The New Witchcraft

From Rural Superstition to Racial Dogma

I must have been in third grade when I first heard rumors about Mr. Ten-Ten spreading around the village. Mr. Ten-Ten was a stout, wealthy man who had built a fortune for himself. He built a large tavern just across the road from my aunt’s house. For months, it did not look like anything would come out of that business venture until one weekend, when crowds swelled up the place, and cars spilled over every available patch of parking space.

That weekend became a strange phenomenon. What happened was the talk of the whole village. It became our nightly news as we huddled in the rondavel, flames dancing to the hissing sound of burning wood. In my childish mind, I wanted to understand why this mattered so much. It mattered enough that our grandmothers sternly warned us not to be out late at night, or even to pass near Mr. Ten-Ten’s tavern.

The story circulating was that there was no explanation for what had happened other than witchcraft. It was believed that Mr. Ten-Ten’s wealth was ill-gotten: a product of trickery, potions, or some arcane and malignant power. Suspicion clung to anyone in possession of such immeasurable wealth.

We were told that he was responsible for a stint of rumored ritual killings and that he had mutilated bodies and sold the parts to an inyanga (a traditional witchdoctor) or a muloi (witch). As the rumors spread like wildfire, the suspicion was that he had also buried some of the body parts at the entrance of his tavern to cast a spell on people to lure them to enter his tavern. The fact that Mr. Ten-Ten was a successful and trained businessman was an irrelevant truth in opposition to the ideological truth, which sees the essential character of reality and life in the village writ large through witchcraft.

This was the world I grew up in: a world where misfortune was blamed on witchcraft, and any ill that befell someone was explained away by displeased ancestors, gods, or spirits. Fortune itself was ambiguous, and it could either be a blessing or a curse.

My aunt was the sort of person who claimed to be in possession of some special knowledge. She always “knew” when something was amiss. She would accuse others of witchcraft with absolute certainty. This kind of knowing carried no burden of proof. And anyone who offered an alternative explanation bore the burden instead. Neither reason nor evidence was accepted if it challenged the prevailing suspicion. She knew that something was witchcraft.

One morning, the sky was grey, and the sun’s rays fell softly on the face of earth as if to illuminate some hidden mystery. As the sun emerged, it streaked the grey sky with a mauve brilliance that made the morning feel eerie and enchanted. My grandmother’s phone rang. I answered on the third ring and heard my aunt’s panicked voice summoning us to come immediately.

And as fear mingled with excitement, I ran to my aunt’s house. When I arrived, we found a long grey snake coiled in her kitchen. With my cousins, we grabbed whatever we could find: stones, sticks, a shovel. I struck the snake on the head. After a struggle, it lay motionless. We covered it with a dish and went outside to gather firewood.

Burning snakes was serious business where I came from. Snakes and cats were believed to be the most evil animals—agents of witches and witchdoctors. It was believed that witches could transform themselves into animals. Burning the snake was tantamount to burning the witch.

When I returned to fetch the snake, it was gone.

This disappearance confirmed my aunt’s suspicions. The snake, she insisted, was a witch who had deceived us and escaped. She already knew who the witch was—an old woman who lived alone in a small, whitewashed one-room house. I had heard stories on the radio of villages burning witches when things became unbearable. Fear had shaped my imagination. It made me suspicious of others and cynical about hard work. What was the point of effort if the world was rigged by spirits and witches?

When I was in fifth grade, my eyes became unbearably itchy and discolored. My grandmother believed this was witchcraft—an attempt to steal my future. She took me to an inyanga, who confirmed her suspicions. But after many visits, my eyes did not improve. Eventually, she told my father, and we went to the city to see a medical doctor.

The doctor diagnosed sensitivity to dust and sunlight and prescribed glasses. My eyesight improved. I almost became blind, but now I can see clearly. I see that many of the beliefs we held were self-defeating and destructive. Had my grandmother not abandoned that losing faith, I might be blind today. I thank God that my grandmother lost faith in that blind faith in witches and witchdoctors.

But when I left the village for the city, witchcraft followed us, but the only difference was that it wore a different name. Racism became the new witchcraft. We blamed everything on racism, as we did with witchcraft in the village. This new witchcraft is a sophisticated superstition. Unlike rural witchcraft, it exists without witches. It is racism without racists. It is invisibly embedded in structures and woven into the very fabric of society.

You can be a witch without knowing it. Only the initiated victims can reveal your guilt or complicity. And life becomes a perpetual power struggle, and the quest for social or racial justice is nothing but a witch-hunt. It has become a spiritual battlefield of white witches and black witchdoctors, animated by invisible structures of cosmic racism. The modern notion of structural racism is a more spectral reality, a preconceived assumption that gives both explanatory power and scope to a gamut of issues.

This kind of racism cannot be factually proven, but it is an ideological assumption about the world and how the world works. This is cosmic totalism and determinism. It explains everything by explaining everything away.

White witches are cast as villains; black witchdoctors—activists, governments, and woke elites—claim esoteric knowledge; and designated victims are blacks, women, and LGBTQ+ identities. Anyone who challenges this narrative bears the burden of proof. Like the witchcraft of my childhood village, it eludes logic, evidence, and common sense.

And like my grandmother’s gut-level faith, it blinds its adherents to reality. That blindness spreads into every area of life. This worldview produces blindness. It untethers reason, imagination, and emotion from truth and descends into absurdity. It fuels anger, and an anger I know well.

When my grandmother died suddenly, I felt rage not at death, but at its explanation. Witchcraft had claimed another victim. A worldview does not merely explain reality; it forms emotions. You cannot see the world a certain way without feeling a certain way about the world that one inhabits.

But I see clearly now. And I know that clarity is costly. It requires losing faith in a blind faith, no matter how familiar or comforting it once was.