The Demon Headmasters – Part 2
In African Schools, the Term “Witch-Hunt” Is Still Meant Literally

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In the previous article in this series, we examined an illustrative selection of 21st century cases of alleged demonic persecution of staff and students alike throughout black African schools, many of which were blamed on witchcraft and sorcery.

But witchcraft and sorcery are mere secondary phenomena. For them to exist in the first place, a witch or a sorcerer already has to be present nearby to cast such spells. What kinds of people are framed as being such grimoire-wielding evil-doers? The potential answers are varied.

Land of the Witches

Most obviously, there are cases in which the individual accused is simply someone the accusers hold a pre-existing grudge against, and therefore stand to benefit from ensuring the legal downfall of—witchcraft still being listed as an actual specific crime in various modern African states, which can often attract severe punishments.

Last time, we briefly examined a 2008 case from Sir Tito Winyi Primary School in Uganda in which over 100 pupils began wailing that ghosts had set painful fires inside their bellies, causing them to go mad by stripping naked, barking like dogs, throwing stones, and chasing staff and other children around. Who could have possibly caused this outrage? Apparently, it was local landowners who thought the school’s land truly belonged to them, and whom the school’s administrators had consequently become embroiled in interminable legal disputes with.

In 2007, four nearby residents had already appeared in court charged with having cast a spell upon the school over just such a dispute about land. However, when some “bewitched” schoolchildren were brought in as witnesses, the kids began showing signs of becoming possessed again as soon as they saw their alleged bewitchers standing before them intimidatingly in the dock, causing the magistrate and prosecutors to run right out of the building in abject terror: case dismissed!

When, a year later, another outbreak of demon mania then occurred at the school, the next supposed perpetrator did not get away so lightly. Once again, someone involved in so-called “land wrangles” was blamed for matters, 60-year-old Lawrence Murubya. Murubya had formerly sat on the school management committee, in which role he had allegedly supervised the sale of some of the school’s estate against the rest of the committee’s wishes. The local Christian church also made accusations against him of illegally selling some of their own land. Murubya won his cases in court, but in revenge the church suspended his former position as a catechist, a position he had held for 35 years. However, the school chose to take its vengeance in a rather different manner.

Whether spontaneously or via the sotto voce suggestion of teachers, some of the children began calling the land-grabbing witch’s name out loud during their rampages, muttering “We want to go to Lawrence Murubya, we want to eat the meat he has brought for us before we die of hunger.” These utterances were interpreted as meaning Murubya wanted to sacrifice the children to his evil gods as food so they would magically enable him to steal yet more land; as the school’s deputy head, John Tugume Katuramu put it, “The gods are demanding sacrifices before they give him wealth.” Spreading lies like that about the poor man was certainly one way to get him to give up his pesky title-deeds claims.

In fact, Murubya, who said he and his family were now living in fear of their lives, was one of the first residents to settle in the area and, as such, got a good pick of the local plots to build his house on. His line was that various residents, jealous of this fact, then started spreading the rumors about him being a sorcerer purely to get rid of him; neighbors were accusing him of wanting to grab their land, but in reality they wanted to grab his. The overall impression gained is of an entire community turning against the man for their own selfish gain. Even one of Murubya’s closest friends, John Bagonza, was quoted as follows:

I have stayed with him since childhood. He used to be a good man, but has turned to witchcraft to get rich. Murubya has been taming gods, but now they want to eat. Instead of giving them one of his own children, he has turned them on ours.

Less superstitious commentators pointed out that the children at the school were most likely tired and depressed, their day starting at 7:30 in the morning and not ending until 5:00 in the evening, and involving hard labor as they were forced to sweep and clean the classrooms and outside grounds before then returning home to endure yet more hard chores like chopping wood. Plus, the school was massively overcrowded, with up to 75 pupils crammed into tiny rooms, some with no roofs. In such a climate, perhaps it was no wonder the children became stressed-out and ill; but, it appears, the pupils’ hysteria and visions were then ruthlessly used by a variety of local people to get their own back upon someone they felt had wronged them simply by being successful in life.

Vampire Survivors

Lawrence Murubya denied being a witch, but so strong can be the social pressure for a person to admit to their “guilt” across Africa that, sometimes, innocent persons simply cave in and do so regardless.

In 2000, governmental offices in Kenya were stormed by angry students from Itokela Girls’ Secondary School, complaining they were being tormented by a poltergeist which delighted in pushing them over invisibly. It was all down to a local businessman who had withdrawn his daughter from the school after she was unhappy there, and who was sending out ghosts to get them by way of payback, cried the kids. The local District Commissioner had the businessman arrested, whereupon, possibly thinking it would be easier to simply make feigned amends than go to the bother of being dragged through the courts, he confessed to being guilty and offered to pay for the school to be ritually cleansed of all evil. [1]

This was also the case with an assault by hordes of spirits known locally as mayembe upon Bisika Primary School in Uganda during mid-2004. Here, pupils would begin gabbling nonsense, running around foaming at the mouth and shedding clothes whilst shaking violently “as if shocked by an electric current”. When their parents took them home, they had to tie them to pegs hammered into the ground with ropes to prevent them from running away or simply “vanishing” via demonic teleportation.

