Witchcraft and Violence in the World Today - Essay Example

As history has shown, fear is a powerful motivator. Perhaps the most well-known example in the United States would be the Salem witch trials in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. This type of violence, often driven by personal vengeance or mass hysteria, can still be found in the world today, and in fact, there are many examples of just such a fear of the unknown causing people to lash out against their neighbors. In the modern world there are several different definitions for the term “witchcraft.

” Stephen Hayes provides an excellent analysis of the problems associated with the terminology as it is used by various people around the world. According to Hayes, many people use the word witchcraft in a traditional manner. To these people using witchcraft means to use dark or black magic to cause harm to others. In essence, these people see the use of witchcraft as evil. In contrast, many followers of the neopagan religion Wicca use the term witchcraft synonymously for their religion. To Wiccans there is nothing evil about the term, save for the violence that was committed against alleged witches throughout history.

This paper will use the more traditional definition of witchcraft. The reasoning for this choice can best be summarized by Hayes: “In normal, non-Wiccan usage … the essence of witchcraft and sorcery is the causing of harm to persons or property by invisible occult means” (339). Tanzania is a country in eastern Africa lying on the Indian Ocean. The majority of the population in this country believes in witchcraft, similar to the beliefs in many other areas of Africa. Elderly women in Tanzania are often accused of witchcraft and murdered.

Additionally, according to some researchers, in years when Tanzania suffers unusual rainfall either by drought or flooding then the murders of accused witches double (Kristof, par. 3). However, weather is not the only cause for these murders. Many of the murders are also performed at the behest of traditional healers who blame the elderly women of performing witchcraft to cause illness in their patients (Dickinson, par. 2). Clearly the murders in Tanzania have many different causes at their roots.

Other areas of Africa also have problems with violence against those accused of witchcraft. The Democratic Republic of Congo is located in western central Africa. It, like its eastern neighbor Tanzania, also has problems with attacks on “witches.” In 2008 there was a massive scare in the country surrounding purported thefts of men’s penises. Several cases of attempted lynching occurred during the incident in which suspected sorcerers were “accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises” (Bavier, par. 1). Police in Kinshasa arrested the accused witches as well as their alleged victims in order to avoid the murders associated with a similar incident a decade earlier in Ghana, another African country.

The continent of Africa is not the only place in the world where violence occurs against those who purportedly practice witchcraft. According to Tess Eastman, a woman in India was recently tied to a tree and beaten for being a witch (par. 1). The violence in this case was initiated by a man who had admitted to hiring the woman to heal his wife with magic and prayer. However, the man subsequently accused the woman of witchcraft when his wife’s condition worsened. This accusation was enough for the violence to happen.

The attack, while not fatal for the accused witch, was violent enough to result in the arrest of six people, including the original hirer of the woman. While it would be tempting to believe that violence against accused witches only happens halfway around the world from the United States,