Resurgence of Juju : Modern-Day Africa Turns to Old Magic

Azoka Ebo picked up her new white Mercedes-Benz at the car dealership, drove it straight to her Christian church and said a prayer of thanks. Later, the car safely parked at her apartment building, she invited an elderly neighbor to help her pray for protection.

“We call on you, the god of iron, to protect this woman from accidents,” the old man said as he sprinkled vodka on the hood, then the engine and finally the leather upholstery of the $20,000 automobile.

“If there is an accident in front, let this car be behind. If the accident is behind, this car will have passed on,” he continued, breaking a kola nut over the engine block. “When this car is old, may it bring her a bigger brother or sister.” (Translation: May she trade up.)

Part of Rural Fabric

Ebo, a government worker, wasn’t sure that the ceremony, known here as a “car washing,” was necessary. “But it’s been handed down to us by our forefathers,” she said. “And if it worked for them, it might work for us.”

Traditional animist practices and superstitions such as witchcraft, black magic, juju and native healing have long been part of Africa’s rural fabric, but lately they have been revived in some very modern settings across the continent.

Witch doctors, sorcerers and herbalists are used to bless automobiles against crashes, ferret out thieves and murderers and treat everything from infertility to AIDS. Occasionally, they are even successful.

The resurgence, in the view of some Africans, has been triggered by a feeling that important elements of the cultural heritage have gone missing in the continent’s headlong plunge into the 20th Century.

Economic, Health Concerns

Others say that worries about foundering economies and deadly diseases, neither of which seem to respond to Western medicine, have people shopping around in their pasts for help.

Johannes Openda called a medicine man to Kakaeta Village in western Kenya a few weeks ago to find out who was to blame for the mysterious deaths of several of his children. The man, Oganda Nyangire, summoned everyone from the village and prepared a potion.

“If anybody knows that he caused the deaths of Openda’s children, that person should come out in the open and confess,” Nyangire said, according to later police reports. “If he takes this drink, nothing but death will result.”

When no one confessed, Nyangire took a sip of his own concoction and then began administering it to the villagers. Within an hour, four villagers were dead and a fifth was in the hospital. As Nyangire was led off to jail, he insisted that his potion had successfully unmasked the culprits.

In northern Uganda, rebel fighters led by a local cult figure, Alice Lakwena, have been using an ointment they believe magically protects them from bullets. Last week, 185 of Lakwena’s followers, their bodies smeared with the ointment, were reported killed in one battle. More than 800 of Lakwena’s rebels have been killed in the past two months, the government says.

The use of traditional magical powers became a hot topic in Nigeria after Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, a former Nigerian president, suggested last year that Africans should use juju to fight apartheid. Obasanjo, co-chairman of an international group studying conditions in South Africa, did not specify how that might be done.

The word juju, from the Hausa language of northern Nigeria, is used throughout West Africa to mean black magic, omens, curses, voodoo--and attempts to protect oneself from that sinister unseen world.

People Believe It Works

Nigerian newspapers recently have been filled with reports of juju among thoroughly modern Africans. Witchcraft is “enjoying a revival in the most unexpected quarters” of Nigeria, reports the New African, a monthly newsmagazine.

A state governor refused to move into his official home because magical objects had been left there, for example, and another governor sought the help of an elderly jujuman to rid his state of crop-eating insects.

In some cases, juju works because the people believe it works. Stolen goods often are returned soon after the thief hears that a jujuman is on the case. A jujuman helped Bendel State University find a missing typewriter--and the member of the typing pool who took it. A United Nations agency in Lagos used two native doctors to locate some car tires stolen by its employees.

Using protective charms is especially important to Africans because they believe that the world is ruled by forces that make life unsafe for all, especially the unwary, according to Osadolor Imasogie, a Nigerian professor and author of “African Traditional Religion.”

Accidents Don’t Just Happen

“It is easy to say, for example, that an African driver must be stupid to think that a charm on the roof of his car will avert accidents,” Imasogie writes. “But for the driver, there is no natural event without a spiritual cause. What appears to be an accident is, for him, the result of a spell cast by an evil man.

“Neither intellectual sophistication nor over a century of Christianity has made a decisive inroad into the practice,” Imasogie adds.

Juju and other traditional practices began to fade with the arrival of the first Westerners, many of them Christian missionaries. Then came Western laws, Western clothes, Western buildings, Western food and Western education.

But the old way of seeing the world still rests beneath the surface, and “the fear of the unknown keeps people shuttling back between modern and traditional religions,” said J.A. Awosan, a sociology lecturer at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria.

Christian missionaries find that those animist beliefs are ingrained, even among converts.

“It’s there, yes, and not just in the uneducated people,” said George Foxall, a Canadian missionary in Nigeria. “You can tell whether they are truly Christian or not by whether they depend on the charms or on the Lord during a crisis.”

Many African nations have made attempts to preserve some elements of African tradition while getting rid of others that conflict with modern ways.

