Africa's Spiritual Awakening - A Documentary on African Witchcraft

Witchcraft. A concept associated with black magic, death, destruction, primitivity and evil. But with more Africans now than ever going back to their roots, the conversation on the demonized subject is taking a rather unexpected turn. People are asking me, are you a witch? That's because you're going there or what's so interesting about this? Professor David G. Mailu, Africa's most published author and scholar of African spirituality, stirred up controversy when he hosted a public lecture on witchcraft at his Mathembonie home in Makweni County. I colonized us. I saw us as humans, savages, who had neither history nor philosophy. They forced us to drop everything in our culture and demanded that we should stop thinking creatively because the quality of our mind had nothing good to think about. We had no religion. We did not know God. We only worshipped idols and ancestral spirits. This is why the colonizers brought religion to us. The colonizers still demanded that we should surrender our way of life because the white man shall be thinking for us. And when we would want to do something, we will have only two options, consulting the white man's brain and the Bible. When we hear the word witchcraft, which has been thrown around so many times, and then you are called a witch, and there has been a confusion with regard to what is actually witchcraft. The alarming content of his entire lecture caught the attention of different scholars in the scientific community who were part of the audience. I'm Sylvester Anami. I was born in a village from Kakamega County, Kolomani constituency, and I've grown through the normal education system until the point where now I'm a teacher at the University of Jomo Kinyo University of Agriculture and Technology, and I teach students, both undergraduates and postgraduates, in the areas of biotechnology, molecular biology, and tissue culture, especially focusing on plants. Throughout my growing, the term witchcraft and the witches, it makes one get afraid. And I was wondering that there is somebody somewhere who is so courageous enough to talk about something that people don't want to talk about. You know, some communities, if you talk about witchcraft, then they can even kill you. So that surprised me, and I hesitated interest, and I shared in many Western groups. In attendance as well was Dr Wangari, who is a perfect embodiment of the coexistence between African spirituality and modern science. My name is Wangari. I am an African feminist. I am a healer. I am a clinical psychologist. I am an Afrofuturist. I'm also an Afro-optimist. I first encountered Africanism gradually from stories, especially from my grandmother. A lot of her stories were centered around what we need to do if we are sick. And she was talking about plants, and she was talking about parts of animals that she would slaughter and give, you know. And she would talk about these things. Just in passing, I never thought much about those things. Growing up mostly in Nairobi and only visiting my grandparents from time to time for a couple of days and then going back to Nairobi. Then towards my young adulthood years, I got engrossed in some works in the library, just naturally gravitating to some Pan-Africanist works, being very, very fascinated by the works of Nkoge Wadi Ongo, one of the most renowned Africanists, still alive and strong. And then, obviously, I got this invitation to Professor Mindloo's lecture. And I thought this was very interesting because there's a lot of knowledge that's subjugated. It seems to be forgotten. And I am all about getting that which is more peripheral to be more central. That's what I do. So science, what we call science, has two sides. There is the physical one, the one we know, which falls under physics or empiricism, and the other one which falls under metaphysics. What we don't know, how that happens, how that works. But now, the real science, as we say, to split, to take science without the metaphysics, you only link yourself to one. You have lost a lot. Now, what happens, communities like Africans and the others, primitive people who live in natural courses and the others, tend to develop a lot of knowledge in metaphysics. And metaphysics is that very strange thing, like this woman who actually, 100 years, 150 years ago, saw things which are happening today, and then they happened. What is going on in her mind? What is she using to be able to see far away? Now, in African terms, dreams are very important. When you touch on that, nearly every home in Africa, all homes talk about them because they are people who actually have definite dreams. They come true. Revealed in the lecture was that behind most of what we shun and fear among African people is a powerful force that can be used for either good or evil. Now, this is not the only plant. We have so many plants around here. Now, this plant here, it's coming out from my mind here. This one here, it treats very many, many, many diseases, but usually it's very popular to women when they want to do some abortion. It's very dangerous. They use it for getting through abortion. They use it for that. It's used for many purposes. So the plants we are talking about have the habit of producing very powerful properties. Melanin is a substance that makes us who we are. Gives us our swag, our empathy, our soul, our humanity. It's all tied to this. And one thing you got to realize, melanin is such a commodity these days. There's a certain armed forces that right now they're developing weaponry that utilizes melanin. The word voodoo was first used in Latin America. And voodoo simply means spirits, good spirits, bad spirits. In Islam, we talk about jinni. Jinni is a word you'll find in the Quran. Jinni is not necessarily a bad word. Jinni just means spirits. The same Arabic version is in Swahili. So Swahili speakers know when we say jinni, what we