Witch Hunts and Foul Potions Heighten Fear of
Leader in Gambia
JAMBUR, Gambia — This tiny West
African nation’s citizens have grown familiar with the unpredictable exploits
of its absolute ruler, who insists on being called His Excellency President
Professor Dr. Al-Haji Yahya
Jammeh: his herbs-and-banana cure for AIDS, his
threat to behead gays, his mandate that only he can drive through the giant
arch commemorating his coup in the moldering capital, Banjul, and his
ubiquitous grinning portrait posted along roadsides.
Not to mention the documented disappearances,
torture and imprisonment of dozens of journalists and political opponents.
But then came a
campaign so confounding and strange that the citizens are still reeling and
sickened from it, literally, weeks after it apparently ended.
The president, it seems, had become concerned
about witches in this country of mango trees, tropical scrub, dirt roads,
innumerable police checkpoints and Atlantic coastline frequented by sun-seeking
European tourists mostly unaware of the activities at nearby Mile 2 State
Central Prison, where many opponents of the regime are taken.
To the accompaniment of drums, and directed by
men in red tunics bedecked with mirrors and cowrie
shells, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Gambians
were taken from their villages and driven by bus to secret locations. There
they were forced to drink a foul-smelling concoction that made them
hallucinate, gave them severe stomach pains, induced some to try digging a hole
in a tiled floor, made others try climbing up a wall and in some cases killed
them, according to the villagers themselves and Amnesty International.
The objective was to root out witches, evil
sorcerers who were harming the country, the villagers were told. Terrified,
dozens of other people fled into the bush or across the border into
The roundups
occurred from late January through March, according to people here. But even in
recent weeks, the same witch doctors in
red, accompanied by others
identified as government agents, have
Jane Hahn for The New York Times
Billboards depicting President Yahya Jammeh are ubiquitous in
circulated in the dirt-poor countryside — Gambia
was ranked 195th of 209 countries by the World Bank in 2007, with a per
capita income of $270 a year — demanding that villagers make animal sacrifices,
of a red he-goat and a red rooster, to root out the sorcery supposedly in their
midst.
Gambian government officials did not respond to
e-mail messages and phone calls, and the government has not commented on
articles recounting the anti-witch campaign in the opposition newspaper Foroyaa (“Freedom,” in the local Mandinka language),
according to the paper’s editor, Sam Sarr. Amnesty
International says it received a press release from the country’s attorney
general declaring such witch-hunting activities “inconceivable.”
Yet the testimonies are numerous, and experts on
this former British colony have little doubt that the witch hunts occurred, and
on the scale described.
The roundups were guided by the president’s
“Green Boys,” villagers say. The Green Boys are Mr. Jammeh’s
most militant supporters, “vigilante die-hards,” said Abdoulaye
Saine, a political scientist at Miami University of
Ohio. They dress in green and sometimes paint their faces green, the color of
Mr. Jammeh’s political party, the
Even in the often brutal context of his 15-year
dictatorship, this year’s roundups stand out, the president’s few open critics
in
But this time, it was not critical journalists
or political opponents who were singled out. “There’s a feeling that if this
can happen, anything can happen,” said the opposition leader Halifah Sallah, the minority
leader in Parliament from 2002 to 2007, who has himself been arrested four
times, most recently for speaking out against the witch hunts.
“People no longer have the protection of the
laws,” Mr. Sallah said. During the witch hunts,
“people were in a state of panic” throughout
On the teeming streets of Serrekunda,
a suburb of
The anxiety has persisted. The witchcraft
accusation brings shame in a society where belief in sorcery “was pervasive and
still is pervasive,” according to Lamin Sanneh, a
Gambian-born history professor at Yale University. Beyond that
is the trauma of being uprooted and the illnesses that people say linger from
the bitter potion.
“This stigma will follow us into our grave,”
said Dembo Jariatou Bojang, the village development committee chairman in Jambur, a dusty town 15 miles from the capital. “We will
never forget this.”
He said he was taken, along with about 60
others, after being assembled in the village square, attracted by the beating
of the drums. Driven by bus to a place they did not recognize, Mr. Jariatou Bojang was made to drink
and bathe in the foul liquid.
“My head is still paining sometimes,” Mr. Jariatou Bojang said.
As he spoke, an elderly man sitting on the floor
of the village imam’s house shook his head uncontrollably from side to side.
The men in the room said the symptom developed after the man, said to be in his
80s, was forced to drink the liquid.
Omar Bojang, the son
of the imam, Karamo Bojang,
recalled being told to undress, and ordered to drink “filthy water from a tin.”
“Once you drink that, you become unconscious,
you can’t think,” he said.
Forty miles away in the
They demanded the sacrifice of a red goat and a
rooster. The imam of Bintang recalled drawing about
$40 from the village treasury to pay for the animals, which were slaughtered at
the graveyard beyond the town’s unlighted dirt streets.
Back in Serrekunda,
pedestrians hastened away when asked about the president. Mr. Jaiteh, the contractor, ducked inside a darkened shack,
hidden from the street by two towering stacks of tires, to talk about the
government with a friend.
“Human rights is not
here right now,” the friend, Yaya Gasam,
said in halting English. “Human rights is ... pop.”
Copyright
2009 The New York
Times Company
