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Tue, 16 Mar 2021 Feature Article

I've Forgotten Now Who I Used To Be!”

Ive Forgotten Now Who I Used To Be!”

H ARDLY had the ink dried on my article, “The Evil Consequences of Religious Mania” (The Ghanaian Times 9 March 2021) when the London Observer newspaper published a heart-rending story about a witch camp in Ghana, and how the songs some of its inmates haver been singing to themselves have been recorded by a couple of musical researchers.

According to The Observer, the witch camp where the recordings were made is one of six on Northern Ghana. One song bears the unforgettable title of “I've Forgotten Now Who I Used To Be.”

Written by Dorian Lynskey, the Observer article says the singers express themselves “in little-spoken Ghanaian dialects” and are “haunting, spontaneous songs by women accused of witchcraft”. According to the writer, the “are unlike anything you have ever heard”. Here is a link to the piece:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/mar/13/witch-camp-ghana-ive-forgotten-now-who-i-used-to-be-review-magical-sound-of-the-marginalised

Dorian Lynskey writes;: “Now that it is fashionable for aggrieved political factions to dismiss criticism as a “witch hunt”, it’s worth remembering what makes actual witch hunts so pernicious. It’s not that the women thus accused are in fact innocent – it’s that they couldn’t possibly be guilty.

“In northern Ghana, witch hunts are more than a political metaphor. Even now, vulnerable women are accused of the dark arts because they have a mental illness, a physical disability or simply because their families want them out of the way. They are blamed for infertility, crop failure, bad weather, accidental deaths and much more besides. Lynchings and burnings still occur from time to time. That’s what a witch hunt means”.

The writer points out that while belief in witchcraft is not unique to Ghana, witch camps are. These small settlements, “which still exist, despite government efforts to shut them down”, offer accused women safe haven, albeit within the same framework of belief that drove them from their homes in the first place. The chiefs oft the witch camps “claim to ask the local gods to neutralise their powers and render them harmless”.

But the protection they offer “assumes guilt” on the part of the alleged witches. One of them innocently told a journalist that “If we are here, then we must be witches,” Can there be any worse evidence of utter dehumanisation than that?

The women of the witch camps are the subjects of Ian Brennan, a Grammy-winning producer and, and an Italian-Rwandan film-maker Marilena Delli Umuhoza. Brennan has a “21st-century sensitivity to the ethics of field recording” and thereby avoids “the bad practice and paternalistic assumptions” that complicated the work of some earlier researchers.

Brennan and Umuhoza have previously documented the music of prisoners in Malawi, genocide survivors in Rwanda, war veterans in Vietnam and albinos in Tanzania:. All these are “persecuted or traumatised communities making music in extremely straitened circumstances.” Brennan argues that “music can be found everywhere and the more unfamiliar, the better.”

Compiled on “Witch Camp (Ghana)”, I’ve Forgotten Now Who I Used to Be is distilled from around six hours of recordings in three different camps. “You can’t tell who the songs are by” (the singers requested anonymity); or what they’re about (their regional dialects are little spoken even in Ghana).

However, “the English track titles offer signposts – from the bluntly explicit (I Trusted My Family, They Betrayed Me) to the universal (Love, Please).

Guitar-like sounds mingle with ad hoc instrumentation – tin cans, teapots, tree branches – and serendipitous interventions, such as the chirrup of birdsong that concludes We Are No Different Than You.

Left to Live Like an Animal, is “a delicate plucked-string motif paired with an intimate murmur and underlaid with a low, droning croon. It is “Exhibit A for Brennan’s claim that emotion makes language irrelevant”. Meanwhile, “the hypnotic overlapping voices on I Am a Beggar for a Home might be mistaken for looped and phased samples, while the shrill burble of I Have Lost All That I Love would seem to come from a synthesiser, if not an interplanetary broadcast,”

This testimony to the way Ghanaians isolate, mistreat and sometimes actually kill sufferers from mental illness, especially Alzheimer's and dementia, in the mistaken belief that the sufferers are witches, brings me back to a subject I have written about very often, namely: What is the duty of the state with regard to a charge of murder levelled against a mini-mob that burns an old woman of 72 to death because it was believed that “she was a witch”?

The Constitution of Ghana enjoins the state and its judicial arms to protect and defend the right to life of all citizens The Constitution makes no distinction between what citizens think of one another: they all have the same rights and duties. If a section of the citizenry takes it upon itself to kill others to whom they attribute unprovable powers of witchcraft, it is the sworn duty of all judicial arms of the state to punish the miscreants according to law.

Punishing the miscreants would teach the populace that certain illnesses can make people act in strange ways that do not necessarily denote the presence in the person of witchcraft or an “evil spirit.”

CASE HISTORY: https://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/Witchcraft-Grandma-set-ablaze-198244

Friday, 26 November 2010

A 72-year-old grandmother suffered one of the most barbaric of deaths when she was burnt alive by a mob at Tema Site 15 after being accused of being a witch.

A student-nurse, who appeared on the scene, attempted to rescue the old woman from her ordeal but the woman died of her burns within 24 hours of arrival at the Tema General Hospital.

Five people who allegedly tortured and extracted the confessions of witchcraft from Ama Hemmah (sometimes spelt Ama Ahima) before drenching her in kerosene and setting her ablaze, have been arrested by the Tema Police.