are talking about. You can say, What is pepo? So if you think about the roots of some words like voodoo or jinni or pepo, we are talking about now the metaphysical existence. And so one of the things that have been maybe a creation of the Western world is this idea that we do not seem to respect our own prophets, our own diviners, our own Africanists, our own spiritual leaders. We seem to kind of over-elevate the other prophets that we know are official prophets, for example, from other religions. Like if I say Elijah was a prophet, you'd say, oh yes, of course Elijah was a prophet. But if I talked about a prophet who's in Africa and suddenly we don't seem to know many of them, but they're there, they exist, and they tell us about the future and things like that. According to the United Nations, lifestyle diseases are now the leading cause of death in Africa. In Kenya, for instance, the Ministry of Health reported a 12% increase in deaths by lifestyle diseases between 2014 and 2021. This number is projected to increase, but this does not have to be the case. Dr. Anami proposes that Africans embrace their traditional practices and science to solve the world hunger crisis. The danger is these foods, the method of preparation is not healthy. And so continuous utilization of these current modern foods has the danger of bringing in lifestyle diseases, be it obesity, which is rampant, and that's because of the lack of nutrition in these foods. We have diabetes. Sometimes it's going to be genetical, but sometimes it's just about lifestyle diseases. And because of many other diseases that destroys our normal metabolism, normal microbiota within the system. So going back to our traditional foods, southern millet, cassava, they are rich in nutrition, vegetables, they are very rich in vitamins that we need for proper growth and development. And also to prevent ourselves from getting sick. And so you realize that even Europeans, you know, were surprised that COVID did not kill many of the Africans. And the reason is, is that we ended up going back to our traditional foods, the ginger, you know, the, what do you call it? These are the foods that we eat, helped us so much. And you can see, in fact, in many restaurants in this country, at the end of COVID, they came up with a drink called Dawa. And so if you go to any restaurant, you start with Dawa. But it's not just the physical well-being that can be improved by embracing the traditional African spiritual way of life. Dr. Wangari posits that mental health issues, for instance, can be tackled by a mixture of clinical diagnosis and some African spiritual practices. The act of going and getting a plant and taking a bath is something we call embodiment. The embodiment practices are central in African-centered psychology. So for instance, somebody walks into my office, they say that, you know, they can't sleep, they are having a hard time. And then I ask them, my role is, of course, I am trained as an armchair psychologist to help them explore what the issues could be. And they say, all they need to do is go back to the village and speak to their ancestor, who probably is a relative who died a couple of years ago. Now, what my training would tell me to do is to write an entire diagnosis of, this person is psychotic and needs to go take medication. It is crazy. However, what African-centered cosmologies are about, or all the different ways of knowing are about, is about actually going and touching the grave. Probably lying on the grave, taking groundies, touching the soil on the grave, speaking to this person who is departed and still with us. Because, you know, again, in African-centered psychology, we say that the people who've gone ahead of us are not far from us. They're here with us. So therefore, these are the people. So this action of going and physically having an object to represent that, embodiment practices, are one thing that I would say is something we need to remember. Knowledge on how to control the forces of nature has existed in Africa for as long as a million years. And it's on the verge of extinction, if not embraced, taught and preserved. So in Africa, in traditional Africa, we do not, we have diviners completely, and diviners have nothing to do with witchcraft. And they are related to spiritual things. And actually, some of them, my own, I come from a divine line, my own sister, who died about five years ago, was a diviner. She never went to school. And she did, she practiced whatever else she did. She was a diviner and a healer. And the healing has, the process was this. This is not the healer who would keep materials for healing or stuff, the stuff here and there. No, the kind of healing she did was, this is the spiritual one. And she was very popular. If she was invited to a family somewhere to heal somebody, she would go and look at the person. And only within that period, she is shown, now this is where it becomes very difficult, what herbal medicine should be used to treat that person. Then from there, I don't know whether she had to sleep or what and that, but then the subject is that she was shown, and then she would say, go and bring that, bring that, and bring that, and that, put them together, do this and that. And then you give the person, and she healed very many people. But with the majority of the African population, deeply indulged in the practice of foreign religions, ways of life and practices, the challenge is for the younger generations to research on and go back to the African spiritual way of life. I would ask young people to be fascinated. Why is it that Pope Michael kept talking about, you know, Africans being experts of the human body? You know, that whole idea of embodiment and the entire field of knowledge around what do we need to do as people to be whole. A lot of traditional societies had structures and also had systems to take care of each other. For instance, alcohol was not served