In African countries like Ghana where people take delight in inscribing cryptic religious statements on their properties, visitors find this signwriting culture very revealing. These writing are part of the popular religious culture. A lot of them insinuate the fact that enemies may either be working against people or plotting their downfall. Thus one finds…

The Lugbara people live in the Northeast end of the D.R.Congo and in the Northwestern West Nile region of Uganda. They belong to the Central Sudanic ethnolinguistic group. 500,000 Lugbara live in D.R.Congo; almost the same number lives in Uganda. Beliefs in witchcraft among this ethnic group are widespread. It is not surprising that most…

“When you used to research witchcraft, we thought it was just something normal,” an old friend told me during a recent trip to Northwestern, Tanzania, we we lived for over a decade during our time in East Africa. “We didn’t think it was really important to research. But now all of the killing of albinos…

Yesterday I received an urgent email from a good friend, the President of an indigenous evangelical denomination among the Aguaruna of Peru, with whom I worked closely many years ago. I would like to translate his letter here into English, using pseudonyms, and provide commentary on the way witchcraft issues continue to play out among…

In my last post, “Identities of Accused Witches,” I listed the most common identities of those who are said to be witches. The question for this post is, “how do we know and identify a witch?” Basically, the question is that of epistemology and it is an important one in dealing with the whole question of…

It is held that witches are organized into covens on local, national, and international levels. In the covens are kings, queens, messengers and executioners. At night, when witches sleep, it is believed that their souls fly out of their physical bodies to meetings. In my previous presentations–“What is Witchcraft?” and “Witchcraft: Physical or Spiritual?”–I attempted…

Witchcraft has negative connotations in every society throughout history. There is no society without “witchcraft” even though a wide range of meanings is associated with its connotations from culture to culture. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica explains, . . . The terms witchcraft and witch derive from Old English wiccecraeft: from wicca (masculine) or wicce (feminine), pronounced “witchah” and “witchuh,” respectively, denoting someone who…

It was around 1990. I was teaching in America at a seminary and Bible college. During a monthly time of staff prayer, our school’s difficult financial problems and damage from a recent storm were mentioned. When other prayer requests were solicited, Bill (a person on staff) mentioned that there was a group of witches that…

The Dhongo form an ethno-linguistic group who live in the Territoire (County) of Faradje in the Haut-Uélé District in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They are neighbors of my Lugbara people and share some “experiences” of witchcraft with this Lugbara people that I previously mentioned, in my “Aula: A Baby Disease Caused by a Witch.”…

Bishop “Moses” (names have been changed throughout) was a respected spiritual church leader from Rwanda. He spent decades building a strong church movement of nearly fifty churches across the Rwanda and Burundi borders into Tanzania. Although this area is a seven-hour drive from where I lived in Mwanza, Tanzania, I stayed overnight for up to…

Over 20 thousand street children, most of them orphans, roam the streets of Kinshasa. In response to the biblical call for God’s people to care for orphans, an organization of Congolese pastors led by Pastor Abel Ngolo called Equipe Pastorale Aupres des Enfants en Détresse (Pastoral Team for Children in Distress), and in partnership with…

In her book Our Religious Heritage, Bahemuka observes that, Witchcraft is partly inherited and partly taught from one generation to the next. Africans believe that witchcraft is in the blood of the witches, and, just like genetic inheritance, witchcraft passes from mother to daughter and father to son. The outward paraphernalia of witchcraft which is…