The Demon Headmasters – Part 3
In Haunted African Schools, Students Really Do Take After Their Parents

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So far in this short series, we have been examining the widespread mass hysteria-like phenomenon of demon-attack panics in contemporary African schools, but gullible children are not only limited to the Third World. Consider events in Houston, Texas, in 1983, when hundreds of schoolchildren (presumably of all races) became convinced they were going to be murdered by the Smurfs.

Local TV news reports about the alleged activities of a gang of violent juvenile delinquents, calling themselves ‘The Smurfs’ after the then-popular blue television cartoon characters, became distorted into a playground rumor that groups of armed blue gangstas, carrying knives and machine-guns, were headed towards the city’s schools to slaughter all the children. Some older kids thought these Smurfs were simply ordinary flesh-and-blood gang members covered all over in blue body paint, but others labored under the genuine impression the fictional figures had literally come to life somehow.

From school to school and class to class, the gossip differed; some said wearing blue clothing would save you from the Smurfs’ wrath, others that wearing blue would be the best way to ensure you were shot dead. Fearing Smurfs were hiding in school toilets, children simply refused to enter them, presumably leading to mass soiling of skirts and trousers; supposedly, one girl who did dare go for a dump got gang-raped with a broom-handle by blue monsters, high on Smurfberries. Word spread that Smurfs had raped and hospitalized both pupils and teachers, leading to terrified students playing truant and parents deluging schools with calls asking whether classes were safe to attend.

At one affected institution, Welch Middle School, the principal, Bill Morgan, foolishly decided to “fight fantasy with fantasy” by announcing over the school’s public address system that the tales were all true. However, he then added that nobody need worry as he had enlisted the combined help of Garfield the Cat and the Greatest American Hero, who were on their way immediately to protect one and all from the blue-skinned menace. By acting thusly, Morgan only inadvertently reinforced schoolyard belief in the myth, making matters worse.

Not unlike in contemporary African school panics, the power of the whole rumor may have been exacerbated by the teachings of certain fundamentalist Christian groups active in the Texas area, some of whom felt The Smurfs TV show was Satanic propaganda, as it featured witches as baddies. Eventually, the hysteria died down as the police, after initially setting up a “Smurf Patrol” to look for human miscreants, subsequently found no evidence of any genuine Smurf-attacks on kids at all.

Gnome Truths?

One way to explain why the Great Texas Smurf Panic of 1983 became so widespread was the simple fact that a number of adults involved, like anti-Smurf Christian fundamentalist preachers, actively told the area’s children the whole thing was real, thus lending superficial adult imprimatur to the “reality” of what was supposedly going on.

In Africa, however, adult belief in such things (demons, that is, not Smurfs) is much more widespread, hence so are full-blown school panics. Garfield the Cat’s good friend Bill Morgan may have told his students the Smurfs were real, for misguided reassurance purposes, but he clearly didn’t believe they were himself. No sensible adult Western schoolteachers would.

Consider a case of comical childhood mass hallucinations (one presumes!) from 1979, when several primary school pupils from the English city of Nottingham claimed to have been assaulted by a gang of gnomes driving miniature sports cars through their local park. The kids were out playing in Wollaton Park one night in September, when, alerted by the sound of a “tinkly bell”, they suddenly saw dozens of little men, around half their height, with long white beards with red tips, wrinkled, greenish old faces, and colorful caps on their heads, zooming towards them from a swampy area filled with trees.

These creatures, said the children, were seated two apiece in brightly-colored miniature bubble-cars without proper steering wheels or audible engines. The children ran away, but the Little People kept pace with them, their cars magically jumping over logs and other obstacles as they did so. They were laughing and friendly, said the young witnesses, who, despite being frightened, felt they were probably only playing chase with them. As they fled, the kids also claimed to have seen more gnomes sitting in the trees and going in and out of holes in the ground. One gnome even dropped down on top of one boy from a tree, causing him to fall over, this ordeal allegedly lasting as long as 30 minutes.

Back at their school, Southwold Primary, their headmaster, Robin Aldridge, interviewed and recorded each child separately a few days afterwards, getting them to draw the gnomes. He felt they sounded as if they were telling the truth, or at least they thought they were telling the truth, but the truth not about a genuine literal paranormal encounter with gnomes, rather the truth about some weird, shared collective infant hallucination of some kind. Aldridge didn’t think the students were stupid, just typical small children, and as such, highly fantasy-prone.

