The Canadian journalist Karen Palmer first learned about the camps from a human rights report. She decided to visit one while on a six-month fellowship in Ghana in 2007. Her new book is the result.
The makeshift settlements are populated by accused witches – women, exiled from their home villages. Essentially, these women are internal refugees, fleeing not ethnic or religious persecution but allegations of supernatural crimes, their guilt substantiated by dreams and the ritual sacrifice of guinea hens. At Gambaga, the town Palmer moved to when she decided to dedicate a couple of years to the subject, there are more than 3,000 accused witches living in unenviable conditions. The residents aren’t prisoners, exactly, but they can’t go home. Unless they can convince their former neighbours that they’ve given up cannibalizing other people’s souls in the spirit world or flying through the night in the form of a fireball, they’re likely to be beaten or stoned to death if they return.
Spellbound takes the form of a personal narrative because much of Palmer’s story is about how difficult it was to find out what’s going on in Ghana. It’s considered improper to speak frankly about witchcraft, so her questions prompted a lot of evasive and indirect answers. The educated Ghanaians she met told her they didn’t believe in black magic, but later turned out to have hired sorcerers (just in case) or bought juju charms or attributed a relative’s illness to evil spells. Even the simplest of communications could be challenging: the poor rural people she interviewed spoke a host of local dialects, so she had to rely on a shifting cast of translators, each of whom becomes a character in his own right.
Spellbound opens with a blood-curdling story of one woman’s witchcraft trial, and only later reveals that Palmer spent countless hours talking to dozens of people in order to reconstruct that simple narrative. She reproduces a partial transcript of one of those conversations as it meanders, unmoored, through a fog of undefined incidents, actors, locations and times. Who accused her? “They.” Who are “they”? “The family.” Her sources describe two different accusations as if they occurred at once. Relationships are ambiguous. A woman with five daughters might sometimes be described as childless (“Oh, we don’t count daughters,” her translator told her, “cheerfully”). Another woman might refer to the children of her husband’s co-wives as her own. And everywhere, the taboo about discussing magic must be negotiated. “Instead of speaking clearly about witches and victims,” she writes, “people would speak guardedly, and cryptically, of cattle, sheep, riverbeds, snakes or insects.”
What Palmer saw when she looked at Ghana’s witch camps was the result of a destabilized tribal society on the lookout for scapegoats. “In an African setting,” one of her guides tells her, “any mishap – anything that happens – should have a cause.” Illness, natural disasters, accidents – all of these are likely to be blamed on a village’s most vulnerable members: women past childbearing age without sufficiently influential male relatives. Other targets include women with abrasive and uppity personalities, or “tall poppies”; one accused witch Palmer interviewed had parlayed her good business sense into a modest fortune that aroused the jealousy of other small-time merchants. When she became a moneylender and made herself disagreeable by trying to collect from her debtors, her fate was sealed.
The witch hunts that racked Europe from the 15th to the 17th centuries followed the same pattern: accusations arising from local quarrels and rivalries led to panics that opportunistic religious leaders then capitalized upon. (Contrary to popular belief, the church didn’t instigate witch hunts so much as take advantage of them.)
Reading Spellbound doesn’t make the reports of African witch scares sound any less bizarre – a man’s soul trapped in a cockroach or a pair of adulterous lovers becoming permanently locked together in intercourse will never be the stuff of mundane morning newspaper fare. But Palmer does construct an understandable context for all this supernatural weirdness, as well as a chastening vision of its all too human costs.
Source: Laura Millar in Salon, October 24
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
