Spellbound : Inside West Africa's Witch Camps

by Karen Palmer

• ISBN13: 9781439120507
• ISBN10: 1439120501
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-10-26
• Publisher: Free Press

Summary

When Karen Palmer arrived in northern Ghana in 2004 to work for six months with a non-governmental organisation devoted to improving the quality of human rights journalism, she carried with her a youthful confidence and a firm belief that witches did not exist. She thought: If only this isolated region in the corner of Africa could receive more aid, more development, more rain then these poor women would not be cast out as witches.Then she met a woman who confessed she was a witch... and Palmer's world turned upside down. Spellbound is reportage of African witchcraft and its relation to the culture and land. Karen Palmer arrived at the Gambaga witch camps ardently opposed to the prosecution of witches but quickly met people who fully admitted they were witches while she experienced things she could not understand. A woman acknowledged she killed a girl in her dreams. Books caught on fire for no reason. A witch doctor accurately described Palmer's life. Could there be something to this mystical place? As the sheen of the exotic wore off, Palmer began to see witchcraft as a tool of power, a means of social control; she saw how it keeps its believers poor, ignorant, and fearful of individual success. It was a means for predicting the unpredictable and controlling the uncontrollable, yet it tore apart families and destroyed lives. With deft storytelling, Palmer sheds light on the plight of women in a corner of the world rarely seen.