The story thus stopped right there and then, and did not really develop into any further mass infant panic, with kids running riot all across Southwold Primary, stabbing teachers whilst claiming to be possessed by Noddy. If they had both been little African boys and girls, however…

Phantom Pregnancies

The simple fact is that adults in Africa today quite often suffer from mass outbreaks of “demon attack disease” themselves too, thereby lending students a convenient, already digested, symptom-based model to follow in the smaller footsteps of themselves later on, in their classrooms.

For example, in a previous article, we mentioned a demonic epidemic at Mdzimba High in Swaziland. It is surely significant that this particular haunting occurred a mere matter of months after demons were reported to have attacked recruits at the Mbuluzi Army Barracks in that same country in much the same fashion. The case, which garnered voluminous press attention, got so out of hand that the authorities had no option but to send over 500 recruits home for a fortnight. It all seemed very similar to an average school-based outbreak, starting off with one female soldier shouting about seeing “weird creatures” before others began speaking in tongues, screaming and running amok. As so often, priests were called in, but only made the situation worse, whilst other figures of authority openly admitted the demons were real, Major Khanya Dlamini quoted as saying “Even though we knew that the recruits were somehow in danger, we were ready to fight the attacks through prayer and be successful.”

“If it can happen to big strong soldiers, why can’t it happen to weak little schoolgirls too?” we can easily imagine students asking themselves. Therefore, it seems entirely plausible that school-based outbreaks of mass hysteria may simply be infant re-imaginings of long-held forms of adult mass psychosis which already exist amongst the general African population – particularly in relation to a peculiarly South African form of such hysteria, called amafufunyana.

Amongst the Zulu and Xhosa people, it was traditionally thought possible to become possessed by a clan of evil spirits known as the amafufunyana. Here, a witch would scoop up some ants that had been feeding on a dead body in its grave, then crush and mix them up into a poisonous concoction called idliso, which, once consumed, would assume the properties of some tiny but vicious creature, like a miniature snake or crab. Then, they would trick their victims into eating it.

Once the victim had ingested this infested substance, they would feel movements from the tiny magic animal inserted surreptitiously inside them, hearing voices speaking foreign languages coming from their stomachs: the amafufunyana spirits. Sometimes these demonic voices would order their human host to commit antisocial acts, go into seizures, or attempt suicide. At other times, victims of such demonic pregnancies would simply collapse to the floor and start speaking in tongues or a gruff voice, the spirits making accusations against those whom they claimed were their witch-masters.

This disease being well-established amongst the adult population in South Africa, it later spread to schoolchildren, too. Over 400 pupils at one school in the Transkei region became affected by a prolonged outbreak of amafufunyana between 1981 and 1983, running about wildly, with eyes rolling, and kicking out at chairs and tables. Some children’s stomachs swelled up, and one teacher reported that, when their bellies were squeezed, voices speaking in Zulu could be heard claiming to be demons. Consequently, three local women were accused of witchcraft. An angry crowd of kids surrounded and then tried to kill one, several later being charged with assault and taken to court where they just started fitting once more.

Another case occurred at Durban Girls’ Secondary School in March 2011, where suicidal students ran out of the grounds and into traffic, besides rolling around on the pavement like escaped mental patients. Police had to cordon off the entire road and the school was closed down for the day, whilst people gathered for prayers. One possessed girl complained she was dehydrated and could feel “strange movements” inside her stomach; a classic symptom of amafufunyana.

But where did the affected children get these ideas from in the first place? They didn’t just make them up wholesale. Instead, they were sourced from the sorcery-believing adults around them, parents, elders, teachers and priests, who will have been telling their kids and grandkids stories of amafufunyana, and sometimes even acting them out as possession victims themselves, ever since earliest infancy. To us in the West, this kind of thing may seem crazy and wholly inexplicable. To many Africans themselves, it is simply an unquestioned everyday social fact of life.

Whatever Can Have Possessed Them?

Not all African adults believe in witchcraft, of course, and sometimes tensions can arise between local adult skeptics and local adult believers. In 2004, Maendeleo School in the Tanzanian city of Iringa was closed down for three days after 18 pupils fainted for no apparent reason. One 11-year-old victim, Harriet Salewa, described her affliction thus:

I feel dizzy and lose consciousness. I’m unable to talk, to walk, to hear, and I feel as if things are crawling all over me, starting from my feet, and disappearing in my head.