Accusations were soon being made against a certain Isma Sserunkuuma, who happened to live near the school. Rather than deny the claims outright, he instead tried the tactic of claiming he was indeed a wizard, but a benign one, whose original innocent intentions had gone badly wrong.

Isma bemoaned having bought some mayembe from a witchdoctor to bring him wealth. However, he had soon found to his dismay these creatures were in fact thirsty vampires in disguise, who refused to obey him unless he sacrificed 300 virgins and cows by shedding their tasty blood. As he could afford to buy neither cows nor children, Sserunkuuma claimed no option but to set his vampires free, whereupon they had begun assaulting the schoolchildren to suck their vital fluids of their own accord. In mitigation, therefore, he pleaded he was not a malicious sorcerer, simply guilty of failing to control his pet demons, like the careless owner of a dangerous dog.

Apparently, Sserunkuuma was believed, and a by-law was subsequently introduced into the area forbidding people to keep any demons, friendly or otherwise, in order to prevent any repeat occurrence of the outbreak!

When Spooks Fear Spooks

Those bloodthirsty mayembe were in the news again during an outbreak of mass hysteria at Kitebi Primary School in Uganda during 2011. Here, teachers were blamed for events, which does seem to be the most common direction in which fingers are pointed during African school hauntings: after all, some children will always end up hating some of their teachers, and lying that they are wicked witches is a great way to turn the tables on them.

The first child to fall victim to hysteria at Kitebi Primary was in class when she suddenly collapsed, shaking, shouting, and making fevered claims that one of her teachers, Naomi Wandera, had concealed magical charms somewhere upon the school grounds. One by one other pupils soon began to fall victim to states of possession themselves too. The epidemic had begun!

Many of the kids also talked about Miss Wandera during their attacks, one boy calling out to her to come and give him blood to drink. The description of one parent of her daughter’s sickness seemed entirely typical:

My daughter barks like a dog and she cannot sleep. She tells me she gets nightmares in which a man and a woman are asking for human blood and telling her to leave the school. Yesterday she woke up crying that an old woman was walking with her while beating her.

As the children were all baying for blood, once more vampiric mayembe were concluded to be at large. At one point, more than 100 pupils – aided by what were termed “goons from outside the school” — chased after Miss Wandera and beat her up, tearing off her clothes. Eventually, police took her into custody for her own safety; or so they thought. Crazed pupils just began attacking the police-post too, leading to Wandera being driven away to a station further afield to escape the rioting infants.

Kitebi Primary’s headmaster, Godfrey Ssenfuma, then brought a cow to school, slaughtered it in front of the screaming children, and daubed its blood across their ankles in a traditional ritual to ward off demons. All of this must simply have heightened the children’s excitability, and eventually the school had to be temporarily closed down.

Naomi Wandera, whom many children were talking about in their trances, was the ex-wife of Godfrey Ssenfuma, but had subsequently been dumped by him in favor of another teacher. Therefore, it was asserted by many that Miss Wandera had acquired the mayembe from a witchdoctor for the vengeful purpose of driving the headmaster out of his job. Incredibly, some of the teachers themselves agreed with this hypothesis, accusing Wandera of having planted malicious charms around the place. Some teachers were so worried by Wandera’s alleged witchcraft that they engaged in a seven-day fast to get God to intervene on their behalf and chase away the vampires.

The parents, meanwhile, unable to afford the services of a witchdoctor themselves, demanded the school pay for one’s magic out of its limited annual budget. Doctors who treated some of the affected children in hospital simply diagnosed mass hysteria and recommended they be given rest and food to help them recover – easier said than done in some poverty-stricken parts of Africa.

Once the school reopened, the media descended in droves, eager to question pupils about their possession-states. One reporter gathered six pupils under the mango tree where it was rumored the evil charms summoning up the mayembe had been “planted” like seeds, to interrogate them. One girl, Betty Natume, promptly became hysterical, shouting out Wandera’s name and calling for blood whilst writhing around on the ground with “amazing energy”. Teachers tried to calm her down, offering to give the possessing vampire-demon some free beans instead of blood, something which a gruff voice speaking through Natume politely declined because, it said, “spirits do not eat such things.” Before long, chaos reigned once more, with students running up and down the corridors shouting, chanting, and demanding human blood.

Word spreading, groups of Evangelical pastors appeared on the scene, praying out loud for the children’s deliverance. One pastor, standing over a little girl who lay stiff as a board on the ground whilst the demons had their way with her, prayed for the child, whereupon she jumped up and ran over to a tree before hitting her head against it repeatedly like a woodpecker with a death-wish. Then, she pulled down her panties and began deliberately urinating upwards onto herself. Accusing the pastors of making the situation worse, angry parents then started stoning the priests.

