I had the honor of hearing a Tanzanian pastor mention people going to witchdoctors in Tanzania. This got me curious so I did a googlescholar search on Tanzania witchcraft. I think I had a music cd that had liner notes about witchcraft in Tanzania - but I can't remember the details. I probably referenced it in my 2012 book. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/John-Iwata/publication/353525998_WITCHCRAFT_BELIEFS_AND_PRACTICES_PERCEPTIONS_OF_TOBACCO_GROWERS_IN_LUPA_AND_NGWALA_VILLAGES_TANZANIA/links/62e8e3ea7782323cf19412eb/Witchcraft-Beliefs-and-Practices-Perceptions-of-Tobacco-Growers-in-Lupa-and-Ngwala-Villages-Tanzania.pdf
accusation of witchcraft beliefs and practises among tobacco growers...witchcraft beliefs and practises persisted in the study area and its impacts were perceived in duality as having both positive and negative impacts....black (African) cultures and religions are viewed as believing in supernatural forces including spells, invisible forces, ancestral spirits and medicine with magical powers (Mufuzi, 2014; Eboiyehi, 2017)....some
people spend lots of money on consulting witchdoctors to obtain counter attack, or to protect themselves....
This article explores various readings of two particular incidents that both
occurred within a suburb of the city of Iringa in South-central Tanzania. First a
[Tanzanian] Lutheran pastor started suffering from a paralyzed shoulder and a few weeks later an old woman was found lying naked outside of his home in the middle of the night. While both incidents were widely ascribed to witchcraft the article shows how particular
interpretations were embedded in and reflective of a dense social climate, characterised
by different kinds of tension, inequalities, suspicions of corruption and by religious and
medical pluralism and competition
a Lutheran parish in Minnesota with close connections to the Lutheran
church in Iringa invited him to the United States for surgery.
All people I spoke to concurred that the pastor was attacked by a
witch. In the most elaborate version of the story I heard, the pastor and his wife were
sleeping at night with the door locked, when the witch entered the bedroom (witches are
able to transcend walls and closed doors) and shot him. As the witch did not use a real gun
but a witchcraft spiritual gun, the shot produced no visible wound, but the pastor’s left
shoulder was paralyzed, and his nose started bleeding. His wife woke up when she heard
him screaming in pain and the witch took off.
Iringa is a pluralist city in terms of religion and ethnicity. Although locally rooted
beliefs and practices are still common, most people, including all “traditional healers”
(waganga wa kienjeje) I have spoken to, have some institutional affiliation with one of the
world religions. Islam has a strong presence, but as in most Tanzanian inland cities,
Christians are the majority in Iringa. While the Roman Catholic Church counts most
members, the city also has one of the highest concentrations of Lutherans in the county
(unfortunately reliable statistic material on religious adherence is hard to find). The
Evangelical Lutheran Church in Iringa runs a university, several secondary schools (many
of which are located in the rural areas) and is engaged in different development projects,
mostly financed by foreign donors. ........
The main ethnic groups are the Wahehe, the Wabena and the Wakinga, but several
people from other parts of the country such as the Wachagga from northern Tanzania and
the Wanyakusa from Southern Tanzania have also settled in the city. The Wahehe, the
Wabena and the Wakinga all have patrilineal descent systems and share many beliefs,
religious practices and linguistic features. The main language in Iringa is Kiswahili.
Interethnic marriages are common, all the Christian churches I have visited are multi-
ethnic and traditional healers treat all patients regardless of ethnicity....
People know that witches meet at night and consume the flesh of human beings (see also Behrend 2011). But no one could tell me exactly where they meet and when I asked about more specific details,..............
for instance if the witches cooked the meat or ate it raw or if they put salt on it and served it
on plates, etc., people would only offer their speculations but no affirmative answers.
Many considered it likely that witches ate the meat raw, a view that was consonant with a
general understanding of witchcraft as representing an inversion of common standards of
adequate behaviour and morality. But my informants insisted that only witches have
detailed and accurate insider knowledge about witchcraft. Neutral ethnographic
participant observation in nightly witch feasts is not an option as the only way to get
access would be through some kind of initiation. No one I spoke to could or would provide
specific information on the initiation rituals, though most people agreed that they involved
sacrificing a relative to be served at the witchcraft feast.