Were these yet more amafufunyana-type spirits at work? To find out, skeptical teachers consulted medical doctors rather than witchdoctors, who were unable to find any discernible physiological cause. According to one Dr Ezekiel Mpuya, the pupils were simply “suffering from neurosis, which happens in adolescent-aged students at times”, the physician explicitly blaming local beliefs in witchcraft for causing them stress. Some angry sorcery-believing parents did complain, alleging teachers must have been casting spells, but the headmistress, Christobela Halifani, gave such accusations short shrift, saying that “These are hurtful remarks against teachers, who depend on their students to earn a living.”

One white commentator, Brad Warren, who runs an “adopt a school” program in Tanzania, also refused to believe witchcraft, or jinamizi (the Tanzanian word for demon-possession) could be responsible, pointing out that such outbreaks were probably a response to underlying social stresses on behalf of native black schoolgirls, who are put under great pressure by their families to go to school and do well so they will be able to bring in more money for them in the future:

The Tanzanian personality gives the impression of being light-hearted and joyful but that is because it is not socially acceptable to be otherwise … Crying is socially unacceptable. It is unthinkable that a young girl would express anger at anyone older … than herself. The repressed anxiety has to be released somehow. The acceptable method is hysteria or jinamizi.

So, whether supernatural in nature or not, it cannot be denied that across black Africa today, outbreaks of mass hysteria have genuine widespread social sanction. They not only occur, they are actively expected to occur. And so, predictably, they do so. Again and again and again.

Laughter Is the Worst Medicine

The most widespread outbreak of African mass hysteria which affected both adults and children alike was the infamous “laughing epidemic” which broke out across Tanzania in 1962, beginning at a girls’ Christian boarding school in Kashasha village in the west of the country. From 30 January until 18 March, when the school was closed down, 95 of the institution’s 159 students were affected by bouts of uncontrollable laughing, crying and running. Girls reported amafufunyana-type creatures moving around in their heads, and that some unknown ‘thing’ was chasing after them. Bouts could last for hours at a time, and were recurrent.

About ten days after this first school closure, the epidemic broke out again around Nshamba village, 55 miles west of the original eruption (eventually, the school from which the laughing disease originally spread was sued for supernaturally harming other people’s health like this!). Over an 18 month period, more than 1,000 adults and schoolchildren were struck down by the hysteria, an illness for which medical authorities could find no biological cause. Food was tested, but no abnormalities discovered. Some blamed the spirits of their dead ancestors for the plague, others preferred to speculate the air had been poisoned due to distant atom bomb tests, whilst yet others guessed the maize schoolchildren were served for dinner had been poisoned.

In 1963, the disease metastasized across the rest of Tanzania and on into neighboring Uganda, where it was rechristened as Ugandan Running Sickness, as more than 300 people in the east of the country suddenly began running around aimlessly and uncontrollably, sleeping out of doors because they could not keep still inside. Furthermore, they attempted to assault and rob everybody they passed and began to smoke tobacco compulsively, unable to stop themselves – the very same malady must also be endemic today in contemporary Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland and New York.

Victims claimed they could see the faces and hear the voices of their dead ancestors. Significantly, they complained of pains in their hearts, their word for that organ (mwoyo) also corresponding to the local word for “spirit”. This seemed to signify their ancestors were feeling pain for some reason, perhaps due to neglect by the living, something further suggested by the fact possessed hysterics also went around catching white chickens and wearing their feathers on their heads. Witchdoctors diagnosed that the dead ancestors wanted some white chickens to be sacrificed to them, and were more than happy to slaughter a few birds over their graves, smearing their plots with blood as a propitiatory offering. Apparently, this remedy worked, and the plague died away.

What was the true reason for the epidemic, though? It seems highly likely the strange illness was, once more, a result of certain underlying stresses present amongst the general population. In 1962, Tanzania had just won its independence from colonial rule, and children were reportedly feeling pressure being placed upon them as a result of increased expectations from their parents and teachers, who said the country’s youth were the future of their newly-freed nation.

Furthermore, the general climate in the country at the time of independence was one of sweeping social change; economic modernization was occurring, and the traditional values which the children were told to adhere to at home were being challenged and contradicted by the modern lessons and ethics to which they were now being exposed at school. Being unable to rebel against the contradictory instructions of two sets of equally strict adult authority figures openly, they seemed instead unconsciously to take the only option open to them and express their concerns instead through the medium of ‘madness’ – a madness socially sanctioned by the widespread adult belief in witchcraft that surrounded them.

