The Belief in Witchcraft in Contemporary Africa and Its Implications for Human Rights and National Security: A Case Study of Nigeria

Abstract

It is argued in this paper, the focus of which is Nigeria, that the belief in witchcraft, which is still very pervasive in contemporary Africa, has very serious implications for human rights and national security. In Africa, as in many parts of the world, witchcraft is purported to be the ability of certain people to kill others or cause other havoc in the community through mystic or supernatural powers. Consequently, witches are persons who are believed to possess supernatural powers to do evil. It is also believed that witches could be engaged by some people to make them rich or to kill their enemies. Using Nigeria as a case study, the paper posits that the main manifestations of the belief in witchcraft in Africa today are in the form of ritual killings. Perpetrators of ritual killings usually cut off some parts of the human body and sell them to certain individuals who then take those human parts to meet “juju” priests or “witchdoctors”, whom they believe could make for them potent charms to enable them to engage the witches or the devil for whatever purposes. In most rural areas, it is very old people, both men and women, who are believed to be witches and are sometimes tortured or killed. In recent times, however, some children are also being accused of being witches. In the case of children, they would either be tortured, killed, or banished into the bushes, mostly by their parents or with the consent of their parents. The paper starts from the premise that witchcraft is not peculiar to Africa but has been a universal phenomenon. It recalls the witch-hunt episode that lasted for about four hundred years in Europe, during which tens of thousands of people, especially women, alleged to be witches, were tortured and executed. However, whereas Europe and most of the developed world have since put an end to witch hunts and even more or less jettisoned the belief in witchcraft altogether, most Africans, including very educated ones, are still neck-deep in the belief in witchcraft. Nigeria typifies what obtains in most of the other African countries. The paper concludes by recalling the role played by scholars in the Age of Enlightenment in the decline of the belief in witchcraft and witch hunts in Europe and calls on African scholars to pay more attention to the study of the phenomenon in order to combat its horrible consequences.