Anti-developmentalist” witchcraft is
mostly but not exclusively associated with poor and envious people who supposedly resent
the progress and wellbeing of others. Pastor Edward was a relatively prosperous man who
supplemented his salary with other sources of income, for instance by keeping livestock
and owning a house that he sub-let. His pastoral home was far above the average standard
of housing in the suburb and his wife and two children were all healthy. He was also
engaged in different local projects. With the financial assistance of Lutherans from the
Minnesota Parish he had initiated the construction of a youth centre next to his church. He
had further arranged an English course for the youth of the congregation and he managed
to purchase a number of sewing machines and started a sewing course for some of the
women, thereby helping them to make a future living as tailors. With books donated by the
Americans he had created a small library in the church and he encouraged congregants to
read. Pastor Edward had developed a personal friendship with American Lutherans who
visited Iringa from time to time and it was expected that they would sooner or later invite
him to the US for a visit (which they eventually did when he needed surgery).
......................
The general view among Lutheran evangelists and lay people was that Pastor
Edward had been bewitched because of his standard of living, his enviable transnational
connections and, last but not least, because he was engaged in vitu vya maendeleo (literally:
developmental things) to the benefit of the whole sub-parish. There were plenty of poor and
supposedly envious people in the suburb, making it difficult to narrow down the field of
potential suspects. Some informants considered it likely that Pastor Edward knew or
strongly suspected who the witch might be, though he never voiced any suspicion. These
informants were not implying that Pastor Edward possessed special powers that enabled
him to identify witches. Rather, they were merely connecting three pieces of common
knowledge, namely, that anyone can in theory be a witch, that witches often attack people
they resent and that most people know who their own enemies are.
...........................
the power healers use to identify and neutralize witches
must itself be a power of witchcraft (see Geschiere 1997; West 2005; Lindhardt 2009a,
2009b). Not surprisingly, traditional healers take pains to assert the legitimacy and
benevolent nature of their healing practices. Yet they also assert some affinity with the
world of witchcraft, for example by explaining that they are assisted by ancestral and
external spirits (majini), both of which are also known to be used by witches. Some healers
even admitted to me that they could use their spiritual powers for harmful purposes if they
wished. Born-again Christians are particularly harsh in their categorization of all
traditional healers as witches and servants of the Devil. It follows that consulting a healer
about the identity of a given witch would not be a simple and spiritually neutral act of
seeking out a specific piece of information from the most qualified expert available. ...
a good number of people within the church, including many of the
same who repeatedly claimed they had no idea about the identity of the witch, in fact hared a suspicion. The person suspected was another Lutheran pastor – I call him Mduba
– who lived near the church but played no active part in local congregational life. Pastor
Mduba was working as a headmaster of a bible school for future rural evangelists,
.............
Pastor Mduba and one of his sons were working in a church-run organization that channelled the sponsor money from the US to the schools. It was almost a public secret that they “ate” some of the money themselves. According to some informants, the number of American sponsorships sent to Iringa supersedes the number of students who receive one. And though Americans sent enough money to pay for the relatively high fees for Lutheran
boarding schools, several students were sent to cheaper private or government day schools.
The mishandling of the American sponsor money exemplifies Jean Francois Bayart’s
(2000) notion of strategy of extraversion by use of which some African actors manage to
benefit from Africa’s economic dependence on the West insofar as they occupy
intermediary positions between the external world and their own societies.
........................
many people suspected that Mduba used his witchcraft to protect the wealth he had generated through corruption and to prevent any superiors from sanctioning his activities.
It was no secret that the two pastors did not get along. People who were friendly with
Pastor Edward speculated that Pastor Mduba was envious because Pastor Edward had
brought development to the parish and gained popularity and recognition on that account.
..................
