(Six Degrees)
Sung in little-spoken Ghanaian dialects, these haunting, spontaneous songs by women accused of witchcraft are unlike anything you have ever heard
Now that it is fashionable for aggrieved political factions to dismiss criticism as a “witch hunt”, it’s worth remembering what makes actual witch hunts so pernicious. It’s not that the women thus accused are in fact innocent – it’s that they couldn’t possibly be guilty. In northern Ghana, witch hunts are more than a political metaphor. Even now, vulnerable women are accused of the dark arts because they have a mental illness, a physical disability or simply because their families want them out of the way. They are blamed for infertility, crop failure, bad weather, accidental deaths and much more besides. Lynchings and burnings still occur from time to time. That’s what a witch hunt means.
While belief in witchcraft is not unique to Ghana, witch camps are. These small settlements, which still exist despite government efforts to shut them down, offer accused women safe haven, albeit within the same framework of belief that drove them from their homes: the chiefs claim to ask the local gods to neutralise their powers and render them harmless. Protection assumes guilt. “If we are here, then we must be witches,” one told a journalist a few years ago.
