Black Magic

Papua New Guinea

Black magic. It was alive and well in the 1970s and persists to this day in Papua New Guinea. As the society reeled under fitful and uneven development fuelling so many unfulfilled expectations, old customs persisted. Women were blamed, accused of sorcery and branded as witches — with horrific consequences.

On a visit to a village outside Kundiawa, we heard the shout: ‘They’re going to cook the sanguma mama!’

Excited children ran past the hut where we were talking about language. Our host leapt to his feet. He knew immediately what the excited children were rushing to see. They were on their way to watch a witch-burning.

We did not follow. This was a violent area. Our police escort would not allow it. We remonstrated, but we sat there like stuffed, impotent academic geese concerned but useless. We decided to return to town.

The next morning we returned and sought out our contact. He was one of the new University of PNG’s first graduate. What he told us was chilling. A woman accused of witchcraft had been seized by a crowd of youths. They were looking for someone to blame for the recent deaths of two young men. They had stripped her naked, blindfolded her, berated her with accusations and slashed her with machetes.

She was tied to a rusty length of corrugated roofing: trussed and helpless. The gathered villagers encircling her included uniformed police.

After beating her and slashing her they let her go. What happened to her later, our friend did not know. She survived. She was fortunate.

In Papua New Guinea, 80 per cent of the population lives in remote communities. Many have little access to even basic health and education, surviving on what they eat or earn from their gardens. There are few roads out. Tracks crawling over high mountain passes link valley to valley and eventually to the major towns. Any wealth from mining in Bougainville and the highlands (Porgera for example) bypassed the vast majority. In their reality, some untouched by outside influence until only a generation ago, tradition resists the notion that natural causes, disease, accident or recklessness might be responsible for a death. To them, bad magic is the culprit.

When people die, especially men, people start asking ‘Who’s behind it?’, not ‘What’s behind it?’’ The answer must lie in sorcery and witchcraft. Even our friend, the new graduate, admitted to belief in sorcery. He just shrugged.

‘What can I do?’

There was a sense in the early 70s that more and more people were becoming disgusted at lynch-mobs and payback and the extreme cruelty that slaughtered witches and sorcerers. Sadly, while disgust was expressed, little was done to seek to change the practice. Indeed, it proliferated.

Some months later we saw another case in a village near Mendi where an old woman dragged herself into a clinic, her genitals burned by the repeated intrusions of red-hot irons.

Why? Anthropologists have assembled quaint pictures of the customs that underwrite ‘pay-back’. The word and the concept strike fear into the hearts of most Papua New Guineans but they persist. Add that to attacking sorcerers, and the mixture is volatile. PNG is one of the most ethnically diverse nations in the world. It is confounding to outsiders and even as we sought to understand, it changed.

Sorcery-related atrocities were common. What was worrying was that the profile of this social terrorism was shifting. Ritual attacks on accused sorcerers — historically brutal in some parts, notoriously so in the wild highlands — began to break out of traditional boundaries and moved into the mining camps and slums and towns as people moved the to big lights. Its bestiality took on new levels of incomprehensible violence and horror. Attacks on accused sorcerers and witches — sometimes men, but most commonly women — became more frequent, ferocious and often fatal.

This went against anthropological norms that claimed that the hold of sorcery and witchcraft over a society declines with modernity. This had happened in Europe and North America. In Melanesia, and particularly in PNG, this was not the case. Instead, tradition was morphing into something even more sadistic and brutal, stirred up by a toxic mixture of booze and drugs, displaced youth, upheaval of the social order, rural desperation over inadequate infrastructure—especially health—and men and women, struggling to find their place in the developing nation, often resentful.

In the past, villagers would push someone over a cliff. They still ended up dead but what we began to see was horrific torture.

Just as happened in the bloody spectacles of Rome’s arenas, putting sorcerers down was becoming a modern, public spectacle.

Of course, there were those who objected. We heard of police watching the tragic events. Why would they not act? Why did leaders do nothing?  Even if they wanted to stop the violence, they had little power in the face of a village mob — particularly a mob enraged by alcohol and drugs.

The police? PNG’s police force was underpaid, under-resourced and under-trained. It was also corrupt and abusive. Sadly, even today, that seems to be the case. Many police themselves believed in sorcery. They saw what was happening as customary and therefore legitimate. Recognising the problem, in 1971 the government introduced a Sorcery Act. This acknowledged the existence of sorcery and criminalised those who practiced it and those who attacked people accused of sorcery. Did it have any impact? Sadly, no. In a lawless society, who cares about law?