randomly. It was only for old people. I don't know if you know that. And there were old men sitting around a single pot with straws, and the straws were made actually of some flexible stick that had already, you know, a pin inside. And so they would be pulling these straws together. In a sense, if you think about all of that, it's natural to take care of each other in that setting. And so you don't have a lot of cases of addiction, for instance, because then you would have older people who are just, you know, and if one person, for instance, maybe got drunk and had bad behavior in public, then they would be fined with a goat, for example. So that's very different from what's going on right now. The word, this word we are talking about witchcraft, this, if we don't embrace that subject fully, because this is part and parcel of the African culture, because witchcraft is hidden knowledge, and hidden knowledge is divided in so many areas, there is that and that one, then we are lost. If we say, if we hear what the churches are saying, do not follow that, this is devilish, this is that, then we are destroyed. The scientific community and education sector as well needs to look into this hidden knowledge and demystify the myths and give names to the legends to ensure continuity of the good aspects of African culture. What is important is for us to impress the positive witchcrafts and be able to learn, maybe integrate them into our curriculum, in schools, and be able to teach our children, the youth and everybody to impress these good witchcrafts so that we can utilise it to solve our problems, to solve our challenges. The idea of thinking about this lecture is try to see whether we could come up with researchers who would go into the field and find out, for example, this man I'm talking about, the Nyerere one, died away like that. We have another one, some of you, most of you know the late professor John Beatty who was a theologian and he actually said something that many people know about locusts. And he comes from the Kitui area where a good number of people are still traditional. Now, at one stage, his area was attacked by locusts. And of course, when they come, they eat everything until they leave this tree with only the bones, white, anything. And locusts, that's quite a story when they begin to eat anything. And then after that, they had the area of one Mzee there. The locusts didn't touch anything. So, of course, it became very curious to go and find out. And they went and discovered, yes, perfect. The locusts didn't touch anything. Well, the Mzee or the owner, whatever he had done to prevent locusts, you know, eating that section. To me, in my own thinking, this man must have just used some herb in one way or the other, biochemistry, to make sure that the locusts would not eat anything. Professor David G. Maillou's Mathembo Nihom is one of those places in Africa which are acting as a modern preservation of the nearly extinct practices of African spirituality. This is a call to all Africans of all age and gender from all parts of the continent and the diaspora to start embracing their own and putting into practice that which was in place before. It is a call to you. It is a call to me. In order for that which was buried to germinate and bear fruits, we must water it by being part of the conversation, demonized or not. We must not let our history be forgotten. So the young, when we were young children, for example, we would come together and there is what you call the finger millet. And so in Luya land, we used to say, yeah, that kind of thing. I think there is an intergenerational dialogue that's missing, especially around aspects to do with difficult life questions. When we have faced tragedy as a people, what did we ever do to, you know, come together and to heal, for instance? And then I think the other intergenerational dialogues that are completely, it seems to be completely missing is basically about medicine and what we need to do to be whole and balanced and complete. Majority of witches tend to use herbal medicine to effect their gods. And I thought probably that this herbal medicine may actually be containing something that we just don't know. So when I actually went to attend and realized that witchcraft is inter-knowledge, then that opened the whole world for me, that it's knowledge that we need to gain in order to help community prosper. And so I was surprised at the very beginning. And then at the end, I was encouraged and I was really full of hope for our enriched with knowledge that we can be able to link science, research and traditional medicine, which in my opinion is now witchcraft, because they use herbal medicine to be able to use it for the good of the people. The Kamba people who are actually accused of being witches, because they think nearly every Kamba man is a witch, they have one very interesting thing which is happening now. In fact, unfortunately, one of the people to attend this place has not come. A real one who actually knows exactly what I'm talking about on this. Now, this is somebody who I wanted him to be here. His father had a very big sugarcane plantation from here to there. And at one stage, when the man got married, the father came and subdivided and said, this is your part, this is my part. And then immediately, this man discovered something. As soon as he got this, he was interested in coming and harvesting sugarcane from there, but they didn't touch the father's one. Now, the beauty about African traditional religion is you know these things, you don't have to go and acquire a belief from outside you. They're just things that are known. So the difference between a belief and knowledge, knowledge which seems just to be here around you. So the aspects of what we are doing is just to discover, to just elicit what's already there and uncover it. It's already there. You don't have to go importing a belief out of anywhere outside of you.