Central Africa witchcraft cops fight sorcery boom

By Lucy Jones, Reuters, Monday 26 August 2002, 10:12 AM

BANGUI (Reuters)—After eating soup cooked with a human heart, 13-year-old Stephanie was told she would be able to transform herself into a cat and cast magic spells.

But Stephanie and the woman who inducted her into sorcery got caught when they tried to creep up on the villa of a member of the Central African Republic's presidential guard.

Now she trembles in confession before Bangui's witchcraft police, who treat cases like Stephanie's as all in a day's work.

I know that it's not a good thing to try and kill someone. But I trusted this woman because she is a friend of my aunt, pleaded Stephanie, an orphan.

Stacked beneath the dusty scales of justice at Bangui's police station are long, thin sticks for beating children as well as metal poles and a wooden beam punched with nails to persuade adults to confess to witchcraft.

Hundreds of men, women and children are charged every year with practising witchcraft and police say the numbers are shooting up.

We are seeing an increase in the problem, said the head of police in Bangui, Jean Guenganno. It's the result of poverty.

The witchcraft detectives are routinely vaccinated with herbs prepared by witchdoctors to make them immune to spells.

FLESH-EATING

In a cell next to Stephanie's at Bangui police station, 70-year-old Ermine Qualigon admits she buried a piece of her daughter-in-law's miscarried baby in the hope of making the woman infertile.

My son's wife never gave me any food. When my son and her had meat, they only gave me soup, she said.

He described to a police officer how his wife became mysteriously thin and accused his mother of eating her flesh.

Blaise Damagoa, 13, told how he ate a neighbour's cake, and was later told it contained human heart.

My manner has changed. My aunt calls me to go to the field but I refuse. I refused to go to school. I told my brother what had happened after he had beaten me up. He then reported me to the police, he said.

With some 17 percent of the country's adults thought to be infected with the virus that causes AIDS, doctors believe that many deaths attributed to sorcery should actually be blamed on unprotected sex or infected blood transfusions.

If someone gets ill people believe it is due to bad spirits and there is little one can do to overcome them, said Marcel Massaga, head of the government's anti-AIDS programme.

Other people suspect that the bulging witchcraft case files may actually be due to people making accusations through jealousy or to eliminate rivals.

WIDESPREAD BELIEF

But few dare suggest that witchcraft is not very real in a country where incoming presidents tend to build new palaces and people firmly believe it is to protect themselves against the sorcery of their predecessors.

People believe there is no such thing as an accident, said Ambrose Balze, a sociologist at Bangui University.

And local human rights groups in smart Western-funded offices will not discount the powers of witchcraft.

In any case, witchcraft is so widespread that campaigning to abolish the legal recognition of the crime is pointless, said Matthias Morouba, of the Human Rights Observatory in Bangui.

But we are pushing for fair trials of those accused.

Truth herbs are often used in court to make a suspect confess. A name cried out by a sick person in his or her sleep after taking a witch doctor's herbs is also used as a way of identifying a witch.

As spells often involve burying bits of clothing, snipped clothes are often dangled before juries as evidence.

But many cases never get as far as the police station once someone is accused of casting spells.

In M'baiki, a large town in the southwest, several women accused of witchcraft were recently buried alive. Others have been executed or had their houses burned down.

Penalties for witchcraft, or being found in possession of body parts for making spells, vary from hefty fines to death. Sentences in the disease-ridden jails of the Central African Republic often amount to the same thing.

I need my mother, said Stephanie as she washed her face in the police station grounds, trying to ignore the stares of watching soldiers.