Pastor Mduba had written a letter to the Americans after the
witchcraft attack, explaining to them that Pastor Edward had recovered and left Iringa
(which he had not at the time) and that inviting him to the US for surgery was therefore
pointless. At one point it came to a heated verbal confrontation between Pastor Edward’s
wife and Pastor Mduba, as she accused him directly of having bewitched her husband,
which he – unsurprisingly – denied.
.......................
Traditional healers provide anti-witchcraft
medicines that are spread out in front of the house and in openings (doors, windows) and
placed into small wounds on the body of a person. An increasingly popular alternative is
found in Pentecostal-charismatic churches and revival groups. During open-air revival
meetings where they address potential converts, born-again preachers often take great
pains to present the power of Jesus as an explicit alternative to protective medicines of
healers. And, similar to how anti-witchcraft medicines have to be placed physically in a
house, born-again Christians explained to me how they walk around in houses “placing
prayers” (kuweka maombi) with the imposition of hands.
.................................
a witch who tries to enter will be paralyzed.
Both a Pentecostal pastor and a traditional healer explained to me how they had on a few
occasions found witches lying naked outside their houses in the morning.
Inarguably, Pastor Edward’s house was being protected. The question that generated
debate was: by which kind of power?
............................
Pastor Edward, who
was known as a born-again Christian and a supporter of revivalism, was uneasy with the
increasing autonomy of the revivalist group and started imposing restrictions on its
activities. He insisted on supervising and restricting all interdenominational activities, and
lay revivalists were no longer permitted to preach during Sunday services. As these
restrictions were unacceptable to the revivalists, who felt that only the Holy Spirit and not
some pastoral newcomer was entitled to guide them, a division became inevitable. The New
Life Crusade leaders broke with the Lutheran church and established their own independent
revival ministry, and later changed its name to New Life in Christ.
.....................
But rumour
suggested that he had purchased anti-witchcraft medicines during a visit to his home
village in Northern Tanzania. Another possibility was that he was himself a witch. Witches
are believed to be involved in all kinds of power struggles, competing with, attacking and
testing each other. Both the paralyzed shoulder and the Mama Mgaba incident could very
well be ascribed to such witchcraft rivalries. The insistence of the New Life in Christ
leaders that Pastor Edward was protected by the powers of witchcraft, whether his own or
provided by a healer, served to mark a rift between the true born-again Christians who left
the Lutheran church and the not-so-true-ones who stayed behind
..............................
Mama Sembuki was a Catholic, though not a regular church-
goer. In 2004 she was persuaded by Lutheran evangelists to become saved and started
attending revivalist fellowships. At that point she gave up un-Christian practices such as
ancestor worship, smoking and drinking beer, and she stopped practising traditional
healing. But after a while Mama Sembuki slid back into her old ways. She had been
making a living as a healer
...........................
Pastor Edward had no previous history of witchcraft, but it is common knowledge that some Lutheran pastors are witches and compete with each other, while others consult traditional healers and others are devoted born-again Christians.
.............................
Besides she had given birth to a total of eight children, of whom six had died, and it is a widespread belief that being a witch requires sacrifices of one’s own relatives.
.............................
In Tanzania, as in other African countries, one encounters a widespread belief
that parents are invested with the power to influence the life course of their children by
uttering curses or blessings (see Lindhardt 2010). Mama Mgaba believed that this curse
and the continuous influence of the resentful spirit of her late father were the main causes
of her tough and miserable life in extreme poverty and with a no-good husband who drank
too much and regularly beat her.
She further explained that several of her brothers and sisters were witches. Though
medical doctors ascribed the death of her six children to ordinary illness (mgonjwa wa
kawaida) such as malaria or typhus, a traditional healer confirmed that the children were
killed and eaten by their uncles and aunts. She confronted her siblings on several
occasions. Backed up a by healer, she even insisted that they have their heads shaved in
a witchcraft-neutralizing ritual, which they refused to do.
.................................
But a person behaving in this way stands a better chance of convincing others that he or she is
a victim, rather than a master of witchcraft.
