By Emily Reimer-Barry

Why do people suffer? How can one believe in a Creator God who allows people to suffer? How can we explain our everyday experiences of evil and tragedy while still affirming order and meaning in our world?

These are complex questions and they are not new. Human beings have wrestled with these kinds of theological and philosophical questions for thousands of years. Christians in the United States answer these questions in a variety of ways. As I’m finding out this week, so do Africans. As part of our seminar I have been reading about witchcraft and traditional African religion(s). For Americans, talk of witches might make one think of such varied themes as tacky Halloween costumes, historical analysis of the Salem Witch Trials, or Wicca in contemporary America. Here in Kenya some ethnic groups account for evil in the world by explaining that witches can use their powers to influence other people’s behavior or to influence nature.

As part of my research for this course I had the opportunity to interview a Christian woman who believes in witches. I am still processing this experience but want to describe our conversation and some of the things I have learned from it.

For my informant, a witch is a person whose intention is evil, and who has special powers to influence nature or the behavior of other people. You can’t recognize witches by where they live, what they wear, or where they worship. But if something evil happens you know a witch is involved. For example, if a family member gets sick with terminal illness, you can assume that a witch is to blame. Nothing is mere accident in the world; there is always an agent involved. But this understanding of witchcraft safeguards an image of an all-good Creator God because, according to my informant, “God allows the evil to be done, but God does not do evil.” As a Christian she believes that prayers to Jesus can combat witchcraft, if the one who prays has enough faith. I told her that I did not think that I believed in witches, and she told me “witches exist whether you believe in them or not.” When my informant told me that she had experienced witchcraft in her own life, I asked her to tell me her stories.

Her first experience of witchcraft was when she was seven years old. Her grandmother was always suspicious of her neighbor down the street and on one particular day, while walking back from the market with her grandmother, they felt like they were being followed by evil spirits. They looked back and saw this suspicious neighbor, whom she called a witch. When they arrived at the gate to their compound the witch caught up to them, mumbled a curse, and spat on the ground. My informant accidentally stepped in the spit and immediately her scalp began to itch and her hair began to fall out. Her grandmother began to pray with her to combat the spell, and eventually her itchy flaky scalp healed but her hair has never fully come back. Today she has short hair that she pulls back with a hair band and she says that her hair never grows.

She told me another story as well. Once, in her church, a young boy was unable to eat for nearly a month. During one church service members of the community extended their hands to pray over the boy but when he tried to eat that night, sand mysteriously appeared in his food. That is how they knew that he had been cursed. When they prayed over him at another church service the boy writhed in pain and my informant said that she could see stones falling from the ceiling. But because of the faithful prayers of the Christians who prayed over the boy, the work of the witch’s curse had been disrupted, and with more prayers over more weeks the boy was freed and was able to heal and to eat again.

My informant also told me that diviners can interpret and resist witches’ actions. A diviner is a person who has a vocation to mediate God’s healing presence in the world. A diviner is a godly person who can confirm a witch’s action and who has the power to disrupt this evil intent.

At this point in the conversation I had tons of questions for my informant! I started by asking her about her understanding of personal responsibility in light of what she had told me about witchcraft. How could she be sure that when something went wrong a witch was to blame? Does she have an understanding of bad luck or of negative consequences from actions? My informant said that sometimes when bad things happen it is because the person did something wrong. But in other times when bad things happen it cannot be attributed to the person doing something wrong. That is why you can go to a diviner and explain the problem and if the diviner is very good, she can help you.

I was also curious about whether her belief in witchcraft prevented her from seeking medical treatment in cases of illness (since she had already told me that illness is an example of witchcraft). I specifically asked her: what do you do if a family member is sick? She said that first she prays to God and asks God for healing. She explains to God that she has faith in God’s powers and she believes God’s will will be done. But, if the illness is very serious, she goes to the hospital. If it is not serious then she stays at home and asks God to heal her.

