As I attempted to digest stories of spiritual cannibalism, of
curses that could cost a student her eyesight or ignite the pages
of the books she read, I knew I was not alone in my skepticism. And
yet, when I caught sight of the waving arms of an industrious
scarecrow, the hair on the back of my neck would stand on end. It
was most palpable at night, this creepy feeling, when the moon
stayed low to the horizon and the dust kicked up in the breeze,
reaching out and pulling back with ghostly fingers. There was
something to this place that could be felt but not seen.
With these words, Karen Palmer takes us inside one of West
Africa's witch camps, where hundreds of banished women struggle to
survive under the watchful eye of a powerful wizard. Palmer arrived
at the Gambaga witch camp with an outsider's sense of outrage,
believing it was little more than a dumping ground for difficult
women. Soon, however, she encountered stories she could not
explain: a woman who confessed she'd attacked a girl given to her
as a sacrifice; another one desperately trying to rid herself of
the witchcraft she believed helped her kill dozens of people.
In "Spellbound, "Palmer brilliantly recounts the kaleidoscope of
experiences that greeted her in the remote witch camps of northern
Ghana, where more than 3,000 exiled women and men live in extreme
poverty, many sentenced in a ceremony hinging on the death throes
of a sacrificed chicken.
As she ventured deeper into Ghana's grasslands, Palmer found
herself swinging between belief and disbelief. She was shown books
that caught on fire for no reason and met diviners who accurately
predicted the future. From the schoolteacher who believed Africa
should use the power of its witches to gain wealth and prestige to
the social worker who championed the rights of accused witches but
also took his wife to a witch doctor, Palmer takes readers deep
inside a shadowy layer of rural African society.
As the sheen of the exotic wore off, Palmer saw the camp for
what it was: a hidden colony of women forced to rely on food scraps
from the weekly market. She witnessed the way witchcraft preyed on
people's fears and resentments. Witchcraft could be a comfort in
times of distress, a way of explaining a crippling drought or the
inexplicable loss of a child. It was a means of predicting the
unpredictable and controlling the uncontrollable. But witchcraft
was also a tool for social control. In this vivid, startling work
of first-person reportage, Palmer sheds light on the plight of
women in a rarely seen corner of the world.
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