Two of the suspects are Samuel Ghunney, a 50-year-old photographer, and Pastor Samuel Fletcher Sagoe, 55, [an] evangelist.

The rest are Emelia Opoku, 37; Nancy Nana Ama Akrofie, 46, and Mary Sagoe, 52, all unemployed.

Briefing the Daily Graphic on the incident, the Tema Regional Police Commander, Mr Augustine Gyening, Assistant Commissioner of Police, said about 10 a.m. on November 20, 2010, Samuel Fletcher Sagoe visited his sister (Emelia) at Site 15, a suburb of Tema Community 1, and saw Madam Hemmah sitting in Emelia's bedroom at a time Emelia had sent her children to school.

Mr Gyening said Samuel then raised an alarm, attracting the attention of the principal suspect, Samuel Ghunney, and some people in the neighbourhood. The suspects claimed that Madam Hemmah was a known witch in the area and subjected her to severe torture, compelling her to confess to being a witch.

He said after extracting the confession from Madam Hemmah, Ghunney asked Emelia for a gallon of kerosene and with the help of his accomplices, poured it all over the woman and set her ablaze.

In their cautioned statement, the suspects denied the offence and explained that they poured anointing oil on the old woman which caught fire when they offered prayers to exorcise the demon from her.

By CAMERON DUODU

Cameron Duodu
Cameron Duodu, © 2021

Martin Cameron Duodu is a United Kingdom-based Ghanaian novelist, journalist, editor and broadcaster. After publishing a novel, The Gab Boys, in 1967, Duodu went on to a career as a journalist and editorialist.. More Martin Cameron Duodu (born 24 May 1937) is a United Kingdom-based Ghanaian novelist, journalist, editor and broadcaster. After publishing a novel, The Gab Boys, in 1967, Duodu went on to a career as a journalist and editorialist.

Education
Duodu was born in Asiakwa in eastern Ghana and educated at Kyebi Government Senior School and the Rapid Results College, London , through which he took his O-Level and A-Level examinations by correspondence course . He began writing while still at school, the first story he ever wrote ("Tough Guy In Town") being broadcast on the radio programme The Singing Net and subsequently included in Voices of Ghana , a 1958 anthology edited by Henry Swanzy that was "the first Ghanaian literary anthology of poems, stories, plays and essays".

Early career
Duodu was a student teacher in 1954, and worked on a general magazine called New Nation in Ghana, before going on to become a radio journalist for the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation from 1956 to 1960, becoming editor of radio news <8> (moonlighting by contributing short stories and poetry to The Singing Net and plays to the programme Ghana Theatre). <9> From 1960 to 1965 he was editor of the Ghana edition of the South African magazine Drum , <10> and in 1970 edited the Daily Graphic , <3> the biggest-selling newspaper in Ghana.< citation needed >

The Gab Boys (1967) and creative writing
In 1967, Duodu's novel The Gab Boys was published in London by André Deutsch . The "gab boys" of the title – so called because of their gabardine trousers – are the sharply dressed youths who hang about the village and are considered delinquent by their elders. The novel is the story of the adventures of one of them, who runs away from village life, eventually finding a new life in the Ghana capital of Accra . According to one recent critic, "Duodu simultaneously represents two currents in West African literature of the time, on the one hand the exploration of cultural conflict and political corruption in post-colonial African society associated with novelists and playwrights such as Chinua Achebe and Ama Ata Aidoo , and on the other hand the optimistic affirmation of African cultural strengths found in poets of the time such as David Diop and Frank Kobina Parkes . These themes come together in a very compassionate discussion of the way that individual people, rich and poor, are pushed to compromise themselves as they try to navigate a near-chaotic transitional society."

In June 2010 Duodu was a participant in the symposium Empire and Me: Personal Recollections of Imperialism in Reality and Imagination, held at Cumberland Lodge , alongside other speakers who included Diran Adebayo , Jake Arnott , Margaret Busby , Meira Chand , Michelle de Kretser , Nuruddin Farah , Jack Mapanje , Susheila Nasta , Jacob Ross , Marina Warner , and others.

Duodu also writes plays and poetry. His work was included in the anthology Messages: Poems from Ghana ( Heinemann Educational Books , 1970).

Other activities and journalism
Having worked as a correspondent for various publications in the decades since the 1960s, including The Observer , The Financial Times , The Sunday Times , United Press International , Reuters , De Volkskrant ( Amsterdam ), and The Economist , Duodu has been based in Britain as a freelance journalist since the 1980s. He has had stints with the magazines South and Index on Censorship , and has written regularly for outlets such as The Independent and The Guardian .

He is the author of the blog "Under the Neem Tree" in New African magazine (London), and has also published regular columns in The Mail and Guardian ( Johannesburg ) and City Press (Johannesburg), as well as writing a weekly column for the Ghanaian Times (Accra) for many years.< citation needed >

Duodu has appeared frequently as a contributor on BBC World TV and BBC World Service radio news programmes discussing African politics, economy and culture.

He contributed to the 2014 volume Essays in Honour of Wole Soyinka at 80, edited by Ivor Agyeman-Duah and Ogochukwu Promise.
Column: Cameron Duodu

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