Yet again we’ve got poor education and superstitions (or convenient excuses) leading to the brutal deaths of mostly women, this time occurring in Tanzania. Horribly, there are two examples within a few weeks of one another.
Firstly, from Seven Suspected of Witchcraft Burned to Death:
Seven people accused of witchcraft have been burned alive in Tanzania, police said Friday, adding they have arrested 23 people in connection with the crimes.
“They were attacked and burnt to death by a mob of villagers who accused them of engaging in witchcraft,” the police chief for the western Kigoma region which borders Burundi, Jafari Mohamed, told AFP.
“Five of those killed were aged over 60, while the other two were aged over 40,” he added.
Elderly women are the highest risk group and the brutal attacks are usually justified as responses to bad luck, infertility, accidents, etc. The logic of assuming that the elderly woman must be responsible is completely nonexistent as surely the “witch” would have cast her spells of misfortune earlier in her life but logic doesn’t get much room in the irrational brain. A possible factor in the late-in-life blaming of women is offered up in that article as some women start to get red eyes, a side effect of the cooking style employed. Differences are scary. In a similar vein albinos are often the targets of attacks in this and other parts of Africa.
The second article, Two Women Accused of Witchcraft Hacked To Death, has this to say:
Two Tanzanian women were hacked to death by men who accused them of casting spells that made them sexually impotent, police said on Friday, in the latest killings of alleged “witches”.
The women, one aged in her 80s and her 45-year old daughter, were killed in the village of Ihugi in Tanzania’s northern Shinyanga province late on Tuesday.
Three men slit their throats and then chopped their bodies up, local police chief Justus Kamugisha said, adding that their neighbour was suspected of carrying out the attack after he believed they had made him unable to have sex.
Burned alive or a slit throat? Either way, until there’s reduced poverty and better education – which would ideally include a reduction in strong beliefs in any superstitious crap (including religion) – and a shift away from very dominant male-driven societal groups these sorts of gruesome murders will continue. So that’s Tanzania off the visit list then.
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