Three enterprising witchdoctors now turned up, demanding 100,000 shillings and two red cockerels to exorcise the mayembe immediately, before cutting the head off one of the cockerels and pouring its blood around the haunted tree. Then, taking hoes and digging up the ground, they found a small plastic bottle with soil inside and claimed this was the haunted lair of the vampires. However, they then insisted upon receiving another 100,000 shillings before they would agree to open the bottle and kill them all.

Meanwhile, another possessed girl led a crowd towards Miss Wandera’s nearby home. Adults and children stormed it, smashing windows and trashing her belongings, but fortunately she was not there. A witchdoctor claimed a vision she was hiding out in Tanzania, saying her demons were busily preparing to kill two pupils and drink their blood; something which only an immediate “donation” of yet another 100,000 shillings could now prevent. With a near-riot now going on, police felt forced to fire bullets into the air to disperse the crowd. As TV crews broadcast sensational scenes of hysterical pupils speaking in tongues and climbing trees, together with exorcists laying on hands, schoolchildren could not even escape graphic images of the terror when at home.

It is not quite clear precisely how the whole mad situation eventually resolved itself, but it seems to have had something to do with the appointment of a new headmaster who turned up on the first day of the next term to instigate a number of sensible and obvious changes, like no longer sacrificing any cows in the middle of the playground.

He prayed with the children, organized for counselling to be given them, and introduced fun activities like sports and music to the school day. Furthermore, he ordered the school’s filthy dormitory – full of rats, cockroaches and moths – be abandoned, and a new, clean and pleasant one be built instead. He even taught the children a “song of unity”, and the establishment won a wheelbarrow as a prize in a bizarre municipal competition which rewarded schools for having the most improved sanitation. It seems that, ultimately, all the children needed to get better was to see an improvement in their horrible living and working conditions. Well, that and a nice new wheelbarrow, of course. [2]

The Power of Free Thought

According to a pair of subsequent reports (here and here) on the website of Freethought Kampala, a kind of Ugandan rationalists’ association, the main reason for the receptivity of parents, pupils and teachers towards the idea of demon-attack was the widespread cultural acceptance of a very conservative form of Evangelical Pentecostal Christianity in the area, which was combined in many onlookers with a still-strong acceptance of the traditional African pagan spiritual world-view. The fusion of these two belief-systems, it was suggested, laid down fertile ground for the hysteria at Kitebi Primary to flourish in.

Taking a definition of mass hysteria from the Canadian Medical Association as being a phenomenon which occurs “in the context of a credible threat that provokes great anxiety”, the reports suggest the flourishing of Pentecostalism in Uganda since the early 1990s— involving, as it does, a great emphasis being put upon the notion of demonic activity as being a key cause of everything from bad luck to AIDS within the country’s charismatic churches – has been one of the key factors in making the notion of demon-attack in schools seem a credible one to many.

Furthermore, the skeptics’ reports show how the influence of the local media was strong in fostering an environment in which the pupils’, teachers’ and parents’ suspicions of mayembe-possession would be backed up on a quasi-official basis at every available opportunity; as many as three 24-hour Christian channels showing a daily diet of exorcisms and sermons about Satan and his demons were easily available on local terrestrial TV.

Moreover, the reports refer to research which has suggested Ugandans as a whole tend to suffer from high levels of clinical depression and stress in everyday life anyway; hardly surprising for a country which had to suffer the brutal dictatorial regimes of both Idi Amin and Milton Obote in quick succession. High numbers of people in Uganda are thought to be victims of severe childhood trauma, including physical and sexual abuse, neglect, illness, or witnessing the death of close family members due to the widespread violence and civil unrest that has occurred there in recent decades. Remarkably, it is asserted that more than half the population today in northern Uganda are suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Given these factors, Freethought Kampala’s ultimate conclusion as to why the panic happened was this:

Once a number of people from such a background are placed in a confined area (e.g. a boarding school) and subjected to a lot of psychological stress (e.g. during, or in preparation for, exams) and anxiety (about the possibility of being ‘possessed by evil spirits’), and one or more of them experience a psychotic episode, with enough suggestion and exposure to audio-visual cues (due to close proximity to the initial instigators), it should not come as a surprise if others in that vicinity also begin to exhibit those same psychosomatic symptoms, resulting in an outbreak of mass hysteria.

Given these facts, the reports’ author suggests that the Ugandan Ministry of Education should henceforth instruct all headteachers not to call out priests or witchdoctors (or, indeed, to slaughter cows!) to deal with such cases in the future, but doctors and psychiatrists instead. Otherwise, they simply risk making a bad situation even worse.

It seems that, in many cases of “haunted” African schools, the true children present on the premises are actually the adults. More on that theme in the final instalment of this series, which I shall bring you in the appropriately spooky week of Hallowe’en.

Notes

[1] Hillary Evans & Robert Bartholomew, Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior, Anomalist Books, 2009, p.207

[2] Compiled from: https://allafrica.com/stories/201104111281.html; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PuXd60aEqc; https://www.newvision.co.ug/news/1013302/kitebi-attack-hysteria-demoniac; https://www.newvision.co.ug/news/1014006/kitebi-primary-school-remains-closed-mass-hysteria