The measure of cultural distance between America and remote PNG has, at either ends of the spectrum, an American Republic media-darling Tea Party celebrity, Christine O'Donnell-- who was once a 'witch', who considered becoming Hare Krishna, and whose father was Bozo the Clown [no joke, really]
--and the unnamed Chuave women of so many news accounts here in PNG in the past few years.
Today there was another one, in the Post-Courier:
Sorcery, used as an excuse to torture and kill
Four people are dead. They were brutally tortured and while they were crying out in agony, their tormentors tied their legs and hands, then threw them into the fast flowing Waghi River.
Their bodies have not been recovered. Two of those killed were an elderly married couple, hardly strong enough to defend themselves against the attack.
The deceased were accused of using sorcery to kill a village chief. This happened on September 4 in Wangoi, Chuave in the Chimbu Province.
This is not the first time that the Police have reported this barbaric behaviour of our people. Over the years we have read about people, usually the elderly and the defenseless, who fall victim to people who do not seem to have any respect for human life.
And these attacks and killings are spreading throughout the country, that is it becoming a big concern for human rights organizations in the world.
The tortures and killings of sorcery suspects are just a part of the problem in this issue. What is not often made public is the damage done to the reputation and standing of the family members of those accused of being sorcerers.
Children of sorcery suspects live in fear all their lives because those who believe in this age old witchcraft business think that the sorcerers pass on the ‘powers’ to their children.
In the case of girls, it can be very frightening. A girl who comes from a family with such a damaged reputation stands to face the same fate, like that of her parents, later in life. For her, education is the key to her survival, for when she is educated, has a job and is earning money, her community values her more and that acts as her shield.
For the poor villager, her days are numbered. She could be the next victim when someone dies.
These attacks and killings, will continue to be part of the larger problem of violence against women and girls that is pervasive and rarely punished in this country.
How long do we have to wait for the government to bring an end to such attacks and killings of innocent people? It is apparent that the Sorcery Act, if there is one in place, has no teeth.
When a lot of innocent people are killed after what are literally witch hunts, it is clear that the government is not doing enough to protect its own citizens and maintain the rule of law.
The police and the judicial authorities have to step in immediately before more people continue to face this kind of vigilante violence.
Public awareness to address misconceptions that HIV/AIDS and the other diseases are linked to sorcery also needs to be addressed by all concerned with this problem.
The public health system in the country has the capacity to deal with all kinds of medical problems and those suffering from any ailment should be taken to the hospitals, health centres and aid posts for treatment.
The tough economic times we are living in also contributes to the spread in the sorcery attacks and killings. People nowadays spend much of the time worrying about their own problems that they neglect the sick and elderly, who are left to fend for themselves at most times.
Combined with this is the cost of medical treatment at hospitals, making it harder for villagers to afford, that the sick are left in the villages to die.
Often in these cases, sorcery is blamed by relatives of the deceased, to hide their shortcomings from the community.
Sorcery killings is a human rights issue and the we must act now to end this rash of killings, related to allegations of sorcery.
Sorcery in PNG today
None of us would presume to have all the answers, nor even all the data, on this subject, which is rapidly changing and which pervades everything from political and religious, to economic life across the country. Especially for women.
There are two main types of sorcery in PNG: poison, or sympathetic magic, and sanguma.
Sympathetic magic includes marila or love magic, in which nail clippings, hair, food scraps and so forth can be used to cast a spell on someone at a distance. This category hasn’t. Fortunately, been much expanded in a modern world so we can share biros, silverware, cold drinks and even seats without much worry still.
Highlands medics sometimes treat sorcery caused by poisons with emetics and laxatives—as functional equivalents of traditional medicines. Pangia call this tomo, and it also includes a marila component that women may give men and vice versa. This kind of illness involves stomach upsets of mild nature, and can be treated with vomiting.
‘Leavings’ sorcery is sympathetic magic. We always discard all our leavings to prevent sorcery---food gets thrown into water. These cures are more investigative, like a CID event, and nothing to do with a hospital. Manam Islanders always accuse women of marila, supernatural pulling power.
But sanguma is men’s work, and is very serious and mainly fatal, so of an entirely different order. This involves an expert sorcerer, in most cases someone who has been trained in the vocation, and traditional (not so long ago) an initiation which would require him (mostly him) to kill his first child and thus subsume that power unto himself. This is typical of the north coast and Sepik all the way to the Siassi and Huon Peninsula.
When Madang people talk about sorcery they are talking about this, and in present day they are also talking about specialists coming from, say, Bagasin, and new forms migrating from Bogia, for example that involves the sanguma man coming to you while you sleep, slitting your throat and thus making you unable to speak. Ppeople also say Raikos is filled with sanguma, whereas Madang proper is less so. Sometimes you can put kavuvur for something around a house to transform the sanguma man from invisible to visible at night so you can defend yourself.
Sorcerers waylay a victim and transfix them. They can hunt people down, for example, find a woman in her garden and copulate with her, then kill her and take her heart out. Or the kidneys are pulled out ---one may be placed in the victims mouth, and the person’s insides are said to be stuffed with leaves. He or she is sent home after being sewn up magically, and is told to cook and eat the kidney. Or the victim is given amnesia of the event, or perhaps only told the date when they will die. He/she may be left in a zombie like state that relatives are powerless to interfere in, and die without medical care. Raikos sangumamen use pigs, dogs and black ants as their cover. Bagasin use flying kokomos at night.
In Western Province a slightly different thing occurs, a combination of sorcery and sympathetic magic. A victim is caught with the help of an unwitting third party, usually a relative, who can provide droppings, the smoke or hair of the target without knowing it. But then when the victim dies, the third person also suffers torments by the spirit of the deceased—a prolonged illness, weight loss, mental problems, physical decaying is some cases, or more direct pain and communication with spirits. As a result, people with classic symptoms of HV/AIDs these days are mistaken for those who may have had a hand in sorcelling someone else.
