Feature:Development/Mozambique/Africa:Mozambique tackles Witchcraft and Human Sacrifice

Feature
Development/Mozambique/Africa

Mozambique tackles Witchcraft and Human Sacrifice

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong examines Mozambique’s attempts to eradicate flourishing witchcraft and human sacrifice in its development process, drawing cases from Ghana and other Africa states

Blessed with some good elites, unlike other African states, Mozambique battled cyclical droughts and civil war. Overtime, Mozambique overturned the label, "the poorest country in the world." Having achieved that, Mozambique roll out political stability and adroitly cemented multi-party democracy. Since then, Mozambique has been rebuilding, and in the 1990s, its economy had made amazing progress, with double-digit growth rates, making it some of the highest growth rates Africa.
But despite these inspiring feats, Mozambique, like most African states, has serious problems from certain aspects of its culture – the growth in witchcraft and human sacrifice - that appear to inhibit its impressive growth. The growth of such negative cultural practices over the years show that Mozambique and other African states are yet to have holistic grasp of their cultural values, positive or negative, that drive their development. Such features are not factored in when developing policies, bureaucratizing, and consultancies. It is, therefore, not surprising that the BBC (2 August 2007) reports that “murder, mutilation and exhuming human bones for witchcraft have become a common practice, particularly in the country's northern and central regions. Items are sold in neighbouring Malawi, South Africa and Zimbabwe.” Such worrying practices occur against the backdrop, paradoxically, of growing economy and poverty remaining widespread and Mozambique still heavily dependent on donor aid - and subject to the whims and caprices of conditions attached to such assistance.
Over the years Mozambique and other African countries have overlooked certain aspects of their traditional values hindering their progress. Even, Ghana, first to free itself from colonial yoke and touted as the “Black Star” of Africa and which pride itself as the leading light of Africa, is yet to demonstrate that it is tackling such inhibiting values. Consider this: A priest, Yaw Agbebu, in Ghana's Central Region, confessed to killing eight people including his ex-wife for ritual purposes. In this context, let’s look at Equatorial Guinea, dubbed “Kuwait of Africa,” where human sacrifice and magic constitute one of the most powerful rhetorics of political culture. Florence Bernault, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells us “that Public rumors depict sorcery as the most common way to achieve personal success, wealth, and prestige in times of economic shortage and declining social opportunities. Political leaders are widely believed to perform ritual murder to ensure electoral success and power, and many skillfully use these perceptions to build visibility and deference.”
How do you progress in such societies that swing between fear and mistrust? Such societies can’t progress or progress very slowly as if retarded. Retarded by what: by the extremely strong negative cultural inhibitions. Why? Trust, a key element in the development process, is weak. As Bernault and other experts argue, within the breadth of the African culture and in the deeper progress of Africa, “is oftentimes ignored by classic political and historical studies.”
African elites, who should know better, blindly go by these Western classical paradigms, and have not made any conscious attempts to deal with this cultural issue as one of the hindrances in Africa’s progress. As the interplay of culture and progress show, the impact of the inhibiting aspects of Africa’s culture on the continent’s progress, as Bernault analyses, “is not a marginal, but a central dimension of the nature of public authority, leadership, and popular identities in Equatorial Africa” and Africa. Dirk Kohnert, of Germany’s Institute of African Affairs, argues that the belief in African native occultism are still "deeply rooted in many African societies, regardless of education, religion, and social class of the people concerned" and this has “implications for democratization and poverty-alleviating aid in Africa.”
Over the years, some African leaders have been dabbling heavily in the negative aspects of the culture and this has either paralyze their countries or blow them into pieces or blinded them from reasoning properly to solve their problems. From Liberia’s late Gen. Samuel Doe to Central Africa Republic’s late Jean-Bedel Bokassa (who ate human flesh as part of his rituals), the negative cultural practices have been appropriated and is responsible for weakening the rational abilities of the ruling elites to handle the challenges of the citizenry. The leader becomes unrealistic, depending on the illiterate, irrational, unscientific and impractical native spiritual mediums that practice the negative aspects of the culture that may come in the form of human sacrifices. Such leaders become the manipulative robots of the spiritual mediums, and by extension the African country.
A more telling illustration: Nigeria under the late Head of State, Gen. Sani Abacha. Juju-marabout mediums had grip on Gen. Abacha and his every move was directed them: he conducted important affairs of state overnight by the advise of the mediums; he looted the Nigerian treasury in the same fashion; he killed and jailed in the same vein (He jailed and nearly killed former President Olusegun Obasanjo upon the advice of the mediums, some of whom come as far as Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Mali, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and India). Nigeria was ruled by so much irrationality that the country became ’dark,’ implicating its progress.
Gradually, Africans are rising up to deal with these troubling aspects of their culture, including Mozambicans officials, who describe the encroaching negative values as worrisome. The BBC said the Mozambican cabinet is enacting “a bill against the trafficking of humans for body parts to be discussed and approved in the country's parliament this month.” And the Ghana Police Service and the South African Police Force (it has an Occult Unit) now focus on spiritual mediums that engage in the negatives such as human sacrifice.

