Clair MacDougall
The brutal murder of a 72-year-old woman who was suspected of witchcraft in Ghana has been met with public outrage after a photograph showing her in a near naked state appeared on the front page of the nation’s most popular newspaper, the Daily Graphic, last week.
Ama Hemmah, a poor 72-year-old woman, traveled on a bus from the village of Ajumako Assasan in Ghana’s Central Region to Tema where her two sons and daughter lived. Hemmah rose early in the morning without telling anyone she had left and had not informed children she was coming to visit. At Tema, she got down from the bus and wandered around begging for food, as she often did because she was poor. Then she wandered into a house in Site 7 of the Community 1 area of the city to ask for money and food. She was accused of being possessed by the devil, beaten and then finally doused with kerosene and set alight. This is what her son, Stephen Ofosy Yeboah, a 48-year-old taxi driver remembers his mother saying as she lay in her hospital bed. Hemmah died in the Tema General Hospital the following day. Yeboah said his mother was a devout Roman Catholic and had never engaged in or been accused of witchcraft.
But Pastor Samuel Fletcher Sagoe claimed Hemmah was a witch who intended to do he and his family harm. When I met Sagoe he walked me into the room where he discovered the stranger who had been sent by the devil. He retraced his steps and said he unlocked the gates and came into his sister Emelia Opoku’s room to find Hemmah standing by the window.
Sagoe pointed to the barred window that sat behind the countless items of damp clothing strung from lines crossing the walls in the tiny room. Sagoe said he was puzzled and could not comprehend how the woman had gotten through the gate, as it was locked and far too high for her to jump over it. The pastor took Hemmah into the courtyard and questioned her about how she managed to get in then called his family and friends in to witness the strange occurrence. Police believe the interrogation went on for as long as four hours. While Sagoe said he’d never met Hemmah before, the Tema Assistant Commissioner of Police Augustine Gyening said the suspects claimed Hemmah was a known witch.
Pastor Sagoe’s account was full of inconsistencies as he claimed Hemmah said she was a messenger of the devil and spoke of flying and "spiritual things", and then alluded to Hemmah refusing to confess to witchcraft after the group had surrounded her. Sagoe also claimed he was not present when they set Hemmah ablaze but that it was his friend Samuel Ghunney, a 50-year-old photographer, who asked Sagoe’s sister Emelia Opuko for the kerosene and matches. Those involved in the incident threw water on Hemmah after she began to burn and Ghunney told police that he thought setting her ablaze would scare her rather than kill her.
Hemmah then left the house and stumbled down the road to a provisions shop where 27-year-old Deborah Pearl Adumoah, took her to the police station and the hospital.
"She was in severe pain and tears were flowing down from her eyes," said Adumoah.
Adumoah spent the day with Hemmah and sent someone to her village to track down the contact details of her children in Tema. Deborah’s voice quivered as she spoke of Hemmah’s condition before she died.
"She couldn’t speak and you could only hear her make sounds because her face had been burnt and she couldn’t move her mouth properly," said Adumoah. "It was a cruel act. She reminded me of my grandmother: cute and smallish," she added.
While the case has attracted a great deal of attention in Ghana, belief in witchcraft and attacks on women and men accused of sorcery are not uncommon, particularly within the Northern Region of the country, home to the notorious witches camps that house women, children and sometimes men that have been exiled from their communities because they have been accused of witchcraft.
However, Canadian journalist and author of Spellbound: Inside West Africa’s Witch Camps, Karen Palmer said this particular case seemed highly unusual because there was no clear relationship between the outsider, Hemmah, and the accused. Palmer spent months interviewing accused witches in the Northern Region who had been exiled from their communities and were living in the camps.
"In my experience, I would say that most people know the women who they are accusing of witchcraft and it could be a family member, someone who lives in the same community, a co-wife or even a child accusing a parent, aunt or grandmother," said Palmer. "To attack a complete stranger is a little unusual."
Palmer added that older women in the Northern Region were often targeted because they had developed eccentricities and were no longer able to bear children, or fulfill duties such as gathering wood and water. Women are almost always accused in order to explain some misfortune such as an illness, lack of rain, a bad harvest or even something as simple as a bad dream.
But Palmer was not surprised that residents in a large urban center like Tema believed in witchcraft, as belief in sorcery is common throughout Ghana and is often fueled by preachers at large charismatic churches.
Assistant Commissioner of Police Augustine Gyening said the police department had not handled a case like this before. But, he said that many people believed in witchcraft in Tema. When I asked him whether he too believed in witchcraft he replied:
"Don’t you? There are witches in Europe." He added: "Everybody in Ghana will tell you they believe in witchcraft, but they will differ in terms of what things they attribute to witches."
But Gyening said that he and the Tema police force were appalled by the murder.
Ghana’s Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) issued a statement last Friday claiming the act was barbaric and reflected poorly on the nation’s human rights record. The Coordinator of the Coalition on Domestic Violence Legislation in Ghana Mr. Adolf Bekoe also claimed that witchcraft accusation was becoming a major problem in the country that needed to be addressed by the government.
Palmer agreed that something needed to be done to address violence toward women accused of witchcraft but said that it was complex issue that activists and politicians had attempted to address in the 1990s but had lost the political will in part because of the difficulty of challenging these entrenched beliefs.
"In the West we look at this phenomenon and cannot understand how people could believe in witchcraft and how it could incite violence," said Palmer.
"People take this threat incredibly seriously, because from the moment Ghanaians are born they are told stories about witchcraft and it is ingrained in the culture in away it isn’t in the West."
This is too tragic for my usual finger pointing.
This world doesn’t need a ‘Fountain of Youth’, we need a Fountain of Education.
This is just Murder, plain and simple.
During the time of the Ritual Abuse hysteria (peaking in the 80s and 90s, you couldn’t pin it down to any single American Taliban, many Talibans converged to make it the disaster that it was… fundamentalists, feminists, police, educators, journalists, conspiracy theorists on the far left and the far right. It’s an aspect of human nature that most people don’t want to understand. Many years after Milgram’s studies, most people don’t know about them, but if they did, they would find them incomprehensible or unbelievable. I think it’s important to understand that a large percentage of the population will become swept up in a moral panic, many more will stand by and do nothing, a few stand against. While people on this site are moved to pity by this woman’s fate, many people – including several here – call for the assassination of Julian Assange. People in general are weak and confused... easily mislead, hard to motivate. It is a shame so little attention was paid to the people who would not go along in Milgram’s experiment…. try to learn more about independent, moral thinking, and see if it can be encouraged.