It was just a matter of time.
In many villages in Ghana, vulnerable elderly women are tagged as witches. They are loathed and ostracized.
In many cases, their own children, some educated and living in the cities, abandon them because their pastors, people who never knew they existed until they showed up in their churches and started tithing huge sums of Ghana Cedis, have said they, those very women, who toiled day and night to take care of them, the women who bore them, stayed up late to nurse them from malaria, dysentery, diarrhoea and the many childhood killer diseases, sold or pawned their last cloth to educate them, are now witches who must be left alone in the village. Their sons especially, keep their city born and bred children away from them again because they fear their mothers would kill them with their witchcraft.
In my Nzema community this is no secret. In some parts of Northern Ghana I understand there are “witch camps” set up specifically for such.
There is no judge, no jury, no physical, empirical evidence. All it takes is for one to be female, old and sometimes also widowed. At the most vulnerable time in their lives, all that is needed is for a priest, a soothsayer, a pastor, sometimes just an ordinary Ama, to say that she saw so and so in a dream and she is a witch. Other times a death in the family starts the damning accusations. That is all it takes for these women to be condemned to a life of misery, ridicule, and now, in the case of Madam Akua Denteh, a lynching in broad daylight.
Everybody who has entertained any of these pastors, priests, dreams, everyone who called an elderly woman a witch is as guilty as those people who disparaged, dragged, slapped, canned, stoned and watched this woman die.
We are all guilty as a nation for entertaining these and those who preach these on various media, churches, mosques and shrines in Ghana. May Madam Denteh and all women who face these accusations get justice.
Note: To the younger generation, we are dying early because of our lifestyle. It is not because of any witchcraft. Leave our poor mothers alone.#SayHerName
