A couple of weeks ago, we all watched in horror as a 90-year-old woman, Akua Denteh, was lynched to death because a chief within the municipality she came from in Northern Ghana, declared her to be a witch.
A few days, ago, a Florida-based Pastor Sylvester Ofori was arrested for shooting his 27-year-old wife point-blank in front of her workplace. A video circulating around after the news broke shows a physical altercation between Ofori and his brother-in-law. In the video, the murderer, her husband, is heard calling his wife a witch and threatens to kill her. This video was allegedly taken a day before he killed her.
There are so many problematic issues to unpack in these two tragedies. Obviously, abuse, physical abuse particularly takes center stage, and always raises questions on what can be done differently or what can be done for survivors to keep them safe and assured. Another dimension that these stories keep brining me back to is the violence that manifests towards women based on our society's warped sense of spirituality.
I cannot tell if it was always the case but the advent of Christianity, hand in hand with Colonisation, brought a terse disdain for indigenous African spirituality; A disdain that emanates from within our own. For example in northern Ghana, the Gambaga Witch camp is still very active and has quite a number of maltreated and ostracized women who have been accused of witchcraft.
Of course, this is not new to me. As a young woman who was brought up on the tenets of the Christian faith and has first-hand, witnessed family members who have had whispers about them, naming them witches and being blamed for one misfortune or the other, this is a way of life very familiar to me. All I knew was that African traditional religion was dark and evil, Christianity was pure and good. When you are told that this aunt or that uncle was a traditionalist, you know best to stay well away from that relative. It was that simple.
Nevertheless, It has always puzzled me and now that I am older, it frustrates because I am no closer to understanding why this is. In all of this, I cannot help but blame this on colonization and the number it did on us. To systematically brainwash a people, call them evil for their natural way of living, call them ungodly, dark, dirty, and wrong for 400 years, is quite effective, I have to admit, in disconnecting us from the core of who we are as a people. With one hand, the white man enslaved, raped, and looted that which was ours, and on the other hand, taught us to abandon our ways and follow the ‘light’ of Christ; a manipulated teaching that has succeeded in alienating us from ourselves, a teaching of a compassionate Christ that still miraculously strips us of any compassion towards others, more specifically women. Othering others seems to be a favourite past time of organised religion. The “us” versus “them” mindset.
So back to my question: Why is there a never-ending subjugation of women in the name of religion? In Ghana, many traditional spiritual leaders are men. These spiritual priests are known to commune with the dead, provide pathways for chiefs and community leaders. These spiritual priests are known to be mercenary in their dealings. For example, if you need an adversary taken out if you want to curse someone for a wrong they did you, these are the same priests, people resort to for assistance. These practices are deemed as sorcery, mostly evil, not quite different from witchcraft, and yet you would be hard-pressed to find a public lynching or any type of violence meted out towards them. These circumstances only add on to the overwhelming evidence that men are the gatekeepers of religious practices that only intend to violate and abuse women while protecting themselves.
In Christianity, it is no different. In the bible, on at least on two occasions, women are used as sexual pawns in negotiations which have nothing to do with us. On more than one occasion, in the Bible, the violent raping of women is suggested as a buffer to make peace or punish the wrong of men. (Genesis 19 & Judges 19 )
This is a sad reflection of organised religion's nasty history, its unkindness and complete disregard towards women. In Ghana, women make up almost 70% of the Christian church’s membership. Women are the biggest participants of the church, its growth, and consolidation; despite how restrictive it is for women. Deep in the Ghanaian religious-cultural fabric, is the need to find spiritual answers to basically all our woes. It is supposed to be our place of comfort and solace. It is where we make sense of our reality. It is all we have. However, the stories of women like Barbera Ofori, a pastor’s wife, begs the question: Where was the church when she needed it most? What is the Christian conditioning that keeps women in abusive, violent situations? How does a 90-year-old become a threat to such religious people whose beliefs typically instruct them to love, care, and protect one another?
The truth is that organized religion, and in this case, Christianity, has failed women and continues to wear its cloak of violence in an insidious, slow-burn manner that isolates, judges, and ultimately kills us. We truly have no room to be fully human in the eyes of religion. Our joy, our words, our anger, our mistakes, our freedom is heavily scrutinized and policed unfairly.
This will not change where men continue to make the rules and break them per their comfort. I don’t have answers for a better alternative. But we must get comfortable in the sketchiness and darkness that sits at the heart of what we believe as divine. Perhaps we can start to heal from there.
Rest In Peace Akua Denteh
Rest In Peace Barbara Ofori
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