Voodoo

Voodoo

We are in a village somewhere in southern Africa a few hundred years ago. All the villagers, men, women and children, stand in a long line, facing forwards with their tongues out. Along the line of thousands comes the witch-doctor with a red hot spear to touch the offered tongue. At this very high temperature, the spear head, glowing orange, will bounce off a wet tongue but stick, to terrible effect, to a dry one. Whoever has a dry tongue and mouth must be very afraid and so, obviously, guilty. At least, that is the common wisdom at this time and in this place. Those whose tongues burn are immediately put to death by two strong men who break their necks as soon as the chief, sitting on his throne, nods his agreement. He almost always does.

A new scene. Everyone in the little Haitian hamlet is awake although it is two thirty in the morning. Awake but behind their locked doors and windows, as a zombie walks down the only street, slowly but surely. His face is ghostly white and his clothes and long hair are covered in dirt. The people know who he is: Jerome Fougerat. They buried him a fortnight ago after he suddenly died. No-one was sure why. Now, here is Jerome, up from under the ground and walking around. He goes to a single man's house, kicks the door down and, then, stabs the young man inside to death. No-one tries to stop him – no-one dares.

The 1990s, London, and the police are called to the banks of the River Thames where someone has found a bag containing the head, and only the head, of a small, black boy. At first, the police hardly know where to begin but, when the DNA results come back from the lab, they find that he was about nine years old and came from a small area in Benin, a West African country. An area small in size but with a big reputation for witchcraft. The police turn to African cultural experts who confirm that the boy has almost certainly been killed, and not accidentally, in the course of an African witchcraft ceremony held somewhere in or near London.

Obeah, Bodung, Ju-Ju, Ndoki, Santerria, Voodoo – call it what you like, it's all African witchcraft just in different times and different places. African witchcraft is what the three stories above, bizarre but all true, have in common. Of the five continents, Africa has the most followers of, or believers in, witchcraft. Now, most Africans are Muslim or Christian but, before, they had their own tribal religions. Witchcraft was an important part of those and the witch-doctor was not only a witch and a doctor, obviously, but mostly a priest. He was a power to himself, often feared even by the chief of the tribe. Together, the chief and the witch-doctor ruled. Sometimes the witch-doctor had the whip hand and sometimes it was the chief but, they always had to respect each other and respond to each other's opinions, even if only minimally.

They needed each other. The witch-doctor would sniff out, literally, suspects but the chief had the last word. He could, and sometimes did, stop a killing and pardon someone. The power relationship between chief and witch-doctor is very like that between Church and King in many medieval European countries.

In Africa, still today, witchcraft can dominate daily life in the areas where it is rife. Many people there take their hair away with them when they get it cut, leaving nothing on the barbershop floor in case it is used against them in a spell. Many people will not eat or drink anything outside their own home. And, even there, they are often very careful about what they consume.

Witch-doctors, who traditionally ask for money or favours for doing a spell, are both men and women. They say they can help you to get rich, make a certain person fall in love with you, give birth to a boy this time, make an enemy get sick and die, make an ex-boyfriend get terrible acne, and so on.

Many swear that some of these spells work. This could be because people who believe deeply in witchcraft only remember the few times when a spell appeared to work. They forget the many times that it just didn't work at all. Also, almost all witch-doctors are very good herbalists and Africa has a huge variety of plants and animal toxins. In a lot of cases, the witch-doctor may tell the person buying the spell that this will be managed by pure 'magic' and will then perform a strange rite or ceremony with chanting or herbs, psychoactive drugs, animal blood and parts and, sometimes, human blood and organs because these, they say, make the strongest spells.

Later, the witch-doctor may pay someone to poison the victim of the spell with an animal or plant toxin. The victim dies horribly and often slowly. The witch-doctor's reputation grows and, perhaps, the family of the dead man go to him for revenge on their enemies. Basically, it's a 'blame game'. In cultures where witchcraft is very common, the local people like to blame bad luck or their own mistakes on spells bought and put on them by their enemies in the community.

If a woman has a deformed baby, she will blame this tragedy on a neighbour she doesn't like. If a man likes drinking beer while he drives, when he inevitably crashes, he blames his enemies' spells and not the alcohol in his blood. In this and other ways, witchcraft is a vicious circle: people do not learn by their mistakes and they blame people for their random bad luck thereby increasing suspicion and division in the community.

When Europeans started buying slaves from Africa and taking them to the Caribbean and the Americas to work, the slaves took African witchcraft with them. In new versions and varieties, it is found wherever there are African communities. In Brazil and some other places, it has mixed with the Catholic religion into a new religion usually called 'Santerria'.

With the arrival of Caribbean, and then African, immigrants into the UK, especially London, African witchcraft has become more prevalent. In the case of the little boy from Benin, the police were able to discover that he had been brought from Africa to Central London just to be killed and partially eaten in an Ndoki ceremony. This ceremony was supposed to bring luck to a Nigerian drug trafficker and gangster who was about to go to trial. Things didn't look good for him but, on the day after the Ndoki killing, he was unexpectedly acquitted. He has, long since, returned to Nigeria, beyond the reach of the London Police.

However, there is learning and progress. An American botanist, after years of research in the field, discovered not only that the famous zombies of Haiti were victims of a plant extract mix that brings on a permanent, obedient trance, he also discovered the exact formula or recipe. First, the poison makes the victim seem dead. They are buried and, in the night, the witch-doctor comes and digs them up. He hides them in the forest and uses them to scare the villagers or kill his enemies. The zombies are not the dead walking, they are just the unhappy victims of brain damage brought about by the witch-doctor's mix.

These days, African witchcraft, in all its forms, has more followers than ever and in more places on Earth but, at the same time, the percentage of Africans and African diaspora who believe in it has gone down. On the other hand, non-African believers in African witchcraft are growing in number, especially in Brazil.