Mama Mgaba was unsure why Jesus had left her but the result was that she was no
longer immune and protected. She did not know whether the father’s spirit, the witchcraft
of her siblings or a combination of both was responsible for her problems, but either way
evil forces originating from within her own family had returned to take control over her
life. Interestingly, when explaining to me that she was not a witch, she further pointed to
two of the same pieces of evidence that, according to many others, suggested she was one:
the death of her children and her life in poverty. Had she been a witch she could have used
her powers of witchcraft to protect her children against the witchcraft of others.
............................
Born-again Christians make more absolute distinctions than most others between divine
(good) and satanic (evil) powers and insist that any involvement with healers and other
witches is harmful in the long run as it implies being trapped in a relationship with Satan.
However, they readily recognize that the satanic powers of witchcraft can be benevolent to
the person who possesses them, at least on a short-term basis, and are in many ways
preferable to having no powers at all (Lindhardt 2009a).
................................
In Tanzania most traditional healers sell “business medicines” (dawa za biashara)
that must be spread out in shops or market stalls in order to attract clients. Because of the
ambiguous relationship between the powers of healers and the world of witchcraft very
few people admit using such medicines, while healers insist that they sell a lot of them. In
addition to the marketing of business medicines, there has been an increase in Tanzania
and several other African countries of rumours and concerns about rapid accumulation of
wealth through witchcraft. Many people in Iringa distinguish between the kind of
witchcraft used mainly to obstruct the happiness and development of others, and the newer
witchcraft of wealth. The latter may be used by witches or people who seek their assistance
to attract clients to a shop or market stall, to get a job or secure a promotion and to protect
wealth and positions acquired through corruption.
......................................
In July 2006, I attended a dinner in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Kihesa, a suburb of Iringa, which is a regional capital in south-central Tanzania. The dinner was a good-bye party for a group of American visitors from the Lutheran Church in Minnesota, which has close ties with the church in Iringa. Besides the visiting anthropologist and approximately eight American visitors whose two-week stay was about to end, the participants included approximately ten staff members of the church. Before calling it a night, it was time for a final prayer. We all formed a circle, held hands and closed our eyes and then a senior evangelist started to pray out loud in Kiswahili on behalf of all of us. The anthropologist could not resist the temptation of breaking protocol, so I opened my eyes and discretely observed the rest of the participants. The Americans were all standing in total silence with their heads bowed and their lips immobile, seemingly comfortable with letting the evangelist do the articulate praying on their behalf even though they did not understand the language. By contrast many Tanzanian staff members had their necks stretched and they were praying articulately, although only whispering (but so loud that I had already noticed it when I had my eyes closed) with their lips moving. The prayer unfolded in this way for the first few minutes during which the senior evangelist thanked God for having blessed the church in Kihesa with the visit, asked him to bless both the church and the American visitors and, not least, to protect the latter on their journey home. When the theme of divine protection was introduced, it also became relevant to mention the spiritual dangers against which protection was needed. The evangelist raised his tone of voice as he explicitly asked God to protect us all, but especially the Americans who were to embark on a journey, against the Devil, witches and different categories of spirits. In addition to asking God for protection, he also addressed these spiritual adversaries directly and demanded, in the name of Jesus, that they left and stayed away. At this point most of the Tanzanian staff members could not keep quiet but started speaking out more loudly as they, too, both asked God to keep demonic forces at arm’s length and themselves demanded those forces to stay away, while moving their upper bodies and making semi-aggressive facial expressions.
This prayer was by no means extraordinary or unusual. I have experienced countless similar prayers in different contexts, both during worship in Lutheran charismatic revival meetings and Pentecostal churches and in more mundane everyday situations, for instance, when leaving the homes of friends after a visit. I have also overheard Tanzanian friends and acquaintances pray in private where their prayers included semi-aggressive demands that the Devil and his demons stay away. And numerous Tanzanian respondents have informed me that they often say quiet and discrete prayers that include such demands, for instance, before embarking buses or entering markets, or in many other situations. Finally, as we will see a little later, Pentecostals/charismatics also sometimes focus their prayers on physical objects, such as coins and bills, asking God to clean these objects of witchcraft and other diabolic forces.
