A Year Since President Jammeh’s Witch-Screening Project

It is now a year since President Jammeh was once more able to shock Gambians, send the whole country into frenzy, shaking the bonds that tied people into communities by launching his Witch-screening exercise that aimed to purge the country’s nearly two thousand settlements of witches. Unrestrained by the enlightenment that is supposed to be hallmark of today’s global village and the rational thinking that permeates the constitutional order of modern officialdom, President Jammeh thought it wise to exorcize the country of the witches he sees looming over and about every hamlet, village, town, government building and department before any headway towards peace, progress and prosperity can be made. With the “witch-screening” exercise he launched about a year ago, end of January 2009,  President Jammeh unleashed a team of “witch-doctors’ from Guinea Conakry, accompanied by armed soldiers and a mob of chanting Green Boys & Girls thugs, to raid offices, homes, villages and even farms to identify potential witches, abduct them away to secrete detention centers where they were tortured and forced to drink mysterious potions that led to the death of many.

One such case was that of Isatou Badgie of Makumbaya village, who on Wednesday 4^th February 2009 passed away at the Royal Victoria Teaching Hospital in Banjul days after she was released from the detention center that used to be the home of Baba Jobe in Kotu where she was forced to drink the mysterious liquid. Many such deaths followed in the course of the three months the exercise lasted. But perhaps it was not only the poisonous liquid that killed them. The stigma and the shame of being identified as a witch by state-sponsored actors in communities in the grips of the accumulated superstition of hundreds of backward years, is enough to kill many a soul. Identifying a person of being a witch or a wizard in many Gambian communities automatically strips the person of all human rights, not to speak of civil liberties, in such communities. In Nigeria, the DCR, Kenya, Malawi and Uganda, to mention only a few African countries, so called witches, mostly elderly women, are lynched by stone throwing mobs, but in The Gambia, like nowhere else in the world of this 21^st century, it is the state that has been throwing the stone.

The witch-screening exercise also caused some social convulsions that today, almost a year after, still reverberates through many communities in the Western Region, where most of the gang of witch-hunters visited. In the small Western Region village of Jamburr for instance, it led to a group of young people, desperate to know the whereabouts of their abducted parents, attempting to raze and burned the house of the village chief, Alhagy Kebba Juju Bojang, who had gathered residents at the town square at the behest of the commander of the battalion or armed soldiers who escorted the witch-hunting gang.  A lengthy trial of six young men accused of arson against the chief’s house helped to remind the villagers of the ugly incident. Most of the stigmatized “witches” and their relatives will spend the rest of their respective lives in the shame that the stigma carries.

Without the condemnation of international public opinion and the heroic intervention of Mr. Halifa Sallah and his Foroya newspaper, the mad exercise would still have been going on in the country. According to what The Gambia Journal wrote that it had reliably learnt, the witch-doctors from Guinea were brought in on a two-year contract that would take them to every single habitat of the country’s nearly 2000 settlements and about 185 government and public enterprise work places.

It was when, working on an article for the Foroya newspaper, that Halifa Sallah on Saturday March 7^th 2009 went to Makumbaya village to gather facts around the screening exercise in that area. The next day police went and picked him up at his home and took him first, to the Serrekunda station before he was transferred to the Yundum station and slapped with a number of wild charges. The barrage of protests from abroad that followed this soon forced government not only to release the opposition politician but to suspend the exercise altogether and saved many Gambians and their communities from the ordeal.

 Now it is one year since the mercurial Gambian leader launched the mad exercise and The Gambia Journal last year asked for government to render apology to the aggrieved and to even compensate some of them. Because the call seems to have fallen on deaf official ears, we use the occasion of this shameful anniversary to repeat the call.