In non-PC mode

[dungrollin]

> Carolyn:
> Haven't read it - I'll take a look on Amazon when I next do an 
order. He's one of Hoggart's regulars on the Newsquiz I think.
> 
> As I live in Haringey, where poor little Victoria Climbie was 
tortured to death by her relatives because they thought she was 
possessed by the devil, your village in Africa doesn't seem so very 
far away. All covered up by black-on-black stuff within the social 
services department, ashamed to admit to white people that this sort 
of thing could happen in Britain. Plus there was that black boy's 
torso ['Adam'] that they found in the Thames, which they thought was 
a ritual tribal killing. 
> 
> If the woman has been accused before, is it likely she will get 
off again?
> 
> Carolyn


As far as I understood (which may not be very far) from a long 
phonecall last night, a young man got on a bus, apparently well; 3 
hours later he was vomiting, and then died. Sounds like a 
haemorrhagic fever to me, but I don't know what the autopsy 
discovered - and it's kind of irrelevant to the villagers anyway, 
whatever the cause of death, the cause of the cause of death was 
witchcraft. 

All sorts of other absurd fakery later (and my patience wearing 
thin, though trying to be diplomatic) and the old woman has 
confessed again*. Apparently, whatever malign spirit is possessing 
her has bumped off 20-odd other people recently, and has declared 
Seraphin (the elder brother of the man who died and our field 
station technician) next. He is completely hysterical. Really and 
truly hysterical. 

Unfortunately the priestess of a wierd semi-christian cult (Dehima) 
at one end of the village has shown an interest in Seraphin and woke 
the chief up at 4am to say that she'd had a vision of him tied up. 
Her involvement is (IMO) entirely political - if she could convert 
Seraphin (who is right at the centre of the small animist enclave 
which is all that remains of the Baoulé indigenous beliefs in the 
village) it would be a real coup for the Dehima, and against the 
animists. I suspect that she's been after him since the last 
witchcraft nonsense which happened last summer. So she wants to 
convince Seraphin that she alone can protect him from this spirit.

The upshot of all this is that we have a technician who is drunk and 
terrified and (obviously) not working. Mass hysteria is running 
high, and the village is waiting for a witch-doctor to come and 
exorcise the spirit. The divisions between the Christians and 
animists (though from a westerner's point of view their beliefs seem 
almost identical, it's just the rituals which vary) are deeper than 
ever. The old woman has been fined 4 crates of wine (somewhere in 
the region of £40 - a fortune), and everyone is asking us for money 
(which they do all the time anyway) but not for malaria treatment or 
for rehydration salts or for schoolbooks for their kids, but to pay 
for a charlatan to kill a few chickens and ... well frankly I have 
no idea what he'd do, but I'd bet you anything it would really piss 
me off. 

I hide myself beind "How Mumo-Jumbo..." declare myself immune to 
sorcery (it is well-known not to work on whites), and wait for the 
sun to creep over the yard-arm, announcing the first gin of the day. 
It's such a fabulous *waste* of time and resources by people who are 
already dirt-poor.

Dot
who's sorry if you didn't want to know all of this nonsense, but she 
didn't know a way of shortening the story any further.

* Actually they don't ever use the French translation of this, they 
always say "Elle à recconu..." - she recognised/realised that she 
had used sorcery to kill someone. It doesn't seem to be a 
premeditated thing, which (I assume) is why she was only fined.