Feature/Ghana:Re-Engineering Confidence for Progress

Feature/Ghana
Re-Engineering Confidence for Progress

Why is Ghana troubled by confidence in its development process? Kofi Akosah-Sarpong explores the issue

Of late, the word “confidence” has become a reality thresher among some Ghanaian elites trying to revamp Ghana’s progress. Some non-Ghanaian, too, think Ghanaians/Africans need a jolt of confidence in their progress. From Mr. J. H. Mensah, President John Kufour’s top economic development planner, to the former United Nations Secretary General, Mr. Kofi Annan, the issue of “confidence,” as a developmental magic wand, is fast emerging as a progress issue. President Kufour, too, has on various occasions used the word “confidence” to rally the development process.

Mr. Annan, the latest to use the word of among Ghanaian “Big Men,” is an accomplished diplomat who has seen all that progress is about in the world scene. He thinks “development is the result of transformation; no transformation could be successful without self confidence. We have to believe in our capacities.” Believe in capacities or not, the implications are cultural, historical, and metaphysical. But the thread running through all these attributes is Ghana’s values and traditions as a bulwark to drive Ghana’s confidence in its progress. That means in the larger scheme of things, culture is the magic wand, as the core life-line of progress. But how a country’s cultural values become its crucial life-line in its progress is dictated by how skillful its policy-makers and consultants appropriate its cultural values in its progress. Simply put, it means elites who have simultaneously thorough grasp of their values and traditions and at the same time able to play with them in the global development sphere: juggling values where appropriate, and mixing here and there to create perfect match for the Ghanaian environment as the Southeast Asians have done.

Example of confidence as progress issue driven by one’s cultural values is seen in Japan topping the world today in ideas, innovations, discoveries and patents. The London-based “Economist” (August 3, 2007), in a global examination of awarding patents, the Japanese are world leaders. Why? After a long, and sometimes technical and convulated global analysis, the “Economist” concluded that beyond the more obvious economic imperatives lie certain Japanese socio-cultural factors that appear to be at work. It is the Tokyo-based Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living (HILL) that sought to exploit the Japanese cultural norm of hitonami—a national tendency of wanting to be like others. That’s one central pillars of confidence that emanates from Japanese values and traditions that have been appropriated for ideas, innovation, and patents.

Another example of the confidence-progress subject, this time cited by Mr. Annan, is Malaysia. Both Malaysia and Ghana had independence from British colonial rule in 1957. At certain period Ghana had more prospects than Malaysia. But currently, “Malaysia’s per capita income is 13 times greater than Ghana, and distancing them from us in every single social and economic indicator,” Mr. Annan told the closing session of Ghana’s Parliament that is expected to be the key projector of Ghana’s confidence (Public Agenda, August 3, 2007). “The importance of Malaysia’s success for us has to do with that characteristic that is so essential for a country to prosper: self-confidence.”

Mr. Annan, himself an icon of confidence, didn’t tell Ghana’s Parliament how to engineer confidence in Ghana’s progress. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first President tried: “We are going to see that we create our own African personality and identity. We again rededicate ourselves in the struggle to emancipate other countries in Africa; for our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent.” That was a remarkable confidence booster. But it fell flat on its face. Ghanaians did not see this in broader policy-makings and consultancies as the Malaysians and the Japanese have done. Making high-sounding proclamation is one thing and weaving it into policy-making and consultancies, as a practical necessity in all spheres of the development process is another. This is where confidence as developmental driver became a problem, how to make it the strength of Ghana’s progress. Ghanaian social engineers can pick some ideas from the Vietnamese. It is confidence that enabled communist Vietnam, which went through horrendous ideological war, including with United States, from 1959 to 1975, to mix its indigenous values, the neo-liberal free market enterprise and socialism (the mixture is called "Doi Moi" or "Renovation") in its development process, and emerge today as the fastest growing economy in the world with 8 per cent annual Gross Domestic Product growth.

Nkrumah’s harsh marginalization of traditional institutions, key confidence booster, reveals that he had weak grasp of the correlation between confidence and progress. No doubt, for its weak confidence in its progress, Africa is the only region in the world, as Dr. Y.K. Amoako, former chair of the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Africa, observes where foreign development paradigms dominate its development process. This means Africans do not have confidence in their own values as a development fertilizer, as the Vietnamese and Malaysians have done. The lack of confidence is seen in African values and tradition, for long suppressed in nation-building, not informing national development planning, policy-making and consultancies.

A well-grounded confidence emanating from Ghana’s values and traditions in its development process will also have impact on Ghana’s international development partners and programs. And so will be Mr. Annan’s three pillars of an African Renaissance process: security, development and human rights.