Asking God to keep diabolic forces away and addressing such forces directly, demanding that they leave and stay away are utterances that form an integral part of deliverances in Pentecostal/charismatic communities. At the same time, the kind of prayers described earlier differed from deliverance in a conventional and narrow sense of the term. They were not focused on a specific person and prior to the prayer no one present had displayed common symptoms of demonic possession such as sudden screaming, uncontrolled bodily movements or speaking in a different voice. Sometimes such prayers are preceded by an intuitive discernment of spiritual dangers. For instance, Tanzanian Pentecostal/charismatic respondents have told me how they sometimes sense demonic presence in different locations such as buses or markets, which motivates their discrete prayers. However, discernment of demonic forces is by no means a prerequisite for asking God for protection against them or for demanding that they leave and stay away. In many situations what makes such demands relevant is merely the assumption that spiritual threats are potentially omnipresent and that spirits may reside in people, places and physical objects.
In this chapter I look at Pentecostal/charismatic deliverance as a practice that transcends precluded ritual occasions and extends into a variety of mundane situations and which is not exclusively directed at specific persons who are allegedly possessed but also at animals, places, social situations and not least physical objects, where spiritual forces are presumed to reside. I draw on the work of scholars such as Thomas Csordas (1997) and Simon Coleman and Peter Collins (2000) who have shown how a specific religious habitus that penetrates social realms can be cultivated through ritual training in charismatic groups. While the ability of Pentecostals/charismatics to perform deliverance in different situations can be attributed to ritually acquired skills and sensibilities towards spiritual dangers, I also argue that the understanding of situations where deliverance is particularly relevant and necessary is informed by widely shared cultural assumptions about the omnipresence of witchcraft and about the way spiritual forces work and may reside in places and objects. Such assumptions are also reflected in the work of traditional healers (waganga wa kienyeji) who, as we will see, represent a fierce competition to Pentecostals/charismatics in terms of providing protection against witchcraft and other spiritual dangers. I argue that Pentecostals/charismatics have successfully inserted themselves into a wider market of spiritual healing and protection, in part because their theologies resonate with existing widespread cultural beliefs and, not least, due to their action-oriented approach to spiritual dangers and in particular the ritual training that enables adherents to take deliverance into their own hands and perform it in a variety of situations.
The chapter is based on data collected during numerous field trips to Iringa between 1998 and 2021. Most of my research has been done with Lutheran charismatics................
200 Pentecostals/charismatics in Iringa I have interviewed over the years, a clear pattern emerges. They were generally mainline Christians (Lutheran, Catholics, Anglicans) who at one point in their life decided to attend a Pentecostal/charismatic service or outdoor revival meeting for the first time because they experienced life problems which they attributed to witchcraft. The testimonies of my respondents in Iringa also provide some insights into the dynamics of a broader spiritual-healing market. In contemporary Tanzania, Pentecostals/charismatics find themselves in fierce competition with other providers of spiritual relief or protection, most notably the so-called traditional healers (waganga wa kienyeje). In many of the testimonies I collected, the search for protection against witchcraft and/or other spiritual dangers first led the eventual convert to one or several traditional healers, but to no avail, and only later to Pentecostal/charismatic community. An example of such spiritual-healing biography is the testimony of Mtwewe, a prominent lay preacher in the New Life in Christ, who explained to me how he used to be Lutheran and a ‘normal Christian’ (mkristo wa kawaida) who had not been ‘saved’ or ‘born-again’ and who did therefore not enjoy divine protection against spiritual dangers. Mtwewe told me how he and his wife and children were at one point attacked by a witch whose majini came at night and made them feel that they were being strangled and were unable to sleep (a common manifestation of witchcraft attacks). Mtwewe first went to see a healer in his native village, and the healer explained that he would use his own benevolent majini to fight off the majini of the witch. Mtwewe was given some medicine, to be poured on the body, supposedly containing the protective powers of the healer’s majini. However, despite repeated visits to the healer, who allegedly sent his majini to both Kenya and Zanzibar to increase their power, there was no improvement. Mtwewe’s and his family’s spiritual problems were only solved when they attended a charismatic revival meeting and were delivered through praying.