When Adults Act Like Adults, So Do the Children

It is notable that, wherever adults in positions of authority refuse to capitulate towards the idea of wizardry or demons being responsible, these panics generally die down of their own accord. Consider an outbreak of reasonless mass itching affected more than 1,400 pupils at schools in the South African city of Bloemfontein during February 2000. Pupils began scratching themselves compulsively, and complaining of vague and generic symptoms like dizziness, hyperventilation, pins and needles, headaches and feeling hot. Some fainted; some had hallucinations. These symptoms spread to other pupils by line of sight, and they were treated at clinics in various ways, including some victims being bathed in Jeyes Fluid!

As the illness spread, taxi drivers refused to take pupils from affected schools into their cabs, and some children were kept home. Occasionally, teachers began displaying symptoms, too. The most widespread assumption was that everyone had been exposed to some kind of itch-mite, but entomologists could find no evidence of this. Apparently, the entire affair was without any physical basis; but, whilst some pupils did have prayers said for them, at no point was demon-attack put forward by an adults on the scene as being a plausible reason for the alleged infestation.

As a result, the students didn’t begin blaming demons for events either. Interviews with unaffected schoolchildren indicated that a number thought the victims were simply faking symptoms to get out of lessons. Rumors spread that certain unnamed boys had been seen sprinkling a mysterious (but wholly non-magical) white powder in the girls’ toilets, but sensible measures against the outbreak were taken by the authorities, and the phenomena soon died down.

Meanwhile, at an unnamed primary school in the South African town of Kwa-Dukuza, 27 children, mostly of Indian ethnic origin, suddenly lost consciousness. The first patient did so during an assembly about the need for the children to care for their eyes properly, given by a man who was blind in one eye, and who wore an eye-patch. Whilst he was explaining just how he had lost the sight in his bad eye, this index case fainted, followed immediately by nine others.

The principal sent the kids back to class, where more pupils soon followed suit in collapsing, his initial thought being that the patients had simply been frightened by the one-eyed man or made nauseous by his graphic descriptions. Doctors and paramedics came to the school immediately, and took some of the students to hospital, where they were found to have nothing wrong with them.

It was an obvious case of collective hysteria, although this did not prevent some of the children’s parents from looking for alternative explanations; they did not choose to blame demons for it all, however, but something as prosaic as a gas-leak. Some local religious leaders did suggest evil spirits might have been responsible and offered to come and ‘cleanse’ the school with prayers, but, sensibly, this offer was not taken up. The next day, most of the ‘sick’ children returned to school, suffering no ill-effects.

Black Magicians

Shared infant hallucinations and cases of school-based mass hysteria occur amongst children everywhere, being nothing inherently special to the African continent. However, they undeniably happen more frequently there than they do in the modern West, and on a much more extreme scale. Yet, despite proven differences in average IQ (i.e., black Africans have lower ones), I feel it likely the main explanation is less of a biological matter, more of a sociological one. You can find old outbreaks of demonic possession hysteria in European orphanages from the Renaissance and Middle Ages which look exactly like the contemporary African school-based ones detailed above, with demon-filled children running riot and causing extreme chaos. It is just that, in today’s Europe, the demon-filled Middle Ages have now passed … but not in modern Africa.

Stresses of a more serious kind than are faced by most Western children, combined with widespread adult acceptance of the reality of witchcraft and the supernatural, and the influence of witchdoctors and evangelicals, all combine to allow these weird contemporary outbreaks to occur there.

The question is: in this era of uncontrolled mass migration, will cases like these begin showing up more frequently in our own schools someday soon too? When you have one or two Africans in an otherwise all-white European school, it seems unlikely. But in certain cities like London today, you have schools where blacks make up the majority of students, their parents having often just come in on the boats from Africa, trailing their medieval-style witchcraft beliefs along with them.

Only this September, Spanish police arrested 19 incoming Africans from a Senegalese migrant-boat for the presumed crime of torturing and murdering around 50 fellow passengers whom they had suspected of being witches. Entirely mundane marine phenomena such as engine-failures and bad weather were pinned on the victims, some of whom were thrown overboard to drown (if they were witches, wouldn’t they have floated?). With parents and children like this heading Westward bound, cases of mass amafufunyana possession that may once have been a matter of niche interest only to anthropologists and students of foreign folklore may soon become matters of pressing attention for European and American school boards and Parent-Teacher Associations, too.

Happy Halloween! Thanks to diversity, you might find yourself living in a never-ending Halloween every single day of the year pretty soon, at least if you live in a big city and have children lucky enough to still be of school age. Make sure to note down the soon-to-be-common term amafufunyana in your handy home medical dictionary. One day, you might just need it. Especially if you happen to work as a school nurse.