The direct effects of sorcery are no more heinous and unjust sometimes than the indirect ones, as, for example, when a bereaved parent gets blamed for his child’s death because of some land dispute, or something he himself has done. When people are blamed for sorcery without evidence the effect can be devastating for an entire family, clan, community, as I can personally attest for my own family.
What people like Linus Digim Rina, the Head of the Anthropology Dept at UPNG, and a Trobriander, suggests is that we look at the effects and not the causes, that we walk backward from the tragedy of a primary or secondary death (an original victim or an accused sorcerer who has been hurt). Some of the worst tragedies come from rumours and witch hunts, where people have taken on the role of jurors without sufficient evidence.
If the original sorcerer has not confessed (in pride) or he/she leaves no hard evidence, then the repercussions are potentially more of the same: he or she may be hounded and killed in counter-sorcery, or bloodlust, or perhaps cast out in shame. Signs of weakness or empathy in mourning can also suggest sorcery.
Thus we have two issues to confront: whether sorcery has been the cause of an original calamity, and whether a second calamity can be vindicated as payback for sorcery. The first is especially difficult to ascertain, and the second becomes an issue of restorative justice.
In that great divide between evidence and faith, it really doesn’t matter what someone’s objectives are, if they perform acts that are perfectly legal and have no direct bearing on someone’s health or well-being, it remains a matter of faith only that they have committed sorcery or witchcraft. If I pray for rain, by the same token, and it rains, you can berate me, but you cannot convict me of anything.
Women are twice victimized by restorative justice
But in this day and age when women are being strung up in trees, buried alive, set alight, and generally demonized as witches; and when men continue to confess to acts of sorcery, the idea that we might convince anyone out of a magical system of beliefs is impractical. But when people admit to a crime, they must be investigated, and when it becomes clear that he or she did cause physically or by coercion allow another to brutalize someone, to make them sick or even kill them, then a crime has been committed entirely independent of the sorcery act. Whatever the social outcome of the crime---if it allows peace or relives strain in a community—it is still a crime and must be treated as such.
We live in a country where restorative justice is most effective, and therefore people everywhere continue to justify sorcery/sanguma/poison in terms of the betterment of the community. But this runs counter to western jurisprudence, and it is becoming far-fetched to see PNG communities as autonomous entities anymore---they are cast out across the country as people from one language move and work everywhere else, and their borders grow porous as daughters move in with their husbands and men marry women from elsewhere, not to mention development projects bring migrants right into your lap. We now have Kerema and Tolai and Sepik people in one compound in the settlements, even here in Madang, breeding new ideas about sorcery and competing in different ways with this instrument of social control—which is magic—to define the larger community.
More importantly, women are more often the victims of restorative justice than they are the beneficiaries, as anyone in village court will tell you. They are martyrs to the peace of a community they only married into. And the first ones to be named as cause when things go bad.
Sorcery is a social regulator, the original form of jurisprudence. For fear of sorcery people gag themselves, stay inline, and most importantly in today’s PNG, fear success for the jealousy it inspires. All of us everywhere have at one time or another said about him or her that he’s courting revenge by being so bigheaded. And by that we don’t mean a verbal reprimand, we mean samting blong ples. And when his wife, her son, or their pig dies, we smile smugly, and feel like saying I told you so.
But increasingly if we hear that someone has put samting blong ples on this person, we are shocked, and saddened. We know he or she worked hard for that car, or loved their child, and was not deliberately courting bad luck for wanting to get ahead.
We can talk about the many reasons sorcery is on the rise---terrible infrastructure and even worse health services, new diseases with unknown symptoms, greater mobility and exposure to other diseases, not to mention fears and prejudices against others, etc. A mushroom of social change which allows enormous variety of behaviors that never existed before and suddenly may be considered to attract sorcery. A rise in ‘blame the victim’ mentality as these behaviors come to confuse us. Breakdown of taboos so that men and women eat together, step over each others things, and even touch each other in wholly unprecedented ways---in public. Emergence of social classes, so that the village wife and the husband’s female colleague are now, more than ever before, from two very different worlds, and where jealousy is an everyday, sometimes uncontrollable experience, especially when we hear about people getting rich by kickbacks and palm greasing and simply being in the right place at the right time. Yu laki! ---That makes me un-laki!
But to be clear: I can whinge that she has stolen my boyfriend, but if I stab her with a knife I am guilty of a crime. If I engage a known sangumaman or poisonman to make her sick or ugly or turn her head away from him, I am guilty of what? It’s hard to say. If I engage the same poisonman to make a marila to bring my boyfriend back, I am not guilty either, am I? But if I do so and it causes his new girlfriend to commit suicide, or causes him to recklessly swim the strait and drown, in an effort to reach me, you might say Im guilty. Or liable to some degree. But what if I engage a sagumaman to kill my rival, and she does die in he sleep, the doctors say of a heart attack (she was a fat highlander who ate too many lamb flaps anyway), and if the police find this sangumaman and he confesses to the crime but supplies absolutely no details, and her body lacks any marks whatsoever, can he be indicted? Can I be? Is intent to kill the same as murder?
I am reading your blog for the first time and I must say your approach is different. What sets bloggers apart is how they connect to their readers; you really connected with me. Great post!
Posted by: HCG Diet | July 01, 2011 at 08:36 AM
Thanks for a very informative post! Such a pity everyone in PNG has to live/die with sorcery & revenge killing still.
Posted by: James | October 06, 2010 at 09:53 PM