..............
Each year, the charismatic movement of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Iringa organizes both outdoor revival meetings and in-church seminaries where a visiting preacher will come and preach/teach for several days in a row. Prior to such events, members will meet in the church, and possibly on the plot where an outdoor meeting will take place and pray intensely with the purpose of kuweka moto, literately ‘place fire’, which refers to activating large concentrations of divine power that will allegedly make it difficult for witches and spirits to enter a site.
............
book chapter on Tanzanian witchcraft
Albinos being attacked and murdered....and witch doctors use albino body parts for magic....
173 witch doctors had been arrested....
dead bodies exhumed for parts to sell to witches...
mchawi is a witch
Uchawi is witchcraft
Waganana are healers/diviners
horu is life force and is found in semen and food and...different body parts circulate horu...
Mawele means tantric circulation of life force via womens' breasts and mens' testicles...
Moongo is life force circulating through animal backbones and doorways of houses....
Catholics and Pentecostals both accuse the others of practicing bad witchcraft....
a charismatic revival movement within the Evangelical Lutheran Church...
a neo-Pentecostal prosperity denomination that was founded in 2001 after a schism
within the Lutheran revival movement....
When I last visited Iringa in 2012 I also noticed a slight decrease in the emphasis that was
placed on financial wellbeing in the New Life in Christ as well as in the Lutheran Charismatic movement, as compared to previous years. Offerings went on as usual, but preachers and lay people tended to focus a little more on other kinds of divine counter-gifts than financial blessings...
the ambiguities of witchcraft and to
understand the witch as having a moral function within society, rather
than being the victim of a concerted attack on the female body;
essentially, the witch is a human being that in the perception of the
other embodies what an individual in society ought neither to do nor to
be.
discipline healers in colonial Tanganyika. During the maji-maji rebellion (1905-1907)
healers gave medicines which reputedly turned bullets into water to rebels who were fighting the
German colonial authorities. The first 1922 Antiwitchcraft Ordinance was introduced by the British as
a direct reaction to this
. One can no longer say, as Monica
Wilson once wrote that a “clear distinction is made by the Nyakyusa between the
legal and illegal use of power derived from pythons” (ibid). These days many people
say that imbepo sya bandu has gone too far. To these critics this indigenous law has
become twisted – it allows greedy witches, hungry for food and beer, to use their
strength to force others to feed them at times when they are at their most
vulnerable (when they are bereaved). In 2002, the general opinion seemed to be
that there had been a veritable explosion of deaths related to unsatisfied and
unsated witches after funeral feasts.
.............
Reynolds (1963:165) has long advised
that witchcraft, like belief in religion or racism, “…may not
be eradicated by the stroke of the pen or fortuitous
prosecutions...the cure, if this is appropriate expression,
is the removal of ignorance by introducing a scientific
view of the world through educating the masses"
.....................
Shaibu Magungu, and his effort to make....................................
his practice modern as a commitment to "development"
(maendeleo).Our research revealed that Magungu'svision
of modernity as development is shared by the users of
antiwitchcraft services, who have come to regard these
services as a precondition for the achievement of their own
smaller-scale projects of modernity.
Dealing with witchcraft in Tanzania
Tanzania is particularly fertile ground for the study of
witchcraft.Among the poorest countries in the world, and
among the least developed in Africa,it is wholly enmeshed
within the new political relations of development assis-
tance structuredaround poverty reduction and liberaliza-
tion policies.
over 100 different ethnic
groups, all with their own languages and customs. Witch-
craft (uchawi) transcends local and national culture and is
part of daily life in all social settings and in all locations.
....................
In the northwest, notably
among the Sukuma,the country'slargest ethnic group, the
submerged violence of witchcraft is met with explicit violence commonly directed against those who are elderly, female, and vulnerable,who are most likely to be accused.9
Expulsion and murder are not uncommon (Bukurura1994;
Mesaki 1994).... execution of witches through the secret hiring of young men
willing to hack them to death
...............................