Nigerian officials have been sorting through the traditional culture, “saving and respecting the dancing and other practices that are good and burying the ones that are bad or unhealthy,” says Tony Momoh, the country’s minister of information and culture.

Some Nigerians are embarrassed by the resurgence of juju. Peter Ezeh, writing in the New African, suggests that it is superstitious ignorance rather than cultural pride “that is making us turn to witchcraft and black magic.”

In common tribal practice, jujumen or witch doctors guide people’s lives as well as cure their illnesses. Among the Yoruba people of Nigeria, who regard twins as having otherworldly powers, the mother of twins must ask the jujuman what she should do to appease her newborns. The jujuman often decides she should beg on the streets.

Animal Sacrifices to Fight AIDS

Acquired immune deficiency syndrome seems to have boosted the practice of witch doctors in southern Uganda, among the areas of Africa most devastated by the disease.

Dumba, a witch doctor in the jungle near Kyotera, sees two or three patients a week with AIDS-like symptoms. He works out of a grass hut and charges about 300 shillings, or $5, for a first visit.

Dumba believes the disease is hereditary, and he uses a combination of chants, charms and animal sacrifices to treat it. Witch doctors believe that by sacrificing an animal and leaving it for a passer-by to discover, the illness can be transferred from the patient to the passer-by. Ugandans steer clear of sheep and goat carcasses left frequently at intersections.

Traditional healers who rely on herbs rather than magic or spirits have gained some degree of respectability on the continent in recent years.

In Zimbabwe, the traditional healers have an association with 27,000 members and the government recently began licensing them. No formal exams are required because herbal doctors keep their techniques a secret. Instead, the licensing board makes its decision based upon whether or not people in the village think the native doctor’s techniques work.

Most of Zimbabwe’s traditional healers use herbs, and they specialize in everything from dentistry to psychiatry.

Medical Aspect Promoted

“We try to suppress the witchcraft aspect and promote the medical aspect because, on the whole, witches are not there to assist society but to destroy life,” said Gordon Chavunduka, a 56-year-old sociology professor at the University of Zimbabwe and a UCLA graduate.

Chavunduka, chairman of the government’s licensing authority and a traditional healer himself, said herbal medicine “seems to be much stronger and more effective than Western medicine in treating chronic illnesses, such as high blood pressure, asthma and mental illness.”

Up the road from Dumba’s hut in Uganda, Father Anatole Wasswa practices herbal medicine in a Roman Catholic monastery, the Brothers of St. Charles Lwanga. Anatole, a quiet, balding man, has been one of the white-robed brothers for 30 years, living quietly among the white bougainvillea and fat mango trees.

Anatole’s logbooks usually list 20 to 50 patients a day, although some days he sees more than 100. On occasion, he’ll take his clinic on the road, filling a burlap bag with herbs and setting out for villages hidden among the leafy banana trees.

He thinks he has been able to successfully treat AIDS victims, although none of his patients has ever been tested for the disease. “It’s no magic,” he says. “Just medicines. And the jungle is my pharmacy.”

He also treats headaches, fever, skin rashes, diarrhea and impotence. By far the most common complaint he hears is female infertility--caused, the patient often believes, by someone who has cast a spell on her.

Many of his patients have already been to witch doctors. Anatole shuns the witch doctors’ methods, and he has a collection of leopard skins, rattles and other items that witch doctors have prescribed and his patients have discarded.

In those cases, especially, he says, his work can win good will for the Lord. “If I succeed where the witch doctor fails, then my patient becomes a believer in God,” he says.

Anatole’s examining room has a tattered medical school anatomy chart on the door and a beach ball hanging from the ceiling. “For decoration,” he explains. His shelves are full of medicines, dried brown and sealed in plastic.

Many of his herbs must be boiled into a sort of tea for drinking. The herb for ulcers must be chewed. He treats sexual impotence with an herb that must be boiled in three bottles of locally brewed beer and then drunk quickly. For mental disorders, he asks the patient to place a particular herb on a fire and lean over, allowing the smoke to encircle the sufferer’s head.

A Long Tradition

“God made the heavens and the Earth to take care of us and there is plenty of medicine in the jungle to keep us well,” Anatole said.

While Western doctors think there may be some small merit in herbal medicine, few people will argue that Nigeria’s traditional “car washing” ceremonies have much value as protection against accidents.

Some naysayers argue it is not even traditional, pointing out that Africans have only had cars for a few decades. But Africans do have a long tradition of elaborate ceremonies to protect people and property from harm. And the roads of Nigeria are among the most dangerous in the world.

Azoka Ebo considers herself a modern, God-fearing woman. She works in a high-rise government building as a director of administrative services. On the wall of her office is a sign that reads: “Trust in God. He Will Provide.”

“Our generation may have been born into Christianity, but we can’t ignore what is good in our traditional culture,” she says.

When her husband decided to give her the Mercedes, her first thought was: “Why take a chance?”