I asked her if she could give me an example of this in her life, and she told two stories. First, when she was very sick at home and thought she had malaria, she told her husband that God would heal her and that she did not need Western medicine. But her husband made her go to the hospital to be treated, and when she took the medicine she recovered. She said that this was not only because of the medicine but because of her great faith in God. She gave another example as well. A few years ago when traveling to see her mother she began to have a high fever and hot flashes/cold shivers. She called her mother to tell her that she was turning the car around because she was sick and her mother insisted that she continue to come and that while she traveled her mother would pray for her unceasingly. Sure enough, when she arrived at her mother’s gate she was healed.

She told one final story as a way of explaining her understanding of her belief in witches and her faith in God’s power. When her father was very old he became sick, and on the way to the hospital she and her mother prayed over him. God revealed to her that her father’s time had come, and when he received treatment in the hospital he was healed and then died. Even though she was very sad to say goodbye to her father, she knew that God had confirmed that her father’s time had come. His death was not a result of witchcraft.

At this point we were running out of time and our conversation shifted to my experience in Kenya so far. I told her that I was still getting used to the bumpy roads and that I was nervous about the matatu drivers who are very reckless. She asked me if I am a Christian and I told her yes, and she told me that I should not worry about the matatu drivers because if I have faith in God then God will protect me.

I wanted to ask her if this is the kind of advice she would give in other circumstances, but I thought it would be rude. I had in mind the case of HIV-prevention and condom use but I did not feel comfortable asking her whether she would just tell someone to pray for God’s protection.

As our conversation ended I had more questions than answers, and I am still thinking about what she said. I don’t know what to make of the stories she told me. Clearly her grandmother’s neighbor had scared her as a young child, and she associates this story with her psoriasis and hair growth. Others might say that there are other explanations, but this is the one that makes the most sense to her. Some might use Western medicine to explain how she recovered from malaria or from the illness she experienced when traveling to see her mother, but she believes she was healed through the power of prayer (at least in part).

I remain troubled by my informant’s attempt to explain tragedy by referring to witchcraft. But at the same time I am trying to understand how this makes sense to her. If we see her beliefs contextually can we understand how a person in her social location might find it empowering to say that faithful prayer can disrupt evil in the world?

I also want to point out that there are some important similarities with my informant’s understanding of witchcraft and some Christians’ understandings of the devil or Satan. Some Christians believe that there are cosmic forces of good and evil battling and that bad things in your live are the result of the work of the devil. Lest we automatically dismiss this woman’s description as superstitious we should acknowledge that there are superstitious Christians in the world as well. For me her analysis made me realize that any discussion of evil and tragedy in the world brings up many questions about God, human agency, and meaning-making.

As I conclude this long-winded description and reflection, I’d simply like to point out that even if my readers find my informant’s descriptions to be strange, she is not alone. Just last week the BBC Africa “Have Your Say” online forum was devoted to the question: “Do you believe in witchcraft?” As you can imagine a variety of responses have been submitted. You can read them online here.

In addition there are a few recent news stories from BBC Africa about persons who have been murdered here in Kenya because their attackers claimed they were witches. So my informant’s descriptions, which might seem strange to me, are more prevalent than I had initially realized. One powerful and disturbing report is Joseph Obhiambo’s recent article in which he gives a first-hand account of the public murder of five accused witches. While Pope Benedict has spoken out against witchcraft, I witnessed a “Catholic visionary” here in Nairobi just a few days ago whose claims about the power of the rosary and holy water came close to the same kind of beliefs my informant was describing.

When we discussed witchcraft in our seminar last week, one of the Kenyan participants said that one can think of witchcraft as the community’s way of shaming and stigmatizing persons who do not fit the norm of their culture. It is a way that the traditional community regulated behavior, she told me. For me, many questions remain. Why do people—Christian or otherwise—seek to describe tragedy by ascribing agency and power to a figure like the devil or a witch? In a country where over 150 persons have been accused of witchcraft and murdered by members of their community, what is going on? How are these beliefs connected to a community’s education, to widespread experience of tragedy, and the need to have someone, something to blame? And how should Christians describe the goal of prayer, the limits of human agency, and the realities of tragedy?