The Sorcery Act was devised to acknowledge the ‘widespread belief throughout the country that there is such a thing as sorcery, and sorcerers have extra-ordinary powers that can be used sometimes for good purposes but more often bad ones’. It distinguished ‘innocent sorcery’ which was defined as protective and curative, from ‘forbidden sorcery’ — everything else.

The Act recognised citizens’ concerns and provided a mechanism for them to have an accused sorcerer dealt with by the courts rather than taking the law into their own hands. In the 21^st century, a review concluded that the Act had not prevented bad magic: nor had it every effectively punished practitioners.

What it had done was provide legal refuge for vigilantes to argue sorcery as a mitigating factor acknowledged under law allowing witch-killers to get off with light sentences. There are moves to change the act but it will take much more than a change in legislation to counteract the violence.

Three years after the act, in Kundiawa, a friend who lived there told me of a case in which an accused sorcerer was tortured while on ‘trial’. In this particular case, for reasons not clear, the crowd let her go and she was placed in police custody. My informant asked to see her but the police said he could no as they had lost the key to the cell.

The following day, he heard a ruckus and discovered that the crowd had somehow got her in their clutches again. They were repeating the previous day’s torture. He drove to the police station to report it. The police commander said that he could do nothing. The commander claimed that the crowd had promised him that would not hurt her.

My friend raced to the site to find the woman naked, staked-out, spread-eagled on a frame, blindfolded, with a fire burning next to her. The fear she must have felt is unimaginable. She would have known that irons were being heated in the fire to mutilate her. Our friend broke down as he described what the crowd did with those irons.

It turns out that she had no husband to protect her. He had died leaving her with a daughter. Custom required women to leave their own place and family when they married. If their husband died, they found themselves stranded in a what was often a hostile environment. When a family, believing that death comes through human agency, looks for a scapegoat, abandoned or widowed women become easy prey.

What happened to the woman? She was left to die of her injuries, untended by anyone in the village. A large Catholic church stood in that village. Why did the priest not do anything? A sobering thought. Why did the police do nothing? Who knows!

Years after this event, on my last night in Papua New Guinea, before moving to Indonesia in 1982, my own experience showed that the police were ineffective. We, as with most expatriates, had our haus meri. She lived with her husband and young son in a small hut outside our compound. We let her in during the day and locked her out at night. We heard the sounds of alcohol induced revelry coming from the hut but ignored it. It was common. Her husband was unemployed and totally dependent on what we paid Rose.

Just before midnight, we heard her screaming out to us. I went to the gate. She was holding her young son. Blood was splattered over her clothes. She told me that her husband had attacked a friend of his with a machete and she was terrified. I let her in and my wife settled her down. I walked up to the hut. The husband was lying comatose on the floor. Next to him, dead, was his friend, lying in a pool of blood, part of his head sliced off.

I ran back to the house and called the police. The arrived remarkably quickly. I left them to it as they removed the body, handcuffed the husband and took him off assuring me that they would deal with things. We decided to spend the rest of the night with several gin and tonics. Rose, whimpering, huddled in the spare bedroom with her son.

An hour later we heard shouting from the hut. I went out. The husband had returned, still confused with alcohol, but quite able to wield his machete. He asked where Rose was.

I told him she had run away. I told him to go to sleep and not make any more noise or I would shoot him. That worked. I called the police.

‘Why is he back? Please come and get him and lock him up and arraign him and etcetera etcetera.’

The reply? ‘We already arrested him once. We don’t have the resources to do it twice.’

Unbelievable but true.

I have no idea what happened to Rose, but it showed me that if the police were so incompetent in cases such as ours, what hope for help did villagers have when violence of a far worse nature occurred?

As in this case. Mount Hagen, famed for its sing sings. Tourist mecca. A 20-year-old mother of two was stripped, tortured, trussed, doused with petrol, thrown on a rubbish tip, covered with tyres and set alight. She died. The killing was carried out by relatives of a six-year-old boy who had just died in the local hospital. They seized a couple of women they suspected of causing the death, among them the victim, and determined that she would be the scapegoat of their grief. In this case, police tried to intervene but the crowd blocked them.

It is reprehensible in any society that anyone should be targeted for alleged sorcery. We could see momentum building up to address what was becoming endemic, epidemic violence against women, but that build up was hardly a groundswell and to this day such atrocities continue. Respect for the rule of law and the rights of others are pillars of any modern-day democracy. Does PNG fall under this category? Answer that for yourself.

PNG is a fascinating and beautiful country. There are magical cultures and traditions. But its underbelly is horrific.