Mick Hartley

A particularly grim report from Gambia:

Dressed in ankle-length vermilion robes, adorned with hundreds of tiny cracked mirrors, the witch-hunters had first been spotted by watchmen, through the flames of their campfires, emerging from the bush in the dead of night.

Aroky Bajung, a mother of six, was one of the first sleeping villagers to wake. She caught fleeting glimpses of ceremonial gowns glinting in the moonlight as the tall strangers flitted between houses like ghosts. She grabbed her children and cowered under her bed, praying for morning to come.

By daybreak the fitful dreams of the villagers of Jambur in western Gambia had become a terrifying reality as they woke to the sound of screams and a spidery trail of blood and animal entrails. Before them, flanked by mysterious red-cloaked strangers, stood the notorious Green Boys, Gambia’s feared private militia.

“We have work to do here,” the soldiers shouted. “The president’s work.”

Within two hours the soldiers had seized more than 100 people. Simultaneously across Gambia another 1,200 suspected witches, both men and women, were rounded up. Shaking with fear, they were taken to secret government detention centres.

Here their nightmare really began. In the name of Yahya Jammeh, Gambia’s dictator, they had been singled out for exorcism. Accused of being witches, they were blamed for the death of the president’s beloved aunt. By nightfall at least six had died after they were forced to drink a mysterious potion. Those who survived the foul concoction spent the following days racked with pain. Some claimed to have bled from their eyeballs. […]

Earlier this year Jammeh held a mass demonstration of his homemade cure for Aids. He invited thousands of local victims of the disease to abandon western anti-retroviral drugs and line up at the gates of his palace to try his herbs and banana remedy. A doctor who criticised the call to abandon the medication was jailed.

Superstition and mysticism go hand in hand under Jammeh’s erratic rule. He regularly threatens to behead homosexuals and drive them out of the country. He also declared that only he can drive through the giant arch built to commemorate his 1994 coup….

Back in Jambur, Karomo Bojang, an imam, is one of 40 Muslims taken in the witch-hunts. “Why did they use witch doctors to force me and my neighbours to drink some unworldly potion?,” he asked.

“We are living among madness. Our lives are in the hands of a lunatic.”