, alcohol, drugs, promiscuity...and witchcraft...

In our rural areas, when the personal stresses became too much, you would see cases of "conversion hysteria"...one rarely sees such cases nowadays in the USA(Although Freud reported many in sexually repressed Victorian times, such cases now are rare in American society that too often ignores rules)...but such cases were common in Zimbabwe.

and example: One of our cooks was a girl taken in and given a job by our mission...she ran away from home when her father arranged for her to be a third wife of a rich old man, developed hyperventillation and hysterical paralysis of her arms when she found he was suing the mission to get her back...

But sometimes the hysteria comes out in anger and rage...there was a case told to me by one of the priests...this priest was (for lack of a better word) a schlamiel...but humble and greatly loved. One day, a woman came into church screaming obscenities, and so he blessed her and ordered the spirit to leave her...she collapsed and when she awoke she was fine...the priest asked if that was indeed spirit possession or if it was just hysteria...I said it really didn't matter, since his "treatment" worked...

But when the stresses in the community become too severe---and the stresses in cities and with modern society slowly destroying a culture, you get cracks...a person who is powerless and harmed will place a curse on the one harming him or her (usually it is a her)...so the troublemaker may find snakes in their hut, or find poison in their food (it is not unknown for a traditional chief to die of poisoning...presumably by one he had harmed)...

Most Americans know about "vodoo curses"...where a curse is placed on one who is harming you, or a person you harmed places a curse on you...and of course, this primitive vodoo is usually a joke (but before you laugh at such primitive thinking, remember the best seller, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, was about just such a curse...and that best selling book was about the elite in Savannah Georgia)...

Traditionally, it was the "witchdoctors" who treated curses (witchdoctors are not doctor-witches, but those who diagnose witchcraft)...but now often such treatments, aka exorcisms, are carried out in churches...In mainstream churches, there are superiors to the pastors that keep such things in check, as this article points out...

As a doctor, I'm like the pastor in the article, or like St. Teresa of Avila, who when hearing of some nuns "possessed" by the devil back in 1530, instructed that they needed a doctor, not a priest......and indeed, most of these cases are psychological...but one sees a spiritual aspect to this. Think Alcoholics anonymous rather than The Exorcist...but once in a great while, one feels the presence of pure evil in a patient ...I think I've felt it twice in thirty years, and the first time was with an African politician...

You see, in African tradition one does not seek to be better than one's neighbors...so to be powerful or rich, there is a suspicion that one has to be evil...and indeed, some businessmen and politicians hold ceremonies to betcome rich or powerful...usually animals are sacrificed... (think Santara, a religion followed by Castro, and which under him has flourished in Cuba)...but there have been cases where more power is sought, and humans are sacrificed...when I worked in Liberia, bodies of children would be found with genital mutilation, and the people knew that a new business would be built with the missing organs under the foundation...(The movies "Dingaka" and "The Believers" used this as the plot).

So what does all this have to do Mugabe?

Well, it is not unknown that tyrants use witchcraft ceremonies to stay in power and to intimidate their opponants. (Hitler and some of his henchmen were deeply into occultic practices, for example)...Idi Amin was deeply into witchcraft...and was only overthrown when the president of the neighboring country invaded and easily overthrew him...but before the invasion, he arranged a protection ceremony for his soldiers...

Is Mugabe into such things? I don't know...

But fear of witchcraft and being harmed by witches is deep in the culture...

It is something to remember: when you read that church leaders and educated people urge the local people to rise up and peacefully throw out the tyrant,...it is not merely fear of death that has to be overcome, but a deepseated fear of unknown evil...

Perhaps the answer, if you can't get South Africa to invade and end this tyranny, would be to have one of the Bishops go out with a cross or a statue of Our Lady, leading crowds praying and singing hymns...
This is what Cardinal Sin did in Manila, that lead to Marcos' overthrow...and there is even a local story that the reason Marcos' soldiers did not shoot the crowds was a beautiful lady in white appeared and told the soldiers "Do not shoot my children"...

That is the good news...the bad news is that similar, but less fervent, demonstrations did not stop the genocide in Ruanda nor in Bosnia...and unless there is a miracle of God's grace, one suspects it would not work in Harare or Bulawayo either...