Ordinary people also
spoke of shaving in the language of service delivery to
explain what shaving does and why it is necessary. Shaving
can suppress the powers of witches. This is necessary to
address the suspicions of kin and neighbors that people
enmeshed in bitter quarrels may be involved in witchcraft.
The perception of shaving as a public service and in institutionalized terms echoes Steven Feiertnan's understanding of witchcraft-suppression practices in Tanzania as
"public medicine," concemed with "control over the social
conditions of health" (1986:206).
.................................
The receptiveness of traditional healers
in Tanzania to what appears modern, where appropriate
(Semali 1986:87),underlies their enthusiasm for the Traditional and Alternative Medicines Act, which became law
in 2002, that will foster the sector's closer integration into
the formal medical system.44Traditional healers welcome
the act because it accords them recognition as a legitimate part of the medical system and as specialists in
their own right (see Gessler et al. 1995:154).The inclusion
of healers who base their treatment on divination, who collaborate with spirits, and who are likely to become possessed in the course of their medical duties may at first sight
seem to contradict the modernizing objectives of public-sector reform
........................
Witcheraft, in the form of the malicious use of medicines that empower witches to harm, can
be guarded against through special protective medicines (kinga), widely available from traditional healers.
............................
In response to the competition from Pentecostal churches, Charismatic revival groups soon emerged within both mainline Protestant churches, such as the Evangelical Lutheran
Church, and the Catholic Church. In the early stages of the revival in the
Lutheran Church there were considerable tensions between revivalists
and church authorities (Mlahagwa, 1999), sometimes resulting in schisms
and the formation of new independent Charismatic ministries. However,
in recent years such tensions seem to have softened and the revival movement is now an established and accepted part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania.
the last time I visited Tanzania in May 2016 one Lutheran pastor and passionate revivalist, told me how an owl had recently entered her home in the middle of the night. She was
convinced that it was not an ordinary bird gone astray but a witch in the
shape of an owl. Her first reaction was to pray in order to chase it away.
As that did not work, she tried to chase it out with a stick, but to no avail,
and finally she killed it. At about the same time an old man living nearby
died all of a sudden. A similar incident occurred a few weeks later, only
this time the trespassing nightly visitor was a fierce dog that tried to bite
other people living in the pastor’s home and could not be chased away.
When she finally killed it, a woman living nearby, whom many suspected
of witchcraft, took her last breath.
Spirits (majini, ancestors)
https://media.proquest.com/media/hms/PFT/1/GwxZS?_s=Vkxm6%2FXCZm%2Bvx2swmmGxKLTwXc8%3D
The 2002 law still retains the provision for deporting a person suspected to
engage in witchcraft activities a factor pointed out by the
Nyalali Commission and many a human rights advocate
to be contrary to the constitution and a contravention of
ones human rights. The act continues to differentiate
between “benevolent” and “malevolent” intentions of
perpetrators of witchcraft which are differently penalized....
2002 a revised edition of the law which now reads
“Witchcraft Act” instead of “Ordinance” a direct product of
the recommendations of the Law Review Commission
(LRC). The act refers to the various previous versions/
editions (1928, 1935, 1956 and 1998) denoting the
numerous amendments it had to go through.
https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/28141/1/1001853.pdf#page=264
exorcism healing of mental illness (mayabu bewitchment) relied on herbs and massages (twice a day)....for two years....
bugota witchcraft medicine
Christian missionaries have called "ancestral spirits" demons or shetani but in Tanzania traditional medicine has been paired with Western religions - as dawa
Priests, Witches and Power in Tanzania - book
the girls first menstruation required extended seclusion in Tanzania into the 1960s..
unyago as this fertility ritual for women...the young maidens were kept secluded (in the house) until they married...then marriage payments were made as she left the hut...being presented to the groom's kin... called mwali....
cucumbers, ntanga, are considered emblematic of fertility and